Last month, Alicia Valenti wrote about her tips and experiences bicycling in the winter as a Minnesota transplant. “I got into summer biking and then didn’t want to stop once it got cold,” Alicia told me recently. Like Alicia, I’m a transplant who didn’t want to stop biking once it got cold, partly because biking […]
Another Kmart has closed. This one leaves behind an 11.5 acre site just outside downtown Rochester. The property was sold for $7M back in January, before Kmart had even closed. The parcel itself is weird, the current plan is disappointing, and the public process for such a large site in the supposed Destination Medical Center […]
So, it’s time for a streets.mn walk again and this time I’m in Rochester walking with my niece, Danielle as we went through a couple Rochester Destination Medical Center (DMC) sub-districts. Very short story – it’s where I grew up, studied piano, worked at a Shopko, rented in a 4-plex with a buddy, trekked the pedestrian […]
Hot, hot, hot for Memorial Day weekend in Minnesota. What a good time to sit under a mature tree (perhaps on a bench) or take a slow trail ride after you read what happened last week on streets.mn. Minneapolis 2040 discussion continues Minneapolis 2040: Tree Edition is not really about the new comprehensive plan, but about […]
I would not have guessed that last year’s “9 Ideas” blog post would garner such attention. The quickly assembled list was a no more than a combination of thoughts and ideas shared between friends and colleagues as well as examples derived from authors and practitioners from across the United States. Yet the ideas spurred conversation. […]
2016 is disappearing quickly — Only one Sunday Summary left before 2017 (and next Sunday falls on Christmas). Before the end of the year, we’d like to encourage you to join us as a member of streets.mn; your donation is tax-deductible and will help us make website and editorial improvements. Or, write for us. streets.mn […]
In small and mid-sized towns across the United States the daily decisions on design are literally making our health worse. We need to go back to a system where we designed cities for humans. Below is a link to my PechaKucha presentation from the Mayo Clinic Transform 2015 Symposium.
Rochester is dealing with what can only be described as a development craze. Speculation, market demand, and long term planning have formed a conflagration growing larger by the day. It is hard to remember back just a couple of years in the heart of the recession when nothing much of anything was being proposed. Today […]
It came as no shock to me to read the Stantec report recommending major changes to the Rochester Planning Department. Rochester doesn’t have a planning department. When it comes to planning for Rochester, we have zoomed out and presently view the growth issues of our city through a countywide lens. Lost is the fine-grained detail […]
“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” –Yogi Berra If you have lived in Rochester long enough, you may remember downtown buildings as the businesses that used to occupy them (e.g. Dayton’s, Wong’s, Henry Wellington’s). And you may remember a time when it was very convenient to drive downtown and park right in front of […]