BY DEB KEEFER RAMAGE In the vibrant neighborhoods surrounding Chicago Avenue and 48th Street, it’s easy to forget about home-based businesses. Many are so home-based that there’s no sign in the window, no trucks pull up to the door, no clients park on the tree-lined block. One extremely private way…
BY STEPHANIE FOX Hennepin Avenue, in Uptown and north to downtown, is one of the older business districts in the city, always trendy, whether scruffy or upscale. For more than 100 years, from flappers to the hepcats to hippies to hipsters, Hennepin Ave. businesses have been a destination for folks…
BY TONY BOUZA Around 1966, the NYPD was assailed by the police union as an unfit place to work. The cops were miserable. Morale had never been lower. The troops wallowed in lachrymose self-pity and the Fourth Estate lapped it up. What a fun time they were all having. My…
BY STEPHANIE FOX Unlike many American cities, bus shelters in Minneapolis are not privately owned. They are owned and operated by Metropolitan Transit Authority, a division of the Metropolitan Council. Buses carry nearly 70% of public transit riders on 123 bus routes, with thousands of passengers waiting every day at…
BY STEPHANIE FOX Schatzlein Saddle Shop 413 W. Lake St. Monday – Friday, 9:30 a.m. – 6 p.m. Thursday, 9:30 a.m. – 8 p.m. Saturday, 9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. Everyone who regularly travels down Lake Street has seen the Schatzlein Saddle Shop. But, for many, what’s inside remains a…
BY STEPHANIE FOX Mt. Olivet Lutheran Church in South Minneapolis, with a membership of 12,000, is the largest Lutheran Church in the country, perhaps in the world according to some accounts. It’s not the kind of church that actively courts controversy. Located on 50th Street in a liberal section of…
BY ED FELIEN Funding for neighborhood organizations has come mostly from the increased property taxes on downtown development. In 1989 the city gave developers a huge tax break to encourage development. Tax Increment Financing meant they would only have to pay property taxes on the value of the buildings they…
J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece “The Hobbit” will be playing at the Children’s Theatre Company until April 14. Go and see two hours of excitement in this adaptation written and directed by Greg Banks. Altogether the show is two hours, counting the 20-minute intermission, but I count it all as excitement.…
BY ED FELIEN Funding for neighborhood organizations has come mostly from the increased property taxes on downtown development. In 1989 the city gave developers a huge tax break to encourage development. Tax Increment Financing meant they would only have to pay property taxes on the value of the buildings they…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Janaan Ahmed, a junior at Patrick Henry High School (PHHS) in Minneapolis, is the 2019 student at-large director on the Minneapolis School Board. The activism for which Ahmed became known, almost a full year before her selection as student representative, was as one of the point…
The rich get richer A great deal of what I do when I write is to reduce word usage. For example, a small newsletter that I receive monthly contains so much information about the corporations that run this country. (No, they don’t govern it; they simply control those who do…
BY TONY BOUZA (Publisher’s Note: I vigorously disagree with Tony Bouza’s analysis and my rebuttal follows.) The election for President begins in 2019—and that ain’t an optic. Trump—if he can survive to run (which I doubt) has no chance. Zilch. So, who should the Dems nominate? My secret choice is…
BY ED FELIEN Amy, you stand with the old guard, establishment wing of the Democratic Party. You are a deliberate centrist. You believe in bi-partisan cooperation. You went on the goodwill tour of Neo-Nazi battalions in Eastern Ukraine with John McCain and Lindsay Graham a couple of years ago just…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN “The Scramble for Africa” is a very long book about Europe’s takeover of the continent of Africa at the end of the 19th century. The story is appalling, mostly because of the confidence of European rulers to just take and control whatever they found there, as though…
Hope for the Earth, our home The New York Times of Jan. 7 carried a full half-page ad signed by Michael Kurtyka of the Polish National Foundation and president of the environmental group COP24, describing the most recent U.N. climate policy conference, the Katowice Rulebook. Negotiators from 196 countries and…
