I was up in Brainerd this weekend, visiting my sister. I’ve been up there several times since she bought a house just south of downtown a year and a half ago. Brainerd has a nice, walkable downtown. It has wide sidewalks, trees and benches, and active storefronts. Compared to the neighboring Baxter strip, it’s a breath […]
Someone on an earlier post said all the action in McLeod county is in Hutchinson, not the County Seat of Glencoe, so I should go there. So I did. Hutchinson (map), 61 miles due west of Minneapolis, is certainly a bit livelier than Glencoe, with nearly three times the population. There is an important public square […]
New Ulm, Minnesota, (map) in Brown County, is the local urbanist small town Utopia. New Ulm is definitely in good shape as small towns go. Having a college (Martin Luther) in town is good, but its location away from Main Street means it doesn’t interact as much as Carleton in Northfield. It parallels the Minnesota River, […]
You know what I don’t think we have enough of on Streets.mn? Huge, improbable, thought-provoking ideas. We’re all familiar with Nicollet Ave and a lot of the buildings that reside on it. It’s the Main Street of Minneapolis, representing a lot of what’s great about both cities. However, that’s Minneapolis; it’s not all of Minnesota and […]
Mahtowa, Minnesota (near Barnum, in Carlton County) (map) is probably the smallest town profiled in this series. My visit was an accidental stop from up north to down south. Mahtowa is notable for TJ’s Country Corner, which is a thriving corner store and sausage purveyor on Old Highway 61. TJ’s claims to have the best […]
Back in 2011, I coined the term “infrastructure cult,” not to be bombastic but to highlight a destructive mindset that has crept deep into the cultural narrative of America. The notion, fully captured by fellow Minnesotan Tom Friedman in his book, That Used to Be Us, is simple: investments in infrastructure create growth, jobs and prosperity. […]
This is Part Four in a series on the new Stillwater Bridge. Parts One, Two, and Three dealt with the backstory behind the bridge, from vague rumblings in the 1950s to refinements to the design after it was committed to be built. Here are a few thoughts of what lies “beyond the bridge” after it opens. […]
The new high school in Alexandria, MN was highlighted as a model of innovation in a piece by Jenna Ross in Sunday’s StarTribune. This $73.2 million high school, recently heralded “the Googleplex of Schools” by technology magazine Fast Company, reflects a broader shift in education and is already becoming a template. Students have given more […]
How does a man move and shape a culture? Our love of storytelling compelled us to find out, so we dug into the story of the Almanzo 100 gravel road race–the granddaddy of them all. We found that a single man’s passion for community has manifested itself in a bike race. The challenge: to race […]
A week after I came to the Twin Cities (June 1999), I picked up a City Pages and saw this great article by Katy Reckdahl: The Cars of St. Bonifacius. Head west on Highway 7 past Excelsior about 35 miles from Minneapolis, cross the rails put in place a century ago by the Great Northern […]