Minneapolis, Minnesota
Paul
Ostrow, a former, 10-year member of the Minneapolis City Council, added
his (considerable) two cents to the blizzard of print and electronic
commentary about the latest and greatest deal for construction of a
football stadium for use by the Minnesota Vikings. His comments, posted
by MinnPost, March 7, 2012, called the current proposal 'bad public policy' and 'profoundly unfair.'
Ostrow
suggested that the Council and Mayor R. T. Rybak – who he says insisted
on following the city charter during debate on financing Target Field
for the Minnesota Twins baseball team – should follow the charter's
limitations and commit $10 million to construction.
It
has been the City of Minneapolis, Ostrow notes, that always has come through
for Minnesota sports fans: Minneapolis provided the bonds for
Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington 50 years ago, and paid for the
Metrodome 30 years ago. Further, he said, 40% of the Hennepin County tax
for Target Field comes from Minneapolis.
"The
best idea to date for funding a new Vikings Stadium," Ostrow wrote, "is
the proposal by St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman for a two-cent surcharge
on every drink in every bar in Minnesota."
On March 6, the Star Tribune reported information and acknowledgment
that I have not seen before. Writer Kevin Duchschere cited comments by
Governor Mark Dayton that the current stadium deal "is structured to
enable the Vikings to make a net profit of $22 million to $25 million
per year, which would enable them to 'be viable financially.'"
Duchschere's article provided no details for how the construction of a new stadium would generate that kind of profit, but quoted Dayton as saying that "the economics of modern professional sports are 'pretty indefensible.'"
Showing posts with label Target Field. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Target Field. Show all posts
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Walking the streets of downtown Minneapolis, 1
Minneapolis, Minnesota
For 37 years, I have worked in or very near downtown Minneapolis. For 29 of those years, I have lived close enough to walk to work. That has been time enough to absorb, process, and take for granted the countless changes that have infiltrated the cityscape.
Ours is a city that tears things down and builds newer things back up with no regard for any value that might attach to historical or architectural significance. After 20-30 years, we start over again. Witness our unending dialogue about the need for a domed or open-air stadium. If I am still on the planet in 25 years, whatever I then use for newspapers will report on the latest debates to place a retractable roof on the new Target Field that opens for professional baseball next month.
I am not sure that we enjoy this repeating cycle; it just seems embedded in our civic DNA. Perhaps it reflects a collective, obsessive-compulsive personality of the people who built Minneapolis and were never satisfied that they got right anything they were building. In other words, we can't help ourselves.
My new place of employment for the past two months is situated near downtown, near the Mississippi River, and near the University of Minnesota, but at a somewhat further remove from my house than previous workday destinations. As temperatures and pavement conditions have improved with the waning winter, I have begun walking the nearly three miles at least once per day, usually at night.
Such is good for reducing my personal carbon footprint, containing the anxieties of modern life, and for retaining a figure of relative fighting trim.
Treading through downtown this evening, I passed the Accenture Tower on the city block bounded by 3rd and 4th avenues south, and 7th and 8th streets. When constructed in 1987, the 31-story office project was called Lincoln Centre. The "re" spelling of Centre aways struck me as an affectation. Many people have thought it a cold and uninviting structure and have had no hesitation about saying so. I always have regarded it as one of the more classy buildings that have gone up in the last four decades. The tower situates toward 4th Avenue, and has left room for development of a corporate looking park along 3rd Avenue. At the time of construction, there was an expressed intent to build an identical tower along 3rd to mirror that along 4th. Never happened. Now, if another structure rises on that block, it will, no doubt, serve the ego and vision of its designer. A pity.
Nonetheless, I enjoy the park's presence even if it does not invite pedestrians to approach and enter in. In this it is different from the nearly full-block park across 7th Street – also bounded by 3rd and 4th avenues – that serves as a pedestal for the Hennepin County Government Center. The grounds there boast berms and a variety of forestation among pink brick paths. Originally, the bricks were red, imported from someplace in Italy. However, they provided such slick surfaces during our Minnesota winters that, after any number of lawsuit settlements with people who slipped and fell, the bricks got sandblasted down to a dull shadow of their former selves, or were replaced outright.
Construction of the 24-story Government Center, completed in 1977, caused a bit of a scandal because of its cost. Although Hennepin County has been, far and away, the largest of Minnesota's 87 counties in population, prior to the new building few people were aware that county government existed. Previously, it shared space in Minneapolis City Hall.
