As Saint Paul’s population grew in the late 19th Century, people began moving out of the city’s core and into residential areas adjacent to downtown. The Selby Avenue streetcar line was built in 1888 to provide people with transportation from their homes on top of the hill to the offices, factories, and shops downtown, and to […]
Welcome to the streets.mn podcast, Episode 116: Saint Paul 1978 with George Latimer, Jerry Mathiason, and David Lanagren. Today I have a fun conversation for you that I taped back in May. The chat took place between former Saint Paul mayor George Latimer, photographer Jerry Mathiason, and Macalester Geography professor David Lanagren that took place […]
This is Part Five 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. And […]
Here’s an insane looking chart from streets.mn alumnus David Levinson’s Transportationist blog, showing a “Typical Signal Schedule and Traffic Flow Diagram, North-South across Market Street, San Francisco (1929) [with a] “green wave” set to 10.5 MPH.” Peep your eyes on this! The complex trade-offs that go into something as seemingly simple as how to program […]
Summit Avenue has a long and storied history as a bike route which predates the automobile. Bringing back its protected bike lanes should be viewed as historic preservation.
Here’s a blast from the past that is technically a chart: I saw this on Twitter the other day, but I don’t remember where. So apologies to whoever posted it. As you might recall, the 1956 Interstate Highway Act was actually titled the “National Interstate and Defense Highways Act.” According to Wikipedia: The addition of […]
Via Kottke, here’s a cool and very old (!) map of the Mississippi River, which of course begins in Minnesota. It dates to 1866, before the railroad era, when the river was still the main route of transportation in the upper Midwest. Here’s the whole thing with the Twin Cities marked: And here’s a close-up: […]
This is Part Four 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 […]
I’m back with another streets.mn podcast and it’s a good one. I sat down a few weeks ago with the team from Mapping Prejudice, a groundbreaking historical research effort to shed light on the racist history of housing practices in Minneapolis. Joining me around the table in the basement of the Borchert Map Library were […]
June 12, 2016 Midway, Frogtown (Rondo), North End, Como Park 17.5 Miles There is a lot (an undeveloped property, not a large number of things) on the southeast corner of Lexington Parkway and Central Avenue. This rectangle of grass puzzles me for several reasons. First, it’s on a very busy part of Lexington, just […]