The Strib endorses RT Rybak’s dream of revitalizing Washington Avenue.

We’ll get to the editorial in a moment or two.  Shark Bait at Anti-Strib jumped on the first word of this “plan”, last week, quoting the Strib piece:

 The mayor doesn’t know how much it would cost. But he announced that a committee will meet to generate more ideas and a website,

Let me tell you how much it’s going to cost you…WAY TOO EFFING MUCH! You have RAMPANT CRIME in North Minneapolis, you have too few cops on the streets, and you want to spend money on making your city pretty?

Rybak, have you COMPLETELY lost your mind?!?!?!

Well, while I usually agree with the guys at Anti-Strib, this time I’ll leave it with “maybe and maybe not.”

Rybak’s incompetence at dealing with crime is, of course, grimly legendary, to the point that it’s spawned perhaps the most vibrant cottage industry among Twin Cities’ center-right bloggers.

But there is something to making the city less habitable to crime and criminals – by making it more friendly to real people.  Downtown Minneapolis has been victimized over the past fifty years by a couple of government-driven trends in urban design that, in retrospect, have been el-flopola.  And Sunday’s Strib editorial on the subject notes both of these trends, although they stint a bit on parts of the background, in going through a history of the neighborhood:

From the nearby Milwaukee Road Depot, a traveler [before the early sixties] stepped directly into the city’s worst squalor, where drunkards “littered the alleys with broken whiskey bottles, fought openly on the sidewalks [and] urinated on street corners,” recalled Joseph Hart in his and Edwin Hirschoff’s book “Down & Out: The Life and Death of Minneapolis’s Skid Row.”

Washington Avenue was a strip of bars, flophouses, pawnshops, secondhand stores, brothels and charity missions where, according to the Minneapolis Star, rats “burrowed holes from one building to another” and could “travel for blocks.” (The first skyways, perhaps.)

Slum clearance in the late 1950s and early ’60s chased out the denizens […]

 So far, so good.  The editorial refers to “Urban Renewal”, the first big attempt at socially-engineering the American inner city.  Influenced by [see Lileks for the list of the European architectural criminals against humanity], the ideal was that since the suburb was the home of the future, that the inner city should be turned into a hub and destination via piece of minimalist art. 

Which is what gave us urban atrocities like St. Paul’s Town Square (a vast concrete abomination that turned the area around Cedar, Minnesota and Fifth streets into a stalinist concrete desert), Riverside Plaza and, as the Strib describes, the neighborhood that’s drawn Rybak’s attention, which used to be called the “Gateway”:

[…] tore down hundreds of buildings and turned the avenue into a desolate funnel for auto traffic.

Unmentioned by the Strib:  “Urban Renewal” was a government program – the nannystate’s first big effort to shape the environment people lived in.  It, along with the decision to build the Interstate through the center of the city at the same time they tore down the old streetcar lines (which were, after decades in operation, basically self-supporting) with the connivance of a cartel of oil, tire and car companies, effectively turned America’s inner cities into the screwed up messes they are today.  In the Twin Cities, driving 94 and the 35s through the center of both cities gutted whole neighborhoods, creating slums where decent neighborhoods once stood, destroying St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood (the city’s traditional African-American neighborhood dating back to before the Civil War) and taking with it the community cohesion that used to be a hallmark of pre-welfare-state Black Minnesota.

Thanks, government.

But I digress. 

The problem with “funnels for auto traffic” (and/or “grandiose monuments to the wisdom of urban plans gone horribly awry”) is that they are ugly, barren, uninhabitable, and about as appealing to a regular person, a shopper, a visitor to a city, as a parking lot. 

And since nature and humanity both abhor vacuums,  who’s going to flock to these concrete deserts?

Criminals. 

Now, smacking criminals – property criminals, violent criminals, sex criminals – over the head and tossing them into jail until they get right is a laudable goal – one of state and local government’s precious few most legitimate priorities.

But creating an environment where crime can not flourish is equally laudable.  It is, of course, a goal that Minneapolis is comically-ill-equipped to carry out, given its’ one-party DFL government with its’ attendant commitment to using the city as a warehouse for the poor, its punishment of wealth and enterprise and merit, and mania for going mushy on crime; the DFL has spent two generations turning Minneapolis into a perfect storm of crime.

Still, turning Washington Avenue – one of the most depressingly-arid places in the Twin Cities – into something that real, law-abiding people with money and families would like to visit is a decent goal, certainly less-stupid than most of Rybak’s agenda in that, if successful, it could help rather than harm the tax base, encourage rather than discourage real, law-abiding people to come to the area, and make part of Minneapolis inviting rather than actively repellent to decent folks.

Mayor R.T. Rybak’s “vision” for transforming an ugly duckling into a grand, tree-lined boulevard is laudable and well worth trying. The rebirth of the Mills District has shown Washington’s potential as a green, attractive connection between the University of Minnesota’s West Bank and the booming North Loop. Charging a team of talented designers to sketch out a new Washington was the right first step, and their treatment, unveiled this week, is stunning. Their main point (borrowing from European boulevards) is that busy auto traffic can coexist with lively sidewalks if infill shops and a generous barrier of trees are added to give pedestrians an even chance.

Which is a start. 

Of course, there’s the little matter of coming up with businesses that’ll inhabit the stores along the gorgeous new thoroughfare – which would involve making Minneapolis less overtly-hostile to business, which would mean electing a government that is happy to say “no new taxes” for a better Minneapolis.  In other words, it means voters in the City of Lakes must have the foresight and wisdom to turn its ruling bloc of extremist DFLers and Greens out of office. 

The editorial notes what I did a few months back:

In some ways, the city government is its own worst enemy. As developer Jim Stanton pointed out, the city says it wants a pedestrian environment but insists that new buildings extend fully to the street, leaving no room for wide sidewalks or trees. Go figure.

That mentality must change if Washington Avenue is to be transformed. The McGuire Family Foundation has set high standards with its gift of nearby Gold Medal Park. If those standards — and an ethic of public/private support — can spread to Washington, it will become, over time, the beautiful, tree-lined boulevard that the city hopes for.

“That mentality” must change in many, many ways that I doubt the Strib editorial board is prepared for. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Minneapolis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.