NT Times: With Books as a Catalyst, Minneapolis Neighborhood Revives Washington Ave, between the University and Downtown. (via)
Archive for the 'minneapolis' Category
2419 Lake of the Isles Parkway: Paul Magers old house on Lake of the Isles is for sale or only $2,995,000, and being sold after ex-Star Tribune Publisher Par Ridder owned it for only 11 months. Real estate listing has pictures of the 1907 8000 sq ft mansion. (via Lambert to the Slaughter)
150 Things to Do in Minneapolis, separated by season.
Goodbye Whittier, Goodbye 55404: Well, we’ve moved. I would like to take a moment to make a few neighborhood shoutouts
2008 Home Assessments
Star Tribune Staff Writer Steve Brandt brought up the topic on the Minneapolis Issues Forum regarding 2008 home assessments that were recently mailed out. Looks like he was doing a little research for his article that came out a few hours later.
The latest city assessments are bringing some unusual news to much of Minneapolis: Home values are dropping. Drops of $20,000 to $30,000 are not uncommon in middle-class areas of south Minneapolis, where just a few months ago the assessor was expecting values to remain stable.
Anissa Hollingshead on the Issues Forum wrote up an excellent post on the issue of how the city would react to the housing market when doing the assessments, and also regarding the idea that property taxes might also go down.
Regardless of individual assessed values, the city still needs the same or more revenue. If the tax base is smaller, it seems to figure that taxes will probably have to go up to compensate. Thus, any decrease in value doesn’t hold any promise of a decrease in taxes.
Here’s the link to the City’s property valuation page for my house that we bought this summer. Looking back, I wish we could have remained homeless for a few more months. I love our house, but we probably could have found an ever better place for a little less. Oh well.
Two quick videos…
Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak’s plug-in Prius: “Its batteries are recharged by “regenerative braking,” which means that energy used in slowing and stopping is converted to electricity that’s sent to the battery pack.”
And the Rake Mag posts a video about Peace Coffee, explaining their business of fair trade organic coffee, roasted in Mpls, delivered by bikes when possible and their bio-diesel van when not.
Riverview Theater has redesigned their website. Looks great though I think the bold header text is really hard to read. They’ve also added trailer links for each movie showing and also some pictures of the new seats. The Riverview still has the e-mail list, but I really wish they would have added RSS feeds for the upcoming movies. Oh well, it still looks great.
Washington Avenue Transit Bridge
Twin City Sidewalks takes on the Washington Avenue Bridge.
Finally, after almost thirty years of planning, the Central Corridor Light Rail line is going to run thorugh the U of MN campus, and tomorrow the Metro Council is going to vote to close off Washington Avenue to passenger cars, and turn all this space under the bridge into a pedestrian-and-transit mall like Nicollet Avenue downtown.
I’d say that nearly everyone in Minnesota has some memory of walking across this bridge, whether as a student at the U or not. I used to spend a lot of time on the bridge in High School, rollerblading with friends, and with living near the River Road, I’ve driven under it thousands of times. When they painted the underside of the bridge maroon with big gold M’s on it, I thought it was a great decision - it made the bridge stand out even more. And driving eastbound under the pedestrian bridge was made a treat by the Gerhy designed Weisman Art Museum.
It will be interesting to see how the bridge changes over the next ten years. I look forward to seeing another transit line, and I think serving the University will be a good use for it. But I also believe that making the Central Corridor run on the street level is a mistake and a major shortfall made by the fiscally cheap administration.
But on the other hand, TC Sidewalks believes that moving car traffic away from Washington Ave might be a good thing.
I think the “compromise” option is actually far better than a tunnel would have been. This way, the campus can maybe start to rethink the relationship between automobiles and people.
I guess we’ll just have to see.
City hockey’s future gets blast from past: “Many who played in or remember the glory days of hockey in the Minneapolis public schools are trying to build it back up by, among other things, recruiting more young city athletes to the sport.”
Having played at my local park these past 7 years of living in Longfellow, I’ve seen and played against some really good young kids that end up playing at Minnehaha Academy or Holy Angels. So the talent is here, but the kids need a reason to stay, and hopefully this new attention being given to the sport will help.
