Twin City Shovelers #7

 [Location forgotten.]

 [Downtown, Saint Paul.]

 [A Line, Saint Paul.]

  [Downtown, Saint Paul.]

 [West Bank, Minneapolis.]

  [Downtown, Saint Paul.]

[West Side, Saint Paul.]

Twin City Shovelers #6

 [Location forgotten.]

 [West Side Flats, Saint Paul.]

 [Duluth.]

 [Mulberry Island, Saint Paul.]

 [Downtown, Saint Paul.]

 [West Side, Saint Paul.]

 [West Side, Saint Paul.]

[Cathedral Hill, Saint Paul.]

Twin City Shovelers #5

  [Location forgotten.]

  [Location forgotten.]

  [Location forgotten.]

 [Location forgotten.]

 [West 7th, Saint Paul.]

 [Lowertown, Saint Paul.]

[West Side, Saint Paul.]

Twin City Shovelers #4

 [North End, Saint Paul.]

  [North End, Saint Paul.]

  [North End, Saint Paul.]

  [North End, Saint Paul.]

  [North End, Saint Paul.]

 [Warehouse District, Minneapolis.]

 [Seven Corners, Saint Paul.]

 [University Avenue, StP/Mpls border.]

[Downtown, Minneapolis.]

 [North End, Saint Paul.]

Sidewalk Mailbox #4: If You Shovel It, They Will Come?

[Walking to school on the "sidewalk", or mountain climbing?]

All too occasionally on this insignificant sidewalk blog, I receive letters from  readers with questions about important matters of the day, issues that range the entire gamut all the way from sidewalk history, to sidewalk graffiti, to types of sidewalk materials!

Needless to say, I find these queries tremendously exciting. Feedback of any kind always makes me giddy.

At the same time, I’m inevitably disappointed with my responses to these kinds of questions, for the simple reason that, to tell the truth, I don’t know very much about sidewalks! Sure, I can blather on about the joys of walking or random curiosities, and thanks to my very expensive education, I can use words with many syllables. But I know next to nothing about actual sidewalks. You might say, I lack concrete knowledge.

That said, I got a letter the other day from a frustrated citizen of a second-ring Twin Cities’ suburb [Hint: it’s in Ramsey County] who expressed frustration about the lack of shoveled sidewalks in his neighborhood.

Here’s a version what the reader wrote to his local civic code enforcer, with all nouns removed to protect the innocent: [Extra fun game: insert your local nouns and create a Madlibs sidewalk complaint!]

I am very concerned about the lack of snow removal on the part of property owners along [street name], specifically between [street name] and [name of local elementary school]. [Name of city] removes "significant snowfall" along this corridor which we greatly appreciate. It's the nuisance snow which property owners neglect to clear in a timely manner. This snow becomes compacted and glazed over with ice becoming extremely treacherous. In my opinion they are in violation of [number of city code].

My wife has walked our kids to school over the past few days and there are sections of glare ice where they had to walk like "penguins" for lack of a better description. This section is heavily used by the [name of elementary school] walk line as well.

I'm not one to nit-pick, but when this happens time and again it's ridiculous. A majority of home owners do their part which we're very grateful for, but it's the following owners which create problems time and again.

In response, the code enforcer wrote that “citizens are not required to remove snow from the sidewalk” and that “we recommend it, but its not required.” Needless to say, this didn’t please my correspondent!

Even on the best of Twin Cities’ sidewalks, winter maintenance is no easy task. For people with mobility issues – especially the young, the elderly, and the disabled – getting around in the wintertime can be a huge challenge!

[A person in a wheelchair choosing to go the wrong way on the street instead of onto the sidewalk in Minneapolis' SE Como neighborhood.]

But the issue is compounded many times over in the suburbs, which often lack sidewalks altogether. Or if they do have them, they’re almost completely pointless because they lack accessible, nearby destinations. We have an almost impossible task ahead of us lot of work to do if we want to make our suburban neighborhoods walkable, but it would seem to me that requiring snow shoveling could be some “low hanging fruit.” (As added benefits, people would get much needed exercise, boost the snow shovel supplying parts our economy, and maybe even meet their neighbors over a good round of kvetching.)

All this is to say that I turn to you, brave readers. What, if any, are the rules for shoveling sidewalks in the suburbs? Does anyone enforce them? Would it matter if they did? Is there any hope for the wintry suburban pedestrian?

Maybe the only solutions are to either learn to enjoy walking like a penguin, or else to move to Minneapolis, where they only recently enacted a new sidewalk snow shoveling law with teeth.

Twin Cities Shovelers #3

[Man working through the salty slush to the curb. North End, Saint Paul.]

[Hatless man just breaking through to the curb. Como/Front, Saint Paul.]

[Tag team dealing with the curb & sidewalk junction. Como/Front, Saint Paul.]


[Woman working on the sidewalk. St. Anthony Park, Saint Paul.]


[Person and be-sweatered dog clearing the steps. North End, Saint Paul.]

[Two men shoveling out a pickup truck. North End, Saint Paul.]


[Man and two kids unclogging the driveway. North End, Saint Paul.]

[Two men shoveling the roof for some reason. North End, Saint Paul.]

[Woman just putting the finishing sloppy touches on a driveway. North End, Saint Paul.]


[Woman clearing the way to the garage. North End, Saint Paul.]

The Epic Battle of Snow vs. Cars

[Well, at least now I know what to talk to people about in the elevator. Img Avidor.]