Hennepin County Commissioner Richard O. Hanson's person and personality drove construction of the Government Center, just as they had earlier won civil service protections for county employees, built county highways, and built the welfare and library programs. First appointed to the county commission by Mayor Hubert Humphrey in 1948, Hanson became the longest-serving commissioner in county history, until his defeat at the hands of fellow Democrat Jeff Spartz in 1976. Construction of the government center was a key issue in that year's campaign.
Hanson was a true Renaissance man. In his 20s, he taught political science at the University of Minnesota. Later, he co-founded a Minneapolis investment firm, Craig Hallum, Inc., helped found the Citizens League, and served on the boards of the United Hospital Fund, Family & Children's Services, the Legal Aid Society, and others. He died at 79 in April 2000.
I first met Hanson in a professional capacity during his 50s, and my 20s, in the 1970s. Later, we came to know each other as closeted gay men who operated largely under the radar of the larger society. His was the first example to me, in those late-Carter and early-Reagan years, of a man who could accomplish worthwhile things in life and still be gay. I am grateful for his unconditional support during a crucial crucible of my life's journey. I think of him often as I pass by the building, plazas, and park that earned him such opprobrium at their creation.
-
For 37 years, I have worked in or very near downtown Minneapolis. For 29 of those years, I have lived close enough to walk to work. That has been time enough to absorb, process, and take for granted the countless changes that have infiltrated the cityscape.
Ours is a city that tears things down and builds newer things back up with no regard for any value that might attach to historical or architectural significance. After 20-30 years, we start over again. Witness our unending dialogue about the need for a domed or open-air stadium. If I am still on the planet in 25 years, whatever I then use for newspapers will report on the latest debates to place a retractable roof on the new Target Field that opens for professional baseball next month.
I am not sure that we enjoy this repeating cycle; it just seems embedded in our civic DNA. Perhaps it reflects a collective, obsessive-compulsive personality of the people who built Minneapolis and were never satisfied that they got right anything they were building. In other words, we can't help ourselves.
My new place of employment for the past two months is situated near downtown, near the Mississippi River, and near the University of Minnesota, but at a somewhat further remove from my house than previous workday destinations. As temperatures and pavement conditions have improved with the waning winter, I have begun walking the nearly three miles at least once per day, usually at night.
Such is good for reducing my personal carbon footprint, containing the anxieties of modern life, and for retaining a figure of relative fighting trim.
Treading through downtown this evening, I passed the Accenture Tower on the city block bounded by 3rd and 4th avenues south, and 7th and 8th streets. When constructed in 1987, the 31-story office project was called Lincoln Centre. The "re" spelling of Centre aways struck me as an affectation. Many people have thought it a cold and uninviting structure and have had no hesitation about saying so. I always have regarded it as one of the more classy buildings that have gone up in the last four decades. The tower situates toward 4th Avenue, and has left room for development of a corporate looking park along 3rd Avenue. At the time of construction, there was an expressed intent to build an identical tower along 3rd to mirror that along 4th. Never happened. Now, if another structure rises on that block, it will, no doubt, serve the ego and vision of its designer. A pity.
Nonetheless, I enjoy the park's presence even if it does not invite pedestrians to approach and enter in. In this it is different from the nearly full-block park across 7th Street – also bounded by 3rd and 4th avenues – that serves as a pedestal for the Hennepin County Government Center. The grounds there boast berms and a variety of forestation among pink brick paths. Originally, the bricks were red, imported from someplace in Italy. However, they provided such slick surfaces during our Minnesota winters that, after any number of lawsuit settlements with people who slipped and fell, the bricks got sandblasted down to a dull shadow of their former selves, or were replaced outright.
Construction of the 24-story Government Center, completed in 1977, caused a bit of a scandal because of its cost. Although Hennepin County has been, far and away, the largest of Minnesota's 87 counties in population, prior to the new building few people were aware that county government existed. Previously, it shared space in Minneapolis City Hall.
Hennepin County Commissioner Richard O. Hanson's person and personality drove construction of the Government Center, just as they had earlier won civil service protections for county employees, built county highways, and built the welfare and library programs. First appointed to the county commission by Mayor Hubert Humphrey in 1948, Hanson became the longest-serving commissioner in county history, until his defeat at the hands of fellow Democrat Jeff Spartz in 1976. Construction of the government center was a key issue in that year's campaign.
Hanson was a true Renaissance man. In his 20s, he taught political science at the University of Minnesota. Later, he co-founded a Minneapolis investment firm, Craig Hallum, Inc., helped found the Citizens League, and served on the boards of the United Hospital Fund, Family & Children's Services, the Legal Aid Society, and others. He died at 79 in April 2000.
