Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Who's Nicollet Mall for Anyway?
When it comes to downtown Minneapolis, the city is always doing things that are not the things that anyone is asking it to do. For instance, removing bus routes from Nicollet Mall. This move is rooted in a suggestion from Mayor Jacob Frey’s Vibrant Downtown Storefronts Workgroup. The idea is to improve “some of the slowest, least reliable transit services” in the city, according to this description of the proposed changes, by shifting the routes one to three blocks away.
Or is the plan to move “undesirables” (including people who use mass transit) off Nicollet Avenue, which would presumably be to the liking of Target and the Downtown Council in general? That was the consensus on a Bluesky (“it’s the new Twitter!”) thread yesterday. Several women expressed safety concerns about having to wait at remote bus stops. Other people suggested just giving signal priority to buses on Nicollet, while acknowledging that the city would never inconvenience car commuters like that.
If you’d like to have your input ignored by the city, there’s a poorly worded survey for you to fill out. You can choose between options to move buses to Marquette, Second, or Third avenues. There’s no option to simply keep the buses on Nicollet.
Everyone’s Moving to Carver!
What will the Twin Cities metro area look like in a quarter-century? Well according to the Met Council, there will be a lot more people. Our region’s strange, unaccountable governing body projects that the region will have swollen by a half a million souls from 2020 to 2050. (Would it creep you out if I started referring to people as “souls”? It’s a new bit I’m working on—kind of Dickensian, no?)
As you can see from this very cool suburban migration map from Axios, many of those people are headed to sparsely populated outer-ring suburbs. Presumably that’s where there’s still land to build the standalone housing that Americans will cling to until the sun burns our planet to a husk.
But keep in mind that we’re talking percentages here. So while deep purple Carver is nearly tripling and mauve St. Paul will grow less than 10%, the former will only be adding 9,000 people and the latter will still be adding 25,000 new residents. And Minneapolis is projected to break the magical 500,000 ceiling for the first time since the ’50s, though it will fall just short of its 1950 peak of 521,718. Unless *extreme All of Mpls voice* the socialist City Council drives everyone out of the city with its pro-crime, high-tax agenda.
Reminder: You Can Always Just Do Stuff
That’s my takeaway from this cute Ben Hovland story for MPR about some folks in south Minneapolis who recently decided to throw an impromptu speed-skating competition on Powderhorn Lake. An Instagram post was enough to drag more than 30 hardy skaters out to the park for some heated competition. (OK, I guess “heated” is the wrong word there, because it’s winter, huh?) “The real victory is being here with my friends and feeling my heart race as I skate around the ice,” says the modest Spencer Polk, who came in first. Powderhorn has quite a history of speed skating. Apparently in the 1930s and ‘40s “a local ice track hosted national skating championships and even Olympic trials,” according to Hovland. The most surprising fact of all is that four of the nine skaters on the 1948 U.S. Olympic team were from Powderhorn.
Wanna Buy the Avalon Theater?
Last November, leaders of In the Heart of the Beast announced that the puppeteering troupe would soon vacate and sell the Avalon Theater after 36 years there. Now the historic theater at the corner of Lake Street & 15th Avenue is officially on the market, and according to its listing, the site is ideal for “a variety of potential uses ranging from theater to community or educational space, place of worship, or fitness center.” The listing includes a brochure with lots of colorful pictures of the interior (including a very red conference room), which you can enjoy browsing even if you don’t plan on purchasing an 88-year-old south Minneapolis theater—which, let’s face it, most of us don’t. Then again, price is “NEGOTIABLE” so why not make your best offer?
