I discovered Jane Jacobs rather late. It was 2003 a few years after college. Due to insufficient funds, I’d recently moved home from New York City, into my mother’s basement back in Saint Paul, and was spending much of my time reading books. The way I remember it, I was reading through a book of [...]
Tag Archives | Downtown
Reconsidering the Nicollet Mall Redesign
There is a $20 million sum of state money that may be dedicated to redesign Nicollet Mall. While $20 million could bring some impressive changes to the pedestrian mall, these funds would represent an unfortunate misapplication of limited resources. We need to reconnect Nicollet Avenue- not redesign Nicollet Mall. Nicollet Mall, the nation’s first pedestrian transit way, [...]
Saint Paul’s Nice Ride Failure Shows Need for Downtown Bike Lanes
I saw my first NiceRider this week, an Asian student crossing the Wasington Avenue bridge on the University of Minnesota campus. It seems that, barring massive snowstorms forcing the bright green bikes to scuttle back to their hibernation caves, the Nice Ride season is upon us. They’re even expanding again, adding 24 new stations along [...]
Big Roads, Big Clinics, Entertainment Districts & Class A Office Towers
What’s happening around the Twin Cities and Minnesota … Here is the Streets.MN Rundown! Bipartisan support for I-94 Expansion between Maple Grove & St. Cloud [Star Tribune] You know what we need? More lanes on I-94 to St. Cloud. “Republican U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, backed by a bipartisan cohort of about three dozen lawmakers, local elected [...]
Lowertown’s Parking Challenge
This map sparked a few disparaging tweets, including a small #twitterwar with a City Council member. As it turns out, people get riled up about parking. It is as if they feel they are entitled to parking and the benefits thereafter. These blue spaces represent off-street surface parking lots and parking garages; but do not [...]
Are Food Trucks Good or Bad for the Twin Cities?
The Case Against Food Trucks I was at an urban planning function a while back when someone asked me, “What do you think of food trucks?” “I don’t know,” I replied. “They seem pretty good to me.” “They’re terrible!” he or she declared. “They suck all the business from legitimate restaurants. They’re ruining cities. Instead [...]
Is downtown development possible without subsidies?
It seems like you can’t get anything developed in downtown Minneapolis or St. Paul without some sort of tax deal. It’s not difficult to find an example: Pillsbury A-Mill, Izzy’s, Central Corridor development, Vikings Stadium, St. Paul Saints stadium, St. Paul’s Farmer’s Market Lofts, the Pentfield Lund’s, the American Academy of Neurology and that’s just [...]
Is Downtown for Everyone?
A few weeks ago, my wife and I were able to steal a rare night away from our 9-month-old for a date night. A relative had gifted us some tickets to a musical at the Orpheum Theater, so we were excited for a chance to spend an evening in downtown Minneapolis. We don’t get downtown [...]
Sure our skyways could be like Venice, if you mean the one in Las Vegas
I love the debate over skyways because it points to one of the most entrenched and subtle urban issues: what exactly people mean when they say “public space.” In particular, the skyways focus attention on the relationship between architecture and public space, how design works to both include and exclude certain kinds of people, to [...]
The Izzy’s Conundrum: Can condos co-exist with light industrial?
Izzy’s is expanding. Owners Jeff Sommers and Lara Hammel plan to build an ice cream factory in Minneapolis. They’ve put in an offer for a city-owned empty lot near the Guthrie Theater. If all goes according to plan, the facility will be up and running by spring 2013. [Pioneer Press, Dec. 16, 2011] Great! The [...]
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Washington Avenue proposed layouts are posted
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No Parking and De-Signing Streets
From the network
- Twin City Street Musicians #11: [Guitar. T station, Somerville MA.] [Chinese instrument. Harvard Square, Cambridge MA.][Bass and guitar, West Bank Campus, Minneapolis.] [Guitar. Santa Monica Pier.] [Guitar. Lyndale Avenue, Minneapol...
- What is the Constituency of a Local Land-Use Decision?: cross-posted at Streets.mn In the Linden Hills neighborhood of Minneapolis, a local entrepreneur put together a proposal to develop a surface parking lot into a 5-story condo building with retail s...
- Full Cycle: A Bike Shop Working With Homeless Youth: Ten years ago an outreach worker started picking up discarded bikes from the bins and alleyways of Minneapolis. He gave them away to the homeless kids he was trying to reach. Bikes change lives be...
- Minnesota Vikings Stadium FAIL – We need better urban design: The architecture of the Minnesota Vikings Stadium: take it or leave it? Personally, I think it looks like a cross between a laser jet printer, a drunk Frank Gehry and something out of 2001: A Space Od...
- Let’s Get the Urban Details Right in Downtown East: On our way to the ceremony unveiling the plan for the five-block Star Tribune property in Downtown East, my son Shaw and I got off the train at the Downtown East/Metrodome station and I was asked dir...
- David Harvey on CIty Monopolies and the Art of Rent: David Harvey is wise and usually has interesting things to say. I'm no Marxist but I agree with many of the things he brings up in this interview with Spiegel. I agree with this especially:SPIEGEL ONL...
- 2012 Nice Ride flows revisited: For the last two years, I’ve mapped the flows of the Nice Ride bikes. I’ve always been slightly dissatisfied with the results, since bikes were obviously shown taking routes that any san...
- Pedestrians prohibited on streets.mn: Today on streets.mn I examine Bloomington’s latest bungle. Bloomington is the suburb I lived in the longest, it has some really nice topography for the Twin Cities that great parks like Hyland,...
- Bikeway Functional Class: I’ve been reading a lot of bike plans lately, and there seems to be a pretty wide variety of frameworks used by agencies to categorize bikeways. In particular, I’m intrigued by the variet...
- Mostly Empty Syndrome: If you have been following this blog, you may have detected a theme, I don't like the public wasting money on un-needed infrastructure. Of course no-one endorses "wasting" money, we just dis...
- Amazon sales tax is imminent: The Deets Tom Webb at the Pioneer Press reported that the Minnesota is reaching the end of an era when it comes to sales tax collection for online purchases. It was a good run,...
- Return on Brain Damage: This morning I was part of a really interesting group discussion over email, which I thought the Strong Towns audience might enjoy hearing a bit of. Without copying the entire email chain, here's what...
