Yesterday a fire broke out at a small restaurant called “Heidi’s” on 50th Street, just east of Bryant Ave. in Southwest Minneapolis. It quickly spread to take the whole building, you can read about it here.
A friend noted on her Facebook page that she was sad for her husband, who had fond memories from his childhood of going to one of the neighboring businesses, called The Malt Shop (fortunately this one survived the blaze). I recently stopped in Patina, another business destroyed, to find a gift for friends, a salt and pepper shaker set that looked like one of those plastic honey containers shaped like a bear. I swung in after leaving my brother’s house, which is just a few blocks away.
50th and Bryant is one of Minneapolis’s little commercial nodes that add so much to the quality of our neighborhoods. They’re remnants of the streetcar days, before the age of the automobile and big box stores took over.
This type of place is what James Howard Kunstler calls places worth caring about, and I think the reaction of so many prove the point.
People don’t cry when they see a Don Pablo’s go up in flames. Fond memories of childhood are not stirred when a K-Mart meets the wrecking ball.
I have all the confidence in the world that this little corner of Minneapolis will be rebuilt, and it will be done with care and be just as cozy as it was before. We should take note of this occurrence, though, and remember that these are the kinds of places we should be creating. These are places worth caring about.
An article about Hartford, CT, and its parking lot problem.
For the past half-century, city leaders in Hartford have worked hard to satisfy what they deemed to be a critical need — the need for more parking, so that downtown Hartford could compete with suburban office parks and shopping centers.
This summer the Center for Transportation and Urban Planning at the University of Connecticut conducted a detailed study of the cumulative effect on the city of 50 years of providing parking. What we found was startling: Since 1960, the number of parking spaces in downtown Hartford increased by more that 300 percent — from 15,000 to 46,000 spaces. This change has had a profound and devastating effect on the structure and function of the city (see accompanying maps) as one historic building after another was demolished.
And what did the city gain from this assiduous drive to provide sufficient parking? Was it able to grow more prosperous by providing more jobs and housing for more people? If this was the desired outcome, we can consider the past 50 years to have been an abysmal failure. Over the period that parking was being increased by more than 300 percent, downtown was losing more than 60 percent of its residential population, and the city as a whole lost 40,000 people and 7,000 jobs.
I can think of another city that has too many parking lots because too many buildings were torn down..
About three weeks ago I came across a photo essay for “The Standard Hotel” in New York City. While the so-called experts were praising the structure for being some innovative step forward in Modernist Architecture, I found it to be pretty god-awful.
I immediately thought of my favorite polemicist, James Howard Kunstler, and sent him a link, suggesting the building for the next “Eyesore of the Month,” his monthly highlight of man made ugliness.
While I was not credited for the find, I feel particularly honored to have contributed to the canon.
