Customers Flee Wal-Mart Empty Shelves for Target, Costco

edkohler:

besidestheobvious:

This article drove me to apoplexy.

The best big box store is no big box store. Imagine how much better the Hiawatha & Lake would be if there were businesses that served LRT travelers with residential units above them rather than a huge Target store with a parking lot and delivery docks taking up 2-3 more acreage than the store itself. That store and stores like it - regardless of brand - are not assets to their communities.

I have no problem with Target/Cub/Rainbow at that intersection, but how awesome would it be if the Target was like the one downtown, a two story store with no parking lot. And instead of Cub AND Rainbow, just one with a smaller parking lot. For me, the problem isn’t the big box store, it’s the big box store parking lot!

Minneapolis: Let's go crazy. Let's get nuts.

Just a few thoughts on a great piece over at Fight with Knives

1. I love that the entire Twin Cities area is basically just referenced as Minneapolis. As it should be. :)

2. “No one neighborhood is cooler than any other neighborhood.” I’m guilty of this more than nearly everyone, as I love to rip St. Paul and Northeast, but for me it’s all in fun. I fully understand that Minneapolis is great because of all the amazing places all over the two cities. Even areas that people forget about, like North Minneapolis and the East Side of St Paul, are wonderful places and for the most part, great places to live. Find me another city that is even close to being as complete.

3. My perfect day would involve a bike ride around the creek, river and lakes of South Minneapolis, lunch at Shish in Mac Groveland, an afternoon Twins game downtown, dinner at The Strip Club, followed by some beers at basically any bar in either city

fightwithknives:

In honor of this momentous occasion, here are five things I’ve learned in my five years in Minneapolis:

• Right now the Twin Cities are like that kid in high school who is generally cool but doesn’t have any self-esteem and is really self-obsessed, so does some occasionally lame things. It’s not that it’s harder to make friends here than anywhere else (it is hard to make friends everywhere after you graduate college); it’s that we’re obsessed with how we feel about it. Just make whatever friends, treat whoever like however, they will figure it out, stop thinking about yourself that way. You can do it. It’s like MPLS is Liz Lemon in high school - so much potential, but kinda mean because it’s so obsessed with being compared to others (you are going to bring up Portland again? ok, I’ll wait. And no one says hi to you on the street except for in the South, ok? That shit’s annoying.) Anyway, there’s a lot of potential bubbling under the surface right now, and one day Minneapolis will straighten up and grow up and own it, and that day is almost here.
• No one neighborhood is cooler than any other neighborhood. Minneapolis and St. Paul are similarly badass. They all have equally sweet blocks and even better hidden secrets. South Minneapolis is as cool as Northeast, which rocks as much as the Northside and West St. Paul. You can find apartments with badass built-ins in every neighborhood.
• The best place to meet a stranger with whom you would like to get down immediately is the 331 Club.
• There are a lot of favorites everywhere, but a perfect day would involve a trip to Franconia, a visit to Selby & Snelling and dinner at 112 Eatery, capped off by a show at the Hexagon Bar.
• It’s more than ok to be obsessed with Prince, still. It’s the coolest thing, actually. Every time it rains in this city a radio station is playing “Purple Rain.”

I have nothing but love for the Cities. Once I convinced a friend from out of town that Minneapolis’s slogan was “Let’s go crazy. Let’s get nuts.” Can we make that happen?

Longfellow Field: The Park that Bombs Bought « Minneapolis Park History

Excellent article on the original Longfellow Field:

If any park in Minneapolis should be a “memorial” park, perhaps it should be Longfellow Field, because it was bought and built with war profits. It would be hard to explain it any other way. The neighborhood around Longfellow Field is one of the few in the city that didn’t pay assessments to acquire and develop a neighborhood park. That’s because the park board paid for it with profits from WWI.