‘Miscellany’ Archives
Wedding Announcement: Jonathan Miller weds Amy Wehrman
Longtime (gosh, it has been a long time, hasn”'t it) Alley editor and graphic designer Jonathan Miller celebrated his nuptials to Amy Wehrman on August 14. Amy and Jonathan celebrated their wedding with 160 of their friends and family at the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis. The old-exploded-flour-mill-reborn-as-wonderful-museum was chosen to celebrate the coming together of the self-professed nature girl Amy Wehrman and the urban landscape lover Jonathan Miller. So far, all reports of the evening declared it a complete and total success and that a fine time was had by all.
Losing our Assets: A Plea For Help!
By Robert Albee I started out trying to tell a story about Ancient Traders, the East Franklin Avenue strip mall across the street from my house, but wise counsel prevailed and pointed out too many holes, inaccuracies and