As the only person on this list who has read through all the pages of the
1936 City Directory (plus the 1885, the 1909 and the 1922--I know: I should
get a life!), I would like to say here that the 500,000 people who lived in
Minneapolis in 1950 when Dyna was born were mostly living piled up in small
single-family houses and jerry-rigged duplexes, plus in unregulated
boarding or rooming houses into which large homes and mansions had been
turned, in many cases by widows of former industialists who had no
pensions, savings, or Social Security. Amy Klobuchar's father, Jim, lived
in one of those widow-run boarding houses on Como Ave. SE while he attended
the U of MN in the early 1950s.
The North Side's original 1870s and 1880s Scandinavian immIgrants' small
frame houses had been clean-sweep demolished in 1936 (MNHS has good pics of
the housing then torn down, including Floyd Olsen's childhood home), and
replaced by the Holman Field project, itself long since again torn down.
In 1950 there was still a lot of WW II veteran housing in Minneapolis,
mostly on the East Side (in Southeast Como, and in Northeast), which was
extremely dense: they put young families in Quonset huts, trailers, and
cabins just a few feet apart on land acquired through eminent domain,
fields really. These were the next best thing to tents, and thankfully are
long gone. This was the era of large poverty-level housing projects like
Glendale in Prospect Park, too.
I'm guessing that there was not much difference between 1936, when families
of eight to twelve adults lived crammed together in one small home, and
1950 when the city's population peaked. The city's Planning Department had
not yet adopted its absurd Urban Renewal philosophy that systematically
began tearing down solidly-built but declining larger homes and encouraging
the buildings of those awful two-and-a-half-story walkups that proliferated
in the 1950s and 1960s.
the freeways demolished thousands of private residences in the late 1950s
and 1960s, swiftly decreasing the city's population. Along with
suburbanization.
It's knowledge of what CPED's predecessor did to parts of Minneapolis in
the 1950s--not just to the bars, flophouses, and the Metropolitan building
downtown, but in the neighborhoods (e.g., Glendale)--that makes many of us
skeptical of the Density-ΓΌber Alles mentality of the self-described "new
urbanists" who are really just tear-down artists who refuse to recognize
the validity of neighborhoods, as a concept or as a reality in cities. They
disregard any history of place, and the value of unique and enduring
streetscapes as a community-cohering device.
Another note: San Francisco is, except for its south edge, geographically
bound, as a peninsula. Minneapolis in its geographical bounds is very
small, as cities go. Just arbitrary lines, rather than a body of water,
divides us from Golden Valley, Richfield, Robbinsdale, Hopkins,
Bloomington, etc. So, unless Minneapolis again decides to annex some
suburbs, which it did in the past and most recently, part of Richfield,
we'll have to build up, vertically, to increase density. And, as CPED
requires, "to the sidewalk." (no setbacks, no lawns or gardens)
Unless we permit people to cram together unsafely, as they were in the late
1930s to the 1950s.
Connie Sullivan
Como in Southeast Minneapolis
On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Constance Pepin <<email obscured>>
wrote:
Rest of post
> Just to clarify the mention in an earlier post of the South Upton project
> in Linden Hills:
>
> The new office/retail (not residential) building proposed for 4353 Upton
> Ave S is in the Shoreland Overlay District, yet the developer received a
> conditional use permit (CUP) to increase the height of the building to 3
> stories and over 52 feet. This excessive height will provide elevator
> access to a rooftop deck and penthouse for tenants, setting a precedent for
> rooftop use in this C1 zone, and effectively creating a fourth story for
> private use at the expense of surrounding properties.
>
> This height is not allowed in either the Shoreland Overlay District or in
> the C1 zoning classification for this property. A building this tall will
> diminish the Shoreland Overlay District, negatively affect access to light
> and air of surrounding properties, change the scale and character of the
> Linden Hills business district, and set a precedent for even taller
> buildings outside Shoreland Overlay and C1 zoning limits throughout the
> neighborhood and the City. This type of growth is unsustainable and
> inconsistent with the Minneapolis Comprehensive Plan.
>
> Yet the City Council's Zoning & Planning Committee voted unanimously to
> approve this CUP. At the April 9th meeting, concerns about the Shoreland
> Overlay district were readily dismissed with references to all the tall
> buildings near Lake Calhoun, as if those excessive heights--which ignore
> the neighborhood's small area plan--make it OK to continue to use CUPs to
> exceed zoning height limits. The City creates precedents and then says--
> look at all these precedents!
>
> The City's goal for density is being forced at the expense of
> neighborhoods, as zoning limits and The Minneapolis Plan for Sustainable
> Growth and even the neighborhoods' small area plans are pushed aside to
> enable developers to make more profits. As an earlier post stated, more
> population density in our City occurred previously and is possible without
> employing taxpayer-funded resources (such as CPED) to enrich developers'
> coffers. Creative and effective strategies to increase density would
> require a different set of priorities --including respect for
> neighborhoods--that are currently lacking in our City Council and CPED.
>
> Constance Pepin
> [u'Linden Hills', u''], [u'Minneapolis', u'']
> About/contact Constance Pepin: http://forums.e-democracy.org/p/cpepin
>
>
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