Emptiness Is A Form Of Resilience, I Guess

From 2006-2010, I worked at a job in downtown Saint Paul – on Wabasha, as luck would have it.

Wabasha had escaped the worst of the ravages of “Urban Renewal” of the 1950s-’60s, so it wasn’t a completely sterile, dessicated cement canyon, like Minnesota or Cedar.

But the 80s through the 2000s certainly had not treated it well, as whatever little non-government foot traffic there was on non-hockey/Ordway nights dried up. So while it’s not the depression-inducing brutalist hellscape that reigns from Minnesota over to Jackson, it was still pretty sad when I worked there, and the pandemic and Ecolab relocating to the Travelers building hasn’t helped.

A friend of the blog emails:

I travel quite a bit. Sometimes I travel by plane and when I get to my destination, I just walk or take taxis and transit everywhere. I have been to places far more dense than Saint Paul. Those places where I have traveled always have street level shops, restaurants, actual businesses that bring people out. Those places, in addition to having a larger number of people on sidewalks also have a large amount of automobile traffic. They have quite a few parking ramps as well. But, Saint Paul and Minneapolis is the only place that I have been that seems to have a plethora of vacant buildings and parking ramps, yet thinks the reason the downtown is “not people scale” is because it was lacking some sort of bike lane or “traffic calming.”

This section of Wabasha that our Resiliency Officer Stark thinks is so wonderfully suited for people is just one example of many. What is a bike lane going to prove on a deserted street? Stark will, of course, likely blame cars as the reason no one is riding their bikes past parking ramps. Then, the city will buy the ramps and close them. And still, people won’t ride their bikes past vacant buildings. Meanwhile, suburbs that I drive to, because there’s limited shopping in Saint Paul, seem to be thriving with businesses, housing developments, and yes, even sidewalks and bike lanes with people on them. Why are Democrats and far left urbanists determined to destroy our city?

I’m completely at a loss.

4 thoughts on “Emptiness Is A Form Of Resilience, I Guess

  1. town square was the last gasp of downtown retail

    there was a city park on the skyway level where you could eat lunch amid waterfall and live plants restful and welcoming i loved it there

    town square was built 40 years ago, when george latimer was mayor, before donaldsons became daytons became macys became a practice facility for the hockey team

    downtown retail left downtown and the empty spaces were taken by government offices like drivers license and special ed schools

    government employees go home at 4 so theres nobody downtown to shop and retail can’t survive on lunch hour purchases

    between 4 when bureaucrats clear out and 7 when ordway or hockey start the only people downtown are hoodlums

    bike lanes wont save it

  2. To be fair, leftists comprise the majority of people in city downtowns that are not there as predator’s. Let them choose their own Hunger Games scenarios.

  3. It’s been this way for a while. I remember going downtown back in 2017 and noticing about the same thing; with a couple of exceptions, there was very little between the convention center and the river.

    The irony is that in many ways, you don’t need a bike lane along these streets because the car lanes are vacant. Strange to see what the powers that be have done with the city.

  4. A lot of our social follies are the result of coalition building.
    What gets done by government and NGO’s is whatever goals a successful coalition can successfully promote. Contingency, compromise, consensus can lead to good outcomes or bad outcomes.
    City planners/activists, commercial interests and politicians (who do actual resource allocation) get together. City planners and activists have a grand plan of demolishing parking ramps, building green space, narrowing streets and widening sidewalks to encourage foot traffic. The politicians hammer out a compromise between the city planners/activists and commercial interests (who actually pay for all this). Instead of the city planner/activist vision you get a bike lane in a different part of town :).

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