I first met Hanson in a professional capacity during his 50s, and my 20s, in the 1970s. Later, we came to know each other as closeted gay men who operated largely under the radar of the larger society. His was the first example to me, in those late-Carter and early-Reagan years, of a man who could accomplish worthwhile things in life and still be gay. I am grateful for his unconditional support during a crucial crucible of my life's journey. I think of him often as I pass by the building, plazas, and park that earned him such opprobrium at their creation.
-
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Twins baseball fans amid the ghosts of Minneapolis history
Minneapolis, Minnesota
When fans of the Minnesota Twins baseball team swarm to opening day ceremonies at the new Target Field on the north edge of downtown Minneapolis, Apr. 12, few will have any notion of the area's complex connections to people and pivotal events in the city's history.
Mere steps from the stadium's northwest corner once stood the Oak Lake subdivision, platted in 1880 near Olson Highway (6th Avenue North) and Lyndale Avenue with curving streets and some cul-de-sacs. The lake and its genteel neighborhood are long gone, as are the Jewish, black, and working-class white families that took up residence in successive waves as the original cachet waned.
Larry Millett, in Lost Twin Cities (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1992), described the neighborhood's evolution and how, by the 1930s, the city had cleared Oak Lake and re-located the farmers' market there.
In Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century: The Growth of an American City (242 pp, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010), author Iric Nathanson describes the role of land covenants and other implicit understandings that restricted minorities' residential choices to certain parts of the city. The experience and proximity of Jewish and black residents in the larger Oak Lake and Glenwood Avenue sector had important implications for the civil rights movement that unfolded in the second half of the 20th century in a city once known as the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.
My affinity for the area's history has a personal basis. The families of both my parents resided there at various times, and I was born at Glenwood and Penn avenues.
Earlier, on Jan. 23, 1937, when my grandparents lived at 506 Girard Avenue, my grandfather, Harry Hayden Peterson, was shot and killed a few blocks away at the Fresno Cafe, 1007 Sixth Avenue North. Joseph Taylor, the man who shot him in self-defense, lived a block away at 506 Fremont Avenue. Taylor was properly acquitted on Mar. 2, following a speedy trial. The case was a sensation in the newspapers because Taylor was one of the city's few black entrepreneurs and served as a role model in his community. Life was never the same afterward for the Taylors or for my grandmother and her four children.
By the early 1950s, according to Millett, the city regarded the area as its worst slum and, in 1954, demolished more than 660 structures in a 180-acre area between Glenwood Avenue and Olson Highway.
The intersection of First Avenue North and 6th Street, one block south of Target Field, was the scene in May 1934 of a strikebreaking confrontation between members of a Teamsters union local and 1,000 police deputies backed by commercial interests of the Citizens Alliance. Nathanson recounted the event as "one skirmish in a summer-long strike that provoked full-scale class warfare." The strikers eventually won the sometimes bloody struggle, breaking the monopoly of business interests on the city's power structure and balancing it with the interests of organized labor.
Nathanson includes chapters on more than 100 years of controversy about the structure of Minneapolis' city government; periodic bouts of corruption and indictment of mayors, council members, and police officers; and efforts to redevelop downtown, the neighborhoods, and the riverfront.
Baseball fans who will arrive and depart Target Field via the light rail trains may appreciate Nathanson's last chapter with its mind-numbing detail of how light rail mass transit arrived in the Twin Cities. Folks who have followed or fretted over the 13-year saga of the Shubert Theater's salvation and rehabilitation two blocks from the stadium don't know from nothing about perseverance in pursuit of civic goals.
For decades, municipal and state planners tried to build a freeway along Highway 55/Hiawatha Avenue, following an old route south from downtown to Fort Snelling and the airport. For more than a decade in the 1970s and 80s, hundreds and thousands of residents in south Minneapolis fought those efforts at city hall, at the legislature, and in congress, arguing in favor of an at-grade parkway that allowed for the possibility of light rail transit.
One dramatic confrontation occurred in the lobby of the downtown Federal Building late on a January evening in 1975, when 200+ residents took Congressman Donald Fraser to task for his vote in favor of funding freeway construction along the route. I was there! What Nathanson did not relate about the incident was the fact that residents chartered buses to the event at their own expense after Fraser's office had refused to schedule a meeting at a more convenient time and place. Light rail began running on the non-freeway, Hiawatha Avenue on June 26, 2004 – 29 years later!
