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Should the Twin Cities Have a Subway?
For streets.mn, Scott Berger goes to great, great lengths to make the case that yes, we should. Why refill the I-94 trench with dirt and concrete, he asks, when it could house the region’s first heavy-rail subway line?
"This line doesn’t need twenty stations. It needs the right ones," Berger argues, making the case for a limited-stop subway that would connect downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul. His vision is for a kind of "seamless connectivity" between the two, an "end-to-end, SUV-beating" rail option that'd function much faster than the existing/crawling light rail line.
As it is, he writes, downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul function as totally distinct entities. What if it was easier and quicker to get between the two? What if you didn't need to worry about parking to do so? What if we could leverage the underused Union Depot? And while Berger doesn't estimate how much such a project would run us, he does point out that we would avoid the largest cost of a subway: excavation.
Is it an idea so crazy it just might work? Possibly.
This much is certain: Racket's Jay Boller once posed the notion of a Twin Cities subway system to the CEO of Metro Transit on RacketCast, and she didn't seem interested.
Post Modern Times in Food & Wine
The quote from Post Modern Times owner Dylan Alverson that opens a recent profile in Food & Wine sent a stab of fear through this South Sider. “If this all hadn’t happened—given me purpose, inspiration, and a shift in finances—I probably would have closed my restaurant this year,” he tells reporter Stasia Brewczynki.
"This all," of course, refers to Brewczynki's decision to reimagine the Minneapolis restaurant's business model during the federal occupation of Minnesota, switching from a standard for-profit model to a pay-what-you-can system. It was a decision Alverson made (with input from staff) right after visiting the scene of Alex Pretti's January 24 killing. “People are generous,” he remembers assuring the team. “I have faith we’ll be taken care of.”
He was quickly vindicated in that faith, according to F&W...
Staff buy-in was swift, and the team scrambled to reopen the next day, replacing previous menus with ones without prices. The same day, Alverson released his first-ever social media video announcing that the restaurant would henceforth function as "Post Modern Times," a free or donation-based hub for everyone "EXCEPT ICE" for "the remainder of the government occupation." This decision would provide a model for a new way forward, he explains. It would stand as a resistance tactic to support the community, signal dissent from the government, and actively divest from taxation.
Post Modern Times received more donations in its first week than Alverson had made in profits over 15 years of running the restaurant.
Alverson says donations continue to be up roughly 30% over last year's sales, even after the national spotlight has moved on from Minneapolis. Now, the restaurant is establishing bylaws as it formally transitions to a nonprofit cooperative model.
Native Tongues
Sahan Journal does some great news reporting, but we also appreciate the pieces it runs that reveal just what a wide range of immigrant cultures exist in our state. Shubhanjana Das has a written one such story today, about Minnesotans who either teach their native languages or use them at work. Like, yes, we know there are many Spanish, Somali, and Hmong speakers in Minnesota, but let’s hear from a teen born in Ecuador who studies the Indigenous Kichwa language!
He’s one of six people who speak with Das. The others? A Kurdish language high school teacher in Moorhead, a Pashto-speaking refugee services director, a clinical supervisor who teaches the Liberian dialect Kru, and Dakota and Tibetan language teachers. And they all offer fresh perspectives on the need to preserve non-dominant languages.
Rub a Dub Dub, Cruise the Mississippi in a Tub?
That's up to the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, who will vote Wednesday to determine when Minneapolis will join the list of cities that allow "Spacruzzis” on its waterways. A fun summer diversion or just waterborne pedal pubs? Or maybe both?
Hot tubs are high on the list of things it’s easy to be dismissive about until you get in one. So we read with interest this piece from Torey Van Oot at Axios about the fact that we may have them on the Mississippi River as soon as this spring. The company behind the proposals rents them out at $300 for 90 minutes, with max six people aboard.
