***Sidewalk Weekend*** #30

Sidewalk Rating: Halcyon

I've been walking and biking a lot lately and it feels great. Lots of kids on the street, lots of people at sidewalk cafes.

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This is a great invention...

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Council caves; concrete construction calamity!

Sidewalk signage forces feet foes to grassy end!

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This is my life in a nutshell:

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[Chairs along the new old railroad track park in Chelsea. Img. fm. David Byrne.]

The high line opened up in New York City, and it looks quite nice. Its an elevated sidewalk, and if it gets enough use, should make for a great way to escape the city and see things from a different perspective.

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Its strange to read about how cities 'gamble' like this. Biotech is one of those get rich quick schemes that Pawlenty would always talk about.

Second, biotech is a relatively tiny industry with a lengthy product-development process, and even in its largest clusters offers only a fraction of the jobs of traditional manufacturing. In the United States, only 43 biotechnology companies employ more than 1,000 people, according to BioAbility, a consulting firm in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.

You know, a whole lot of urban economic development is total B.S. Still, the T.C. seems to have a ton of biomedical jobs, and we might be one of the places with "strengths" on which to capitalize.

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A call for more taco trucks... they're a great idea for sidewalks, that's for sure.

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[A cartoon about suburbia.]

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Walker/biker people tend to romanticize the older days before the automobile. Well, they weren't always that safe. I remember reading somewhere about how many people were killed by speeding carriages in Victorian London.

And this photo of what streets looked like when filled with horses is pretty interesting.

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For different reasons than me, Adam Platt agrees that Trader Joe's (their wine contains the blood of small children) needs to play by the rules on Lyndale.

I didn't realize these zoning codes meant that you cannot open up a little wine store anywhere in Minneapolis... e.g.

Because of the school/church stricture, these geographic monopolies have made it impossible for a new wine retailer to open in South Minneapolis without another one closing first. A friend and I considered opening a wine store in South Minny over a decade ago and couldn’t find a legal site in a viable neighborhood. I long ago gave that hobby horse up, but these laws still need to go.

Or the city could create a separate license for small scale retailers who do a majority of their business in wine, or allow such stores blanket waivers to the 2000-foot rule.

There are unforeseen consequences to any zoning decision, and this seems like one of the dumber ones. But if it keeps evil Trader Joe's (their cheese is made from soylent green) from moving in and brainwashing all of South Minneapolis, I'm OK with it.

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A movie about North Minneapolis:

[via Mediation.]

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Here's some interesting history of the years of independently-operated buses in the Twin Cities. For example, this description of the Rice Street bus company:

Before 1975, North Suburban was called Rice-Edgerton Lines (and way before that it was called North Star Lines, a name my mother apprently remembered). The Edgerton part was taken over by MTC in 1975, that's what prompted the name change (and yes, this company is why the name Edgerton is so important to me in politics and religion). The problem was that Rice and Edgerton weren't two seperate routes; the Rice-Edgerton route went from Saint Paul out Rice Street to Little Canada Road to Edgerton to County Road F back to Highway 49 to County Road J.

There's a bit more where that came from.

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A tryptich for you!

1) A CU of the pavement around Lake Calhoun. (Img. fm. Mitchster.)


2) Bambi window shopping at Macy's. (Img. via. CityPages.)


3) A street scene sketch. (Img. fm. Avidor.)