DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Open Streets Franklin Avenue is on Sunday, Aug. 25, this year, as ever from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Just like last year, the route stretches from Portland Avenue to 27th Avenue in the east (a block shy of the Seward Co-op store). As each…
BY ELINA KOLSTAD On arriving in MSP after a two-week trip to Germany visiting family, I found out that the Perkins in my neighborhood, the last remaining Perkins in Minneapolis, had permanently closed a few days earlier. The next day I went to an event near the house I grew…
BY TONY BOUZA [On Sunday, July 29, The StarTribune reported: “Arradondo told reporters after a meeting of the City Council’s public safety committee that he wanted to add 400 more street officers by 2025 in order to keep pace with attrition and population growth. “Last week, Arradondo shared a startling…
The May 2019 Southside Pride carried an article by Tony Bouza in which he considers the film “Leviathan, or The Death of Stalin” as an accurate assessment of Russia, and he extends this assessment to Cuba and Venezuela and compares these countries with Scandinavia. Chief Bouza praises Scandinavia for promoting…
DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE This article is about good health, mental health—and breakfast. Obviously, these things are quite interconnected. We had a very fun Sunday morning breakfast at Hot Plate, a diner on Bloomington Avenue and 52nd Street. Hot Plate has been around for over a decade, having been started by…
Guns banned in New Zealand During World War II my husband spent about a year on duty in Australia and his letters to me from there exacerbated my interest not only in Australia, but also New Zealand. So, the New York Times article about gun usage in New Zealand drew…
BY RICHARD TAYLOR In his book “The Grand Chessboard,” Jimmy Carter’s former National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote, with refreshing candor, “The three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians…
TRIPARTITE brings together three distinctly different “street artists” to share the gallery walls at Modus Locus. In this exhibit, each artist brings their own unique perspective to their somewhat elusive public art endeavors. GROE’s body of work embodies and reveals the relationships active graffiti participants encounter: the bold, colorful, calculated…
BY ALLISON ANDRADE The U.N. warns that the world is “on course to exceed the temperature threshold” of warming, meaning another 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) above that set out in the Paris climate agreement. Many cities and community organizations in our country have set out to hold themselves…
BY JOHN CHARLES WILSON There are internet forums where people discuss every issue under the sun. Yes, even obscure subjects like public transit have their own online discussion groups. And, as you can guess, many people in those groups have the “transit vs. roads” or “transit vs. cars” misconception. Interestingly…
Members of the MN350 Solutions Committee met with Cargill executives on July 11 to make them aware of changes they could make to benefit the environment. When the activists arrived at Cargill corporate headquarters in Wayzata, they were not allowed to enter the building but rather were escorted by security…
BY DAVID TILSEN The East Phillips neighborhood has experienced more than its share of outrages. It holds a superfund site called the “Asbestos Triangle,” continues to have polluting industries like bituminous roadways and foundries, saw much of its land taken by Abbot Northwestern Hospital, and continues to be ground zero…
BY TONY BOUZA Every essay is a drip between the Scylla of truth and the Charybdis of offending. What is your responsibility to readership? It is really a sort of sacred trust and central to my pretensions to integrity—pathetic though they be. The reader must be served. The writer is…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE The first indication we had that Open Streets may be hitting a stride of competency after over a decade of building up to it was that it was a lot easier this year to get advance information. The map with all the major presenter booths and…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Cedar Avenue is a place where you can get good deals from locally-owned, unique businesses. We are highlighting five of them, some only a couple of years old, and some over 40. How many other avenues in town, or even in the country, can supply you…
