twin city sidewalks

2017-03-02

Twin City Lamp Posts #7

[West Side, Saint Paul.]

[Merriam Park, Saint Paul.]

[Seward, Minneapolis.]

[Macalester College, Saint Paul.]

[Somewhere in Massachusetts.]

[Location forgotten.]

[Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis.]

[Under I-94, Minneapolis.]

Twin City Doorways #28

[Rice Street, Saint Paul.]

[Osakis.]

[Buffalo.]

[Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis.]

[West 7th Street, Saint Paul.]

[Lyndale Avenue, Minneapolis.]

[Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis.]

[Saint Clair Avenue, Saint Paul.]

2017-03-01

19 More Cityscape Columns We'll Never Get to Read

[This was the mandate.]

After over two years and over 150 (!) columns, I’m moving on from my weekly Cityscape column at Minnpost. The grant funding for the column finally ran out. (Actually, that happened a while ago, and Minnpost generously funded it for an extra year.) I’ll still be writing longer pieces for Minnpost once in a while, but not on a weekly basis.

So it seems like a good time to pause and look at what my goals were, and what happened as I groped with the challenge of producing a weekly quasi-journalistic column along broad “urban” themes. For one thing, I should mention that I had complete license to write anything I wanted for the Cityscape columns, with only the vague Cityscape description to guide me. To be honest, it was too broad for my taste. So when I began writing the column back in 2014, I jotted down a guide for myself.

[My sketched "value chart."]

Things like this:

    theory <-> materiality

    Culture -- politics – history – infrastructure

    Current events <-> equity/diversity

    Everyday stories <-> deep knowledge

As my notes brainstormed their way across my mental horizon, the results transformed into a sort of compass [pictured] that I used for a time to guide the column through the weekly news cycle. One of my goals with my writing is to use complementary and contrasting kinds of stories to illuminate an place or problem. Sometimes you want to tell positive stories, for example; at other times you want to be more critical. Sometimes personal, sometimes empirical, etc.

In the end, I don’t know how successful I was at striking a balance between things like “built environment” or “equity issues”, but I am proud of how it turned out. There were a whole bunch of very successful stories, ones that I look back on and, to me, they just glow. Others were much less effective. That's the way it goes.

In fact, what worked and what didn't seemed a bit unpredictable. Judging strictly from readership and popularity, the most successful Cityscape columns cut across a broad mix of topics, including skate parks, snakes, bad neighborhood Facebook groups, pink flamingo parties, the water bar (!), historic preservation issues, bike issues (OMG BIKES), and public safety in general. (That’s kind of a lot of different things!)

The ones that stick out in my mind as being my personal favorites were the pigeon one, the predatory lending sign one, the street harassment one, the shortcut one, the “libertarian alley” one, the “view” one, the bars without TVs one, the weird parks one, the fallout shelter one, the "numerological twilight zone" one, and the one about the lost dog signs.

(Also, I really love the wonky pieces, i.e. the LOS one, the concrete mix one, the FAR one, the detour planning one, or the curb radii one. I mean, where else will you read about porkchop islands?)

Anyway, writing the column was really fun and challenging. I'm glad to have had the experience. Having ideas has never been a problem for me, but finding the time and energy to transform those ideas into a 1,400-word story was often arduous, increasingly so. I’m looking forward to moving onto other writing projects in 2017.

In the meantime, here is my list of Cityscape ideas that never became reality. Much like my mythical “Marlys Harris notebook” from back in 2013, here are:

19 Cityscape Columns We’ll Never Get To Read

COMPLEAT Mall of America history — a piece on all the detailed ways that the Mall has changed, and not changed, since it opened, done with a friend who has obsessively tracked these things
A column I was working on about how new “whiter” LED lights installed in certain Saint Paul neighborhoods with historic vintage lanterns are driving some people crazy
The last payphones in the city — I know where some of them are!
Part II of the lost bikes story — what happens when bikes are donated to different places?
The challenges International Students face when taking drivers tests in the US (I had started work on this a while ago)
Saint Paul “permit parking” and the need for its reform (the cost of a permit has not increased since 1980 — the way that the city does this is nuts!)
Those letter slots in skyscrapers: do they actually work?
Steel utility covers: where do they come from? (The Neenah Foundry, that’s where.)
Dive bar floors and ceilings (Obvs I will still write this one.)
A whole column on bridge expansion joints
A whole column on leading pedestrian intervals
Funeral homes: their architecture and urban design explained
Largest late-spring snow piles in TC history: where are they and what years were they there?
The gentrification debate deconstructed — Picking apart the CURA report that came out a while back
Old car spots — places where the “old car” crowds have migrated now that Porky’s is closed
Everything you never wanted to know about church parking lots, or Why are there surface parking lots on Summit Avenue?
Saint Paul “downtown ambassadors” debate
Q: Does Minnesota have deadly or safe streets anyway? (The answer is “yes”.)
Hot-take on the SWLRT / OMU Hopkins parking debate! (If you have to ask…)

And with that, so long, Cityscape! It was a total blast.

2017-02-23

Dive Bars of the West Side Walking Tour on Thursday 3/2

[The first step is the biggest.]

There comes a time in every epic dive bar tour cycle when one must confront one’s self, look into the mirror, so to speak, and reflect on what one finds. And so I find myself on Saint Paul’s West Side, my home turf. It is here that I have lived for almost four years, and here my roots can be found. My great great grandfather settled down on the West Side Flats when he emigrated to Saint Paul from Switzerland, down on Isabel Street near the present day El Alamo bar. And then my family moved up the bluff, my great grandmother buying the apartment building where generations of my family has lived ever since, just down George street from the Brown Derby bar (now defunct). And so it has gone. These are the watering holes of my ancestors, and I will endeavor to share them with you.

It must be said that the West Side has been monumentally transformed since the days of my great grandmother, a woman who was fond of her cigars and whiskey (so it is told). The old flats neighborhood, a fiercely poor, impossibly diverse nest of streets, was wiped from the earth fifty years ago. Since then, the bluffs and enclaves of the West Side have remained, but missing the connecting tissue — the green stairs, the black bridge, the absent streets — that tied the place to downtown and the rest of Saint Paul. The remaining dives are mostly settled into the slopes leading up from the river, beginning in the nooks that marked the forgotten streams that used to flow North down the hill.

[Ghosts of the old flats are still entombed in the bluff.]

We will begin at the center and walk up the bluff, tracing a loop around the edges of the old West Side. Many of the bars lie on the other side of the city/county line, and one can easily speculate on the reasons behind this trivial accident. This was the wild west, back in the day when Saint Paul’s gangsters had the run of the town, holing up in caves and brick-walled taverns. The West Side is slow to change, quick to smile, and the view is inescapable, gravity just carries you along through the evening.

We will begin at the Cozy Cantina, located just across the street from some amazing Mexican restaurants and markets. From there we will turn to climb the bluff, venturing up up into the West Side night. What secrets lie beyond the edge of the city?

(We will end walk two miles, ending closer again to the Cozy.)

[Not much remains.]

What: A guided historic walking tour of four (4) West Side dive bars, two (2) miles in length
When: 3/2, beginning at 6:30
Where: Meet at Cozy Cantina, on Cesar Chavez Avenue
Why: Because it’s there
Who: Anyone. Bring cash please. Free (but tips gratefully accepted in either cash or beer formats)

[See Facebook invite here.]