This is the first article in a six-part series on the future of the Southeast Library in Minneapolis.Will Southeast Minneapolis ever get a new community library?While some community residents complain that replacing the library at Dinkytown has been repeatedly delayed, county officials say planning for a new building could begin late this year.The library at 1222 Fourth St. S.E. serves University of Minnesota students and residents of four adjacent neighborhoods: Marcy-Holmes, Como, University and Prospect Park/East River Road.The current building is widely perceived to be inadequate, even for a library open only three days a week. (Hours are noon to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturdays.) The building is not accessible for people with disabilities and it lacks parking and necessary interior space.The county’s 2012 Capital Improvement Program stated that the building has 13,000 gross squire feet, of which only 4,700 are usable as library space for staff and customers. The CIP also stated that planning for a new building should have begun in 2011. “Since Hennepin County took it over, Southeast keeps moving to the bottom of the list for a new library,” said Melissa Bean, executive director of the Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association. Kelli Koob, coordinating librarian in the Hennepin County Library’s Capital Projects Office, will be the project manager for a new Southeast Library.“The Southeast Library has changed its timeline a number of times,” Koob said. “All of our projects have done. Continue Reading
HARDIN, MONTANA—In character as George Armstrong Custer, actor Steve Alexander rode down Medicine Tail Coulee and across the Little Big Horn River several times one June weekend, making the crossing that Custer failed to accomplish 136 years earlier when he tried to attack a large village of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women and children.Custer was defeated in less than an hour on June 25, 1876, while parts of his command under Major Marcus Reno and Capt. Frederick Benteen several miles away held of attacks from a hilltop for two days until reinforcements arrived. News of the battle did not reach the nation until July 4 during the national Centennial celebration.Alexander and the 7th Cavalry rode across the river for the opening and closing ceremonies of annual reenactments of Custer’s last fight that killed 263 of the solders trying to reach the camp.Two battles, two perspectives“The land, Mother Earth, is really the star,” said rancher and poet Henry Real Bird, director of the Crow Indian reenactment and owner of the land. “People are drawn to the site, and I grew tired of answering the same questions 200 times a day about what happened here, so we decided to do this program to show them.”On a hillside 25 miles north and west of Medicine Tail Coulee, the Hardin Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture hosts a competing reenactment which also boasts a Crow author, Joe Medicine Crow, a descendant of Custer’s scout White Man Runs Him.The chamber traced the roots of its reenactment to a cooperative project begun by Hardin and the Crow tribe from 1964 to 1973, when it was suspended because of protests by the American Indian Movement. In 1990, the show returned as an annual event. Real Bird, though, said the chamber moved their reenactment to the hillside along the railroad tracks and revised the story.“It’s their story told in their version,” he said.“We’re walking the very ground—living the history where it happened,” Real Bird said. Continue Reading
Seven BNSF and Minnesota Commercial Railroad officials and their environmental consultants met June 27 with residents of the St. Anthony Park neighborhood in St. Paul to discuss the impact of increasing amounts of sand being transported through the neighborhood by train and truck.The sand comes by truck from western Wisconsin quarries and is dumped on to asphalt where it is picked up by a front-end loader and dumped into train cars that sit on the track until a they get a full train to go to Texas for processing, said Brian Sweeney, assistant vice president for public affairs for Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway.“This is not frac sand,” Sweeney said. “The sand cars go to Texas where the sand is processed into frac sand. This is raw, unprocessed sand. Continue Reading
Minneapolis residents are encouraged to provide feedback on the Stadium Village Station Area Plan through June 14 before the framework goes to the city planning commission and City Council for final approval this summer. Principal city planner Haila R. Maze said the city is in the midst of a 45-day comment period on the plan that covers the area from the light-rail station west of the TCF Stadium at the University of Minnesota east along University Avenue to the St. Paul city limits. The 128-page draft of the plan is posted online. Several documents that comprise the plan are linked to the page, including a two-page summary. The larger report begins with a 10-page executive at the beginning of the document for people who may not want to read the entire report, Maze said. “Unfortunately, our website isn’t interactive enough for the public to leave comments online, but we accept ideas by mail, by email and by phone,” Maze said. A hard copy of the plan is also available at the Southeast Library in Dinkytown. Written comments can be sent to Haila R. Maze (haila.maze@minneapolismn.gov), Minneapolis-CPED, 250 S. Fourth St., Room 110, Minneapolis, MN 55415. Her phone number is (612) 673-2098 or fax to (612) 673-2728. Continue Reading
