BY ED FELIEN At its meeting on Aug.9, the Park Board will hear a recommendation from staff to close Hiawatha Golf Course and turn it into Camp Swampy, a wetlands theme park. In spite of a crowd of more than 70 frustrated golfers, a Park Board committee voted 5 to…
BY ED FELIEN We do not need a change of the Palace Guard. Replacing the Chief of Police is not the solution to the problem with the Minneapolis Police Department. The problem is there is no accountability. The MPD officers believe they are above the law. They believe their badge…
BY ED FELIEN It seems nothing can stop them from closing Hiawatha Golf Course in a couple of years. At a public meeting late last month, Michael Schroeder, the assistant superintendent for Planning Services, told an anxious crowd of more than a hundred golfers that the course would be open…
BY ED FELIEN And they burned the bridges behind them. A new generation came to take their place, so they fought back. They wore the machinery down; ground the process to dust; exhausted them; outlasted them, and they remained intact. The DFL establishment that ran the Convention was the older…
BY ED FELIEN Later that winter we heard about the murder of Mark Salzer by an undercover narcotics officer of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). James Decowski befriended Mark and then busted him. He was in his apartment with his girlfriend. The cop pulled a gun. Mark knocked over a lamp. The cop shot and…
BY ED FELIEN It seems nothing can stop them from closing Hiawatha Golf Course in a couple of years. At a public meeting late last month, Michael Schroeder, the assistant superintendent for Planning Services, told an anxious crowd of more than a hundred golfers that the course would be open…
BY ED FELIEN The Park Board seems hell-bent on destruction. It seems nothing can stop them from closing Hiawatha Golf Course in a couple of years. At a public meeting late last month, Michael Schroeder, the assistant superintendent for Planning Services, told an anxious crowd of more than a hundred…
BY ED FELIEN The Park Board seems hell-bent on destruction. It seems nothing can stop them from closing Hiawatha Golf Course in a couple of years. At a public meeting late last month, Michael Schroeder, the assistant superintendent for Planning Services, told an anxious crowd of more than a hundred…
BY ED FELIEN The DFL will hold an endorsing convention for mayor, Board of Estimate and Taxation and nine Park Board seats on Saturday, July 8, at the downtown Minneapolis Convention Center. There are four leading candidates for mayor: Betsy Hodges is the incumbent. She hasn’t raised a lot of…
BY ED FELIEN Trump is taking the leash off his pitbull. McMaster, the Bush architect of the first failed surge in Afghanistan, has his chance to do it all over again. He’s got a plan to add 3,000 to 5,000 more troops to forces in Afghanistan to settle down the…
BY ED FELIEN There is a hunger in all of us for community. The impulse is older than human understanding. We long to be part of the tribe, to feel the comfort, to know the security, to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We were family, then clan, then tribe, then…
BY ED FELIEN According to a memorandum sent out June 8: “MPRB staff has considered the potential of a 9-hole golf course, but has determined 9-hole golf is not financially viable at this course. As a result, the options for use of the property in a reduced pumping scenario no…
I was fried—mentally and psychologically exhausted. I needed to get away, and I wanted to go out and see Jimmy again. So, I told everybody I was taking a week off, and I hitchhiked out to Massachusetts. Jimmy was great. Pontificating like an apostate pope. Talking about Nixon “with the…
I. How it all began (2015 August Riv, September PP, Nok) I remember when it happened. It was 1961. I had just started graduate school at the University of Minnesota. I was doing research for a history of theater seminar. I was assigned a report on the Abbey Theater and…
Mitch and John BY ED FELIEN It recently came out that the new Republican House Majority Whip Steve Scalise gave a speech to a David Duke group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in 2002. Scalise claimed he had no idea what the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) group stood…
Columns by Ed Felien