The blizzard that dumped two feet of snow on Friday and Saturday was epic. There's no doubt about that. The slow moving low pressure system came from the north-west and blasted Minnesota with a massive belt of snow for a good twelve hours.

But what's interesting to me is what happened afterward. What did you talk about? What did you say? What did you think when you emerged from your snowy house, opened your front door and saw a blinding new world laid out before you in the morning?

Chances are good that you thought about your your car. For every person that says “wow, isn't the snow beautiful” or “let's go sledding”, there were at least seven or eight people muttering things like this:

Where is my car? Is that it under that snowbank? How do I get the snow off my hood? Is my windshield scraped? I the hell do I shovel through that snowbank? Is my street plowed? How do I plow out my driveway? Do you need help pushing your car out of the snow? Can you help me push my car out of the snow? Why isn't this snowblower working? Is there a snow emergency? Where do I park with all this snow? Did I just lock my keys in my snowbound car? What do I do if there's a second straight day of snow emergency? How long will it be until my street is plowed? Can you still park on the street if its already been plowed but its also a snow emergency? Is school still closed? Why are they having another snow emergency? Where do I park if the city goes to a one-side-only parking system? Are these my tax dollars at work? Who do I call when my plow driver gets stuck in my driveway?* Who will stop this illegal plowing? Why hasn't the city plowed my street yet? What do I do at 2 in the morning when I realize that I dropped my car keys in the snow bank an hour ago? What if the metal detector still can't find the keys? Is the car dealership open at 4 am? Will this cheap plastic shovel be able to handle all this snow?** Where can I buy a new snowshovel? Where do I go when I find out that Target is out of snowshovels? How long will my commute on 94 be through downtown Minneapolis today? If the wheels are spinning, why isn't my car going forward? Why didn't they plow the street all the way to the curb? If I'm averaging going 20 miles per hour, how long will it take me to get to River Falls? If my foot is on the brake, why isn't my car stopping … oh shit! How did I drive off the Lafeyette Bridge and how am I still alive?

It's a blizzard of car questions, car car concerns, car catastrophes, car-pocalypse. And just like snowflakes, each car calamity is unique.

See, the thing is, since time immemorial, or at least since Henry Ford invented the Ford in snowy Detroit Michigan, Cars have been battling Winter's snow and vice versa. The two combatants have been locked in combat, vying for dominance, an eternal yin and yang of precipitation and petroleum. And most of this time Cars seem to have been winning. In the early years, Old Man Winter would deal a knockout blow, incapacitating Cars for a spell until the referee counted to 1- 2- 3- 4- 5- days, before Cars bounced back and Old Man got tired and let cars have their way for a few rounds or months. But thanks to a scientific diet of Barry Bonds growth hormones and Eisenhower interstate highways, Cars have been routinely knocking the snot and snow out of Old Man Winter for years now, Winter getting in a good roundhouse once in a while, temporarily stunning cars for a second or two, before the Cars goliath, now grown golem-like to massive proportions, kept up the pummeling, the horseless carriage beating the dead horse.

[Old Man Winter lands a solid punch on Portland Avenue in 1940. Img MNHS.]

But every once in a while the tables are turned. This weekend's big-time KO throws into relief the car system as a whole. When it snows like this, you see so clearly all the parts that are needed for this “happy motoring” car world to function. Something like a mega-blizzard makes all the little things we take for granted a giant pain in the carseat. In Minneapolis alone, there are 100 plows plowing over 1,000 miles of streets, not to mention 400 miles of alleys and tons of other sidewalks, bridges, and culs-de-sac. And that's just one small (but onerous) part of the Twin Cities' car landscape. Think of all the driveways and freeways and parking lots and small city streets and yet more culs-de-sac on which we all depend to drive everywhere. If there are 1,500 miles of plowable surfaces in Minneapolis alone, how many miles of plowing must the entire Twin Cities metro amount to? Could you plow once around the world?

Whereas … and here's where I offer you an alternative … on snowy nights and snow days like this weekend, I like to imagine an alternative. I like to stand out on my porch in the cold and snowy night when everything is quiet, when the snowpiles muffle even the sound of the freight train running through the city, when you can stand there for half an hour and not one car dares traverse the snow-piled street. During a blizzard, I like to walk up from the bus stop in the middle of the road and not once think that I should get out of the way, because for a brief moment or two, I'm in a world without cars.

Even on Saturday morning, during the height of the storm, my corner store was open and I could walk to it and buy some Triscuits. It was like walking into a happier world, far from car kvetches and asphalt anxiety. Nobody there was worried about their commute, because almost everyone lived walking distance from the store. It was warm and lit up and had food and you could trudge there through the snow no matter how much blizzard was blizzarding outside.

And, despite the complaints, the same is pretty much true for the Twin Cities bus system. Sure there was a stretch on Saturday where the buses weren't running, but from when I got dropped off at 1 AM by the bus on Friday night (when the snow was just starting) until Sunday when the bus picked me up again, you could travel through the cities at a decent pace (provided you weren't going through one of the car-clogged stretches of Minneapolis) without thinking for a second about cars and all their problems.

This blizzard was something to remember, and points to how much maintenance and technical ecngineering is involved in our auto-dependent lifestyle. At least for a day or two, we pause and forget and live life without our car, not only because we have to, but to see what it might be like.

[On foot, this is no snowpacalypse. This is a snowtacular snowscape. It's a snow-a-palooza, a snow-athon, a snowventure!]

* True story, happened to my mom.
** True story, happened to my neighbor.