Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of what local media outlets and Twitter-ers are gabbing about.
A Sports Bar for Women's Sports
When Jillian Hiscock went to a bar in hopes of watching the Gophers softball team play in the national tournament, she had to hunt down someone to change the channel on a TV. “After not seeing the game on any of the 20+ televisions, we asked the bartender if they could get it on one of the many screens, which were currently playing everything from football game reruns to a cornhole tournament,” she remembers. Now, the self-professed sports nut is trying to make it easier to find women's teams on bar screens. She recently announced plans for A Bar Of Their Own, a TBD space dedicated exclusively to women’s sports. The details are sparse—here’s no time frame or a hint to where this thing is going to be—but they do have a website up and plenty of social media accounts to follow. In recent memory, only a handful of non-mainstream sports bars have made a go of it in the Twin Cities, including the since-closed gay sports bar at Uptown's cursed ol' Old Chicago space and St. Paul's apparently thriving Black Hart soccer/LGBTQ+ bar.
They Want Our Water
Why are there even cities in the southwestern deserts of the United States? Seems like bad planning to those of us who live near giant freshwater lakes and the big ol’ Mississippi River. And now, with potentially ruinous climate change underway, our drier neighbors are looking to siphon off distant water supplies—like the Mississippi. On Thursday, MPR News reports, mayors from cities along the river who belong to the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative have taken steps to form a new compact that would prevent the creation of some sort of pipeline from the Midwest to the Southwest. Any formal agreement is still a long way off—it’d require approval from the 10 states that border the river as well as the federal government. Experts deem the likelihood of such a pipeline are very low, due to both engineering and political hurdles, but welcome the creation of a compact as a way to kill an idea that won’t go away no matter how impractical. As Olivia Dorothy, director of river restoration with the conservation group American Rivers, puts it: “If you want the Mississippi River water, you can move here.”
It’s Time to Vote AGAIN
The only thing Minnesotans love more than voting is bragging about how many Minnesotans vote. Even so, we have been filling in so many ovals on so many ballots here in Minneapolis over the past few years that you’re forgiven if you feel a little election fatigue. This year, it’s time for another Minneapolis City Council race, even though we just voted for city council in 2021. Redistricting altered the borders of the city’s 13 wards in the interim, so now we’ll vote for who’ll represent the newly drawn wards this year—and then again for city council in 2025. St. Paul is also having a city council election this year, but they haven’t had one since 2019, a reasonable space between elections. Anyway, that’s a lot of candidates to keep track of (even if you can only vote for one) and Kyle Stokes at MinnPost has drawn up a complete list of who’s running for city council in Minneapolis and St. Paul, along with the short answers candidates provided to a Q&A. And if you’re wondering who’s supporting those candidates, MinnPost did a collab with Southwest Voices and they started put this together a month ago.
Fill 'Er Up, FLW!
If you're anything like me, Racket's Jay Boller, you know exactly three things about Cloquet: Gordy's Hi-Hat, the semi-recent closure of America's last matchstick factory, and the beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright-designed gas station at 202 Cloquet Ave. Earlier this week, TPT's Kaomi Lee published a report that attempts to answer why the titan of Prairie School architecture built a filling station just southwest of Duluth. "People are amazed by it," says Chris Chartier of Best Service Gas Station, the longtime operator of the landmark building. "Actually, that's how people know Cloquet a lot." We won't spoil the fascinating, sprawling answer to Lee's big Q, though we will note that architectural historian Richard Kronick, a noted friend of Racket, assists with it. You get a deep-dive into the history, a tour of the place today, and a meeting with the owner, Andrew Volna of Noiseland Industries, who (surprise!) is also a noted friend of Racket. TGIF, enjoy!
