A glance at the map shows that Midtown Phillips is quite different west of 12th Avenue South than east of that line, where I previously walked. Instead of a dense street grid accommodating primarily small-scale residences, the western half features larger spaces holding two hospitals, a park, a school, and a major mixed-use complex of offices, […]
Like many others, our extended family started having regular Zoom gatherings during the stay-at-home phase of the pandemic. Before Covid, we’d never had a group call of any type, but suddenly our four households in St. Paul, Jersey City, Baltimore and the Gulf Coast of Florida were spending an hour together on Zoom every Sunday. […]
Walking the Eastern Midtown Phillips neighborhood reveals a diversity of cultures and an appreciation for the love of family, the appreciation of good food and the need for dignity and self-expression that all Minnesotans share.
America built its city streets and smaller communities for cars. What might you learn and discover and see when you ditch the vehicle and start walking?
In the early 1920s, the Mid-City Industrial Area’s first big wave of development centered on Stinson Boulevard. One hundred years later, that area has undergone a new wave of adaptive redevelopment, as I saw on a short but rich walk. This filled the core I had left out in my prior walk around the industrial area. […]
Not all of Minneapolis’s 87 neighborhoods are neighborhoods. Three are industrial areas, a distinction of official classification that doesn’t affect my determination to walk all 87 in alphabetical order but does provide some clue what to expect as I head into Mid-City Industrial Area. (The “Mid-City” part of the name is more opaque, apparently referencing […]
Don’t just scroll through this post looking at the photos. At a minimum, even if you don’t read the text, click the links. The most striking sights of this walk—several remarkable murals clustered on a single building—are only represented through links to external sources. I didn’t take any decent photos of them and am not […]
Visiting Minneapolis neighborhoods alphabetically generally prevents geographic continuity, but every once in a while the next neighborhood turns out to be adjacent. That happened moving from Marshall Terrace to McKinley, though the border down the middle of the Mississippi is traversable only on the Lowry Avenue bridge. I didn’t start with the adjacent part of McKinley; instead, […]
My mother would do the shopping once a week, filling her cart and car with groceries. We would dutifully unload and put away all the food we may or may not eat over the next week, as this was just how things were done. As an adult, I kept the same practices. Of course I […]
Marshall Terrace is a substantially industrial neighborhood in Northeast Minneapolis, but from an era when living where one worked was considered normal. Its northern and southern borders are St. Anthony Parkway and Lowry Avenue NE; more consequentially, the neighborhood spans from BNSF’s Northtown (rail) Yard to the Mississippi River. My route started and ended at […]