Via David Rumsey’s great website, here’s a fun map you can check out from 1897, a colorful atlas view of the Twin Cities during the early heyday of streetcars. The overview: Here’s the close-up of the downtown areas: It’s fun to Imagine all the farmland that surrounded the streetcar lines that had just been […]
Via Twitter, and the Chief Economist of the Brewer’s Association, comes this map of US brewery openings grouped by month, starting in 1900 to the present day. Animated map of U.S. brewery openings grouped by month. The explosion in the last few years is incredible. pic.twitter.com/SaPFuNXICl — Bart Watson (@BrewersStats) August 31, 2018 Cheers!
We constantly hear that driverless cars are just around the corner. We’re told they will revolutionize transportation and enable us to continue using our car-based transport and land-use system. If they’re made by Tesla, they’ll be powered by magic, solar-powered, super efficient batteries and we’ll all be able to keep living our hyper-mobile, hyper-consumptive lifestyles […]
If you subscribed to the Minneapolis Daily Star in 1923, you could get a year’s worth of pedestrian insurance for an extra 75 cents. The add-on deal was just what it sounds like: insurance coverage for injuries (including fatal injuries) you might incur while walking across the street. The offer, through the North American Accident […]
In 1969, demolition of one of the most elegant Richardson Romanesque-Chateauesque-Style public buildings in the Upper Midwest seemed imminent. The federal government had declared the nearly vacant Federal Courts and Post Office Building (later named Landmark Center) in downtown St. Paul to be surplus property. Many public officials and business leaders in the city saw […]
The advent of automobiles and accompanying pedestrian casualties shook up Minneapolis. Over the first half of the 20th century, the city saw a series of public awareness campaigns led by municipal government and local newspapers, with slogans that evolved from “Safety Over Sorrow” and “One Killed Here” to “Traffic Victims” and “Safest Big City … […]
This is Part Six of an ongoing series of the history of Minnesota’s trunk highway system. Part One covered the early days of government and privately built roads. Part Two covered the events leading up to the establishment of the trunk highway system in 1920. Part Three covered the coming of the U.S. numbered highways and the 1920s improvement projects. Part Four covered […]
“I am king of the streets because I am only a pedestrian.” That was the philosophy of a self-described lowly municipal employee during his 15 minutes of fame in an article on an inside page of the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune in 1916. Horace E. Johnson sauntered city streets as he wished, the newspaper reported, and […]
Via the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society comes this map of the principal cycle runs out of Minneapolis in 1896. It is taken from the Minneapolis Times. It is available for purchase as a reprint from MNHS, but beware its current accuracy or safety.
Through provident circumstances, Rice Park has been able to maintain the whole of its land and its remarkable features while its surrounding buildings have maintained their handsome architectural solidity, preserving strong edges to the park. In this aspect, these stalwart edges meet architectural historian Christopher Alexander’s statement, in his book A Pattern Language, that “The […]