City planning guru Charles Landry says urban planners should emphasize social and cultural capital over their traditional reliance on economics alone in the development of cities. Landry, who has evaluated the livability of cities all over the world, spoke May 7 at the Cowles Center in downtown Minneapolis to begin a weeklong residency of workshops, talks and tours of the Twin Cities.“We should seek a capital balance—not just money and economics—but to attract human, intellectual and social capital,” he said. “When we think only about individual development projects, we may lose overall needs…Everybody wants to keep and attract talented people.”A key message of the Central Corridor planning is to undertake a comprehensive plan for the area along the light rail connecting the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul that does more than react to individual projects as they are proposed, Landry said.Rather than relying on individual development projects and their economic impacts, he said, cities should ask more important questions: “What makes a pleasant place? What makes a pleasant city? What makes a pleasant neighborhood?”Standing in front of a picture of concrete highways and overpasses, Landry asked rhetorically about the cultural value of the scene to someone who walks through the paved-over district to get to work every day.“It isn’t very calming and soothing to the mind,” Landry said. Continue Reading
A bicycle and pedestrian greenway may be the most cost-effective transportation use of the railroad trench through Dinkytown, while new truck routes could increase access to I-94 and Minnesota Hwy 280. This scenario was among more than 16 options considered over the last several years by planners, architects and neighborhood residents looking at the Granary Corridor around the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Transportation engineer JoNette Kuhnau presented their Granary Corridor Study to about 80 neighborhood residents and other stakeholders on May 9 at Van Cleve Park in Southeast Minneapolis.
University of Minnesota law professor Dale Carpenter said April 23 that the U.S. Supreme Court took the first step toward making same-sex marriage legal with its 2003 decision that overturned anti-sodomy laws in 13 states.
“This was easily one of the most important court statements on civil rights decisions of the last 50 years,” Carpenter said. “It was the most important one for gay rights.”
German Nazis tried to eliminate homosexuals as part of the “final solution” to “cleanse” their society of “undesirable elements” like Jews, Gypsies…and gays. An exhibit, Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945, documenting that aspect of the Nazi policy, will be displayed from April 2 through May 11 at the Elmer L. Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota.The exhibit is part of a series of programs called “Discrimination by Design” showing that German prejudice toward gay men dates from 1871 with the passage of an anti-sodomy law called Paragraph 175 and it continued after World War II.“The persecution of homosexuals was based on Paragraph 175, which continued as a law after the camps were liberated—and that context means that gay men should be understood as having a special experience,” said historian Elizabeth Haven Hawley. “Hence this important exhibition.”Artifacts from three University of Minnesota departments—the Children’s Literature Research Collections; the Center for the Holocaust and Genocide Studies; and the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies—will be displayed along with the traveling exhibit created by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.The USHMM exhibit contains reproductions of about 250 photographs and documents that show how the Nazi regime rallied support for the eradication of homosexuality, killing thousands of people in the process and destroying the lives of countless others.“People coming to Andersen will be able to gain more context about the exhibition from the display, which will highlight the way that gender played a role in Nazi ideology and in the attempt of the Nazi leaders to establish their movement as a defender of cultural social structures,” Hawley said.Hawley, who is program director at the Immigration History Research Center, will provide drop-in discussions and tours of the exhibit on three Fridays: April 6, May 4 and May 11. (Tours can be arranged at other times by emailing Hawley at ihrc@umn.edu.) She will discuss “the social, economic, legal and industrial setting in which Nazism flourished and the persecution of gay men took place.” One other public lecture and three films will be shown as part of the “Discrimination by Design” program.The USHMM exhibit has been touring the United States for a decade. The exhibit first came to Minneapolis in 2003 after a Minnesota legislator had denied that gays were persecuted by the Nazis, and this year the exhibit appears as the state debates a proposed constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage.One of the planners who helped bring the exhibit here said the timing is a coincidence. “We are not oblivious to the fact that these debates are under way, but we feel there is no parallel between Nazi Germany and the United States today,” said Laura Zelle, director of Tolerance Minnesota & Holocaust Education, the education arm of the Jewish Community Relations Council.“By doing ‘Discrimination by Design,’ we hope to draw attention to the dangers to all of us by marginalizing any minority groups, including our GLBT neighbors,” Zelle said. “At this time in Minnesota, there is an opportunity to educate people on how law is used to marginalize minorities.”The term Holocaust, Hawley said, refers to the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Continue Reading
Construction of the light rail transit and University of Minnesota expansion are rapidly changing the Stadium Village business district area just west of the campus.
