‘Cover Stories’ Archives
Work on Rethinking I-94 Project Continues
By CIRIEN SAADEH An image created by Minnesota Department of Transportation showing the area under consideration for the Rethinking I-94 Project. SOURCE: MNDOT MNDOT released alternatives to Interstate 94, as part of the Rethinking I-94 Project, in a meeting held July 16th. Attending that meeting was the MNDOT Policy Advisory Committee and Twin Cities residents including elected officials. The high-level alternative plans presented several options including keeping the freeway as it currently is, an expanded I-94, and other combinations of roadway and transit changes. According to reporting from the Minnesota Daily, the plans were met with some pushback from participants, including a response from Saint Paul Council Member Mitra Jalali (Ward 4). “If the goals and the project’s master vision is to have equity, climate and resiliency, freeway expansion is actually categorically in opposition to those things, and I’m trying to understand how it even got into the [...]
Cedar-Riverside: A Photo Essay
A continuation of ‘Cedar-Riverside: A Sketch of Displacement and Resistance’ from August '23 By JESSIE MERRIAM This collage shows just some of the places and people of the neighborhood: can you spot…. the high rise development schemes of the early 1970s and their sabotagers (from the worker-run New Riverside Cafe), a man in a Palmer’s booth 1936, Bohemian Flats woman cutting driftwood in the early 1900s, a crowd at a community sing at Riverside Park in the ‘20s, Bedlam Theatre’s “West Bank Story” collab with East African teens, the beloved futon store and Cafe Extemp, Edna (of Edna’s cafe, pre-Wienery), Anne Charlotte-Harvey the Swedish singer of Snoose Fest 1972-1977, cross-dressers in the 1930s, May Day Books sign to the basement (go see them!), Kwan of Keefer Court holding pastries in the ‘90s, the Skol liquor and beef sign on the old St. James AME church (first Black Minnesota church) after they moved out for the approach of the highway…Images [...]
Cedar-Riverside: A Sketch of Displacement and Resistance
By JESSIE MERRIAM, Public History student working on a mobile museum for Our Streets Minneapolis. Originally published in local punk-adjacent newsletter zine, Restless Legs Inquirer. Re-printed with permission. Cartoon of the forces shaping Cedar Riverside, for community listening sessions in May 2022. By Jessie Merriam. The wavy-crusted pie slice that is now called Cedar Riverside was once a continuous neighborhood with Seward and Phillips. Also known over the years as Riverside, Seven Corners, Bohemian Flats, Snoose Boulevard (Snus = Swedish snuff), “The Haight Ashbury of the Midwest,” and “Little Mogadishu,” Cedar Riverside has always been a place of intersections. “There were no neighborhoods before Urban Renewal–we lived in South Minneapolis! They needed clever labels. Our speech had nothing to do with neighborhoods,” reported a Seward neighborhood elder historian over coffee this January. “Block groups! That’s the basic foundation–come on now! [...]
