{"id":83681,"date":"2022-10-31T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-31T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=83681"},"modified":"2022-10-31T07:21:52","modified_gmt":"2022-10-31T12:21:52","slug":"emptiness-is-a-form-of-resiience-i-guess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=83681","title":{"rendered":"Emptiness Is A Form Of Resilience, I Guess"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From 2006-2010, I worked at a job in downtown Saint Paul – on Wabasha, as luck would have it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A friend of the blog emails:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.”<\/p>\n\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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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?<\/p>\n\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I’m completely at a loss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberal-tyranny","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83681","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=83681"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83735,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83681\/revisions\/83735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}