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Nowhere Is My Home? No, Here Is Your Home!
In a piece that prompted a resigned "shoulda been us" from Racket staffers, Spin writer Brendan Hay interviewed the homeowner at 2215 Bryant Ave. S. in Minneapolis.
Does that not mean anything to you? Congrats on becoming a well-adjusted human adult! The rest of us, including Hay (who says he's made several "pilgrimages" to the south Minneapolis address), know it as the house from the famous Daniel Corrigan photo on the cover of the Replacements’ Let It Be, which turns 40 this very day. The onetime home of band members Tommy and Bob Stinson is now owned by Michael Woell, who bought the house for $525K in 2006 not knowing it was a holy site for indie-rock obsessives. “I didn’t know who the Replacements were, to be honest," he says, casting the blame on his Deadhead/Alice in Chains-loving brothers.
These days, thanks to the many pilgrimage-makers like Hay and neighbors who once partied with the band, he's much more familiar—he even chatted with Tommy Stinson himself when he was there with the A.V. Club in 2013 (see below). The whole story is a lotta fun; go a head and give it a read.
Dog Park Drama
Everyone seems really mad about the Minneapolis Park Board's decision to fence off part of Minnehaha Off-Leash Dog Park, including much of the accessible beach area. You know, where dogs not only splish, but also splash!
The plan, which was approved by the Park Board without a public hearing, would fence off a huge chunk of land that isn't technically part of Mississippi River-adjacent dog park but has been used that way for decade, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune's Susan Du. The actual dog park is just a 6.6-acre triangular portion of the sprawling park as people currently use it, Du writes. The National Park Service, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Minnesota Historical Society own or manage the rest of the land. Some of those groups have asked the Park Board to fence off their areas; Veterans Affairs spokesperson Melanie Nelson delightfully told the Strib that the VA has “no dog in the fight.” Technically, the plan increases the dog park’s size from 6.6 to 17 acres, but once the fences are in the total area to which dogs have had off-leash access for 35 years+ will become considerably smaller. A Change.org petition to save the park is more than halfway to its goal of 2,500 signatures.
“I don’t want to diminish the fact that they are doing a lot of improvements to the actual dog park property,” park user Arik Van Asten tells Du. “But they are drastically changing the use of the overall space.”
Bob Dylan Is Now a Freewheelin’ Tweeter
While we're on the subject of local ("local") musicians and their antics... Bob Dylan is now a freewheelin' Tweeter! That's the perfect headline from Devon Ivie over at Vulture, who writes that while the motives behind the 83-year-old's sudden interest in sharing his innermost thoughts about Bob Newhart and Dooky Chase’s Restaurant are unclear, his website has confirmed that the tweets are written by Dylan himself—none of that John Carpenter Letterboxd B.S. His local-angle senses tingling, Racket's own Jay Boller has of course already reached out to Bob's legal team in hopes of obtaining his longtime manager's info to, ideally, request an interview about Twitter. We have no shame and we await their (unlikely) response.
Place-Specific Bike Racks Pt. II
I wrote about local guy Bennett Hartz's ongoing collection of place-specific bike racks—teeth-shaped racks at dentist offices, the bowling pin racks at Bryant-Lake Bowl, etc.—in an August 23 edition of the Flyover. So why am I sharing it again? Well, because I'm very fond of this project, and because Hartz is back with even more setting-specific racks, from train track racks at Track 29 Apartments to the racks with cat and dog cutouts at Kenwood Pet Clinic. And also because I contributed one of the bike racks this time around: the coffee-cup shaped ones outside of May Day Cafe on Bloomington Avenue in Powderhorn. It's become a fun little thing to look for when I'm out on rides!