In all of "Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century," I found but one factual error. On page 196, Nathanson relates that Rudy Perpich was elected Minnesota's governor in 1976. In fact, as lieutenant governor, Perpich assumed the office of governor on Dec. 29, 1976, following the resignation of Governor Wendell Anderson. Perpich then appointed Anderson to fill the United States Senate vacancy created by the election of Walter Mondale as vice president. Both Perpich and Anderson were defeated for election in November 1978.
-
When fans of the Minnesota Twins baseball team swarm to opening day ceremonies at the new Target Field on the north edge of downtown Minneapolis, Apr. 12, few will have any notion of the area's complex connections to people and pivotal events in the city's history.
Mere steps from the stadium's northwest corner once stood the Oak Lake subdivision, platted in 1880 near Olson Highway (6th Avenue North) and Lyndale Avenue with curving streets and some cul-de-sacs. The lake and its genteel neighborhood are long gone, as are the Jewish, black, and working-class white families that took up residence in successive waves as the original cachet waned.
Larry Millett, in Lost Twin Cities (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1992), described the neighborhood's evolution and how, by the 1930s, the city had cleared Oak Lake and re-located the farmers' market there.
In Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century: The Growth of an American City (242 pp, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010), author Iric Nathanson describes the role of land covenants and other implicit understandings that restricted minorities' residential choices to certain parts of the city. The experience and proximity of Jewish and black residents in the larger Oak Lake and Glenwood Avenue sector had important implications for the civil rights movement that unfolded in the second half of the 20th century in a city once known as the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.
My affinity for the area's history has a personal basis. The families of both my parents resided there at various times, and I was born at Glenwood and Penn avenues.
Earlier, on Jan. 23, 1937, when my grandparents lived at 506 Girard Avenue, my grandfather, Harry Hayden Peterson, was shot and killed a few blocks away at the Fresno Cafe, 1007 Sixth Avenue North. Joseph Taylor, the man who shot him in self-defense, lived a block away at 506 Fremont Avenue. Taylor was properly acquitted on Mar. 2, following a speedy trial. The case was a sensation in the newspapers because Taylor was one of the city's few black entrepreneurs and served as a role model in his community. Life was never the same afterward for the Taylors or for my grandmother and her four children.
By the early 1950s, according to Millett, the city regarded the area as its worst slum and, in 1954, demolished more than 660 structures in a 180-acre area between Glenwood Avenue and Olson Highway.
The intersection of First Avenue North and 6th Street, one block south of Target Field, was the scene in May 1934 of a strikebreaking confrontation between members of a Teamsters union local and 1,000 police deputies backed by commercial interests of the Citizens Alliance. Nathanson recounted the event as "one skirmish in a summer-long strike that provoked full-scale class warfare." The strikers eventually won the sometimes bloody struggle, breaking the monopoly of business interests on the city's power structure and balancing it with the interests of organized labor.
Nathanson includes chapters on more than 100 years of controversy about the structure of Minneapolis' city government; periodic bouts of corruption and indictment of mayors, council members, and police officers; and efforts to redevelop downtown, the neighborhoods, and the riverfront.
Baseball fans who will arrive and depart Target Field via the light rail trains may appreciate Nathanson's last chapter with its mind-numbing detail of how light rail mass transit arrived in the Twin Cities. Folks who have followed or fretted over the 13-year saga of the Shubert Theater's salvation and rehabilitation two blocks from the stadium don't know from nothing about perseverance in pursuit of civic goals.
For decades, municipal and state planners tried to build a freeway along Highway 55/Hiawatha Avenue, following an old route south from downtown to Fort Snelling and the airport. For more than a decade in the 1970s and 80s, hundreds and thousands of residents in south Minneapolis fought those efforts at city hall, at the legislature, and in congress, arguing in favor of an at-grade parkway that allowed for the possibility of light rail transit.
One dramatic confrontation occurred in the lobby of the downtown Federal Building late on a January evening in 1975, when 200+ residents took Congressman Donald Fraser to task for his vote in favor of funding freeway construction along the route. I was there! What Nathanson did not relate about the incident was the fact that residents chartered buses to the event at their own expense after Fraser's office had refused to schedule a meeting at a more convenient time and place. Light rail began running on the non-freeway, Hiawatha Avenue on June 26, 2004 – 29 years later!
In all of "Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century," I found but one factual error. On page 196, Nathanson relates that Rudy Perpich was elected Minnesota's governor in 1976. In fact, as lieutenant governor, Perpich assumed the office of governor on Dec. 29, 1976, following the resignation of Governor Wendell Anderson. Perpich then appointed Anderson to fill the United States Senate vacancy created by the election of Walter Mondale as vice president. Both Perpich and Anderson were defeated for election in November 1978.
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