I’ve lived in the Midway – the part of Saint Paul halfway between the two downtowns – for 24 years, now.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a nice area; leave our short-sighted spendthrift government out of it, and it’s really just about the nicest part of the Twin Cities; there’s nothing wrong with the Midway that a Republican administration couldn’t fix in a few years.<\/p>\n
But the City, the state, and the Met Council have been doing their best to fix that.<\/p>\n
The Central Corridor, as we discussed last week, will tear up University Avenue for the next 3-4 years, and that’s if <\/em>it’s the rare government project that comes in on time; only the most entrenched pollyanna believes it’ll come in anywhere near the current, already-bloated $1.4 billion price tag.<\/p>\n And that’s just up-front costs.<\/p>\n Businesses are already floundering; before an inch of track is laid in the Midway, businesses on the west side of the neighborhood are reporting freefalling customer visits, as the parking and the street barriers strangle access to their stores.<\/p>\n Several businesses have already closed – perhaps not entirely attributable to the rail construction, yet, but at the very least businesses whose fates were sealed by the oncoming traffic, parking and pedestrian nightmares and decided to cut their losses short.<\/p>\n Others – like the venerable Porky’s, the ancient burger joint at Uni by Prior – have decided to sell out.\u00a0 It’s gotta be hard to think about running a drive-in when nobody can drive in.<\/p>\n The big Borders store on Hamline closed because of Border’s ongoing financial meltdown – but given a choice between a store in a thriving area\u00a0 like Rosedale and one that’s going to be operating with a tiny, clunky little entrance from a side street due to construction, what do <\/em>you think the company is going to do?<\/p>\n And the latest rumor – that the Midway Rainbow, the neighborhood’s main grocery store – is going to shut down, ostensibly for the duration of the construction.<\/p>\n It won’t leave the neighborhood without a big-box grocery store, of course; Midway Center has a SuperTarget, a not-s0-super WalMart, and a Cub between Snelling and Hamline, in addition to Rainbow.<\/p>\n But it’s telling that the market is responding to the external force – the imminent destruction of practical transportation into the area – by closing out one of four stores that have co-existed and thrived in that area for decades (the WalMart is the newest addition, replacing a K-Mart; between the two, they’ve been there for maybe ten years); we don’t yet know how Target and Cub will react to the construction, either.<\/p>\n We’ve been warning everyone for years that this rail line project is going to be a disaster for central Saint Paul.\u00a0 It’s happening now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve lived in the Midway – the part of Saint Paul halfway between the two downtowns – for 24 years, now.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a nice area; leave our short-sighted spendthrift government out of it, and it’s really just about the nicest part of the Twin Cities; there’s nothing wrong with the Midway that a Republican administration […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19113"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19115,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19113\/revisions\/19115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}