BY ED FELIEN Settlement houses are generally dreary places—the poverty, noisy kids, anxious mothers.  But they can also be exciting.  I had read about the Henry Street Settlement House on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, and how they had theater programs for children and became a cultural center.  I…

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BY ED FELIEN In one or two months Barr Engineering will release its study of flooding on Lake Hiawatha at a public meeting. Readers of Southside Pride might remember “Return to Mud Lake” from the March 2016 Nokomis and Riverside editions of Southside Pride in which we wrote how Barr…

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The South Chicago Avenue Business Alliance (SCABA) 7th Annual Classic Car Show will be held on Sunday, June 12, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.at the intersection of 48th Street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis. As in other years, the car show will feature a wide variety of classic…

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BY ED FELIEN All right, I admit it, I have a crush on Polly Mann.  My wife doesn’t mind.  She likes Polly.  [For those of you who don’t know Polly, she started Women Against Military Madness—WAMM—with Mary Hamilton 34 years ago.  She writes almost monthly for us.  She’s 96 and…

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BY ADAM M. SCHENCK Swandive Theater’s production of “Kid-Simple” at the Southern Theater has much to recommend it. Co-directors Meg DiSciorio and Damon Runnals create an intricate set with the best sound design I have seen, or rather heard, in local theater. Sound bumps and soothes the audience. Lead actor…

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BY POLLY MANN I do believe we need one, that is, a new economic system, and economist John Scales Avery describes one to us in this book. I didn’t read the book, knowing myself to become overwhelmed by its knowledge as such has happened to me before. But I read…

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BY ED FELIEN I accuse Dustin Schwarze and Mark Ringgenberg of Murder in the Third Degree for the killing of Jamar Clark. According to Minnesota Statutes 609.195, Murder in the Third Degree happens when “Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by…

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The Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board is sponsoring the last in a series of Community Advisory Committee meetings for the South Service Area Master Plan (SSAMP) on Thursday, May 5, from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Central Gym community room, 3400 4th Ave. S.  This Master Plan will create a comprehensive,…

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BY JOHN KARRIGAN I don’t have thousands of out-of-state Sandhill Cranes to write about this month, but the park water birds have been quite good. On the last day of March, three Great Blue Herons were on the lake and one or two have been on the lake almost every…

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BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE A couple of years ago, there were serious fears in some quarters that the arrival of the Seward Co-op Friendship Store on 38th Street would open a wedge (if you can pardon the pun) to gentrification of the adjacent Central and Bryant neighborhoods. Even before that,…

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An Open Letter to Mayor Hodges, I supported your election and have been grateful for your effective leadership in our community. I ask that you extend that leadership to address the need to fund more adequately the upkeep of our neighborhood parks.  Carol Becker’s article in the April edition of…

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BY ED FELIEN He was disconnected from his family when he was 4, and it seemed like he never got connected after that.  A gangsta armed robbery when he was 19 got him 41 months in prison.  He got out and got busted for smoking grass—“Rich people do it in…

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For the past five years, the Minneapolis public schools have been slowly laying off educational assistants, a classification of paraprofessional, because they don’t meet new college experience requirements different from when they were hired. At this point, there are 17 EAs left in the district, all with 25 or more…

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BY CAROL BECKER Minneapolis has 160 neighborhood parks and 49 neighborhood park buildings.  This excludes any regional parks like the Chain of Lakes or the Riverfront.  A study done last year by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board showed that we need $14 million a year to maintain these neighborhood…

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BY ED FELIEN The Vigil on the Lake Street Bridge started in 1999 when local peace groups decided to act in solidarity with the people of Yugoslavia who were standing on bridges to protest the bombing by U.S. warplanes. Marie Braun, perhaps the    principal organizer of the vigil, wrote in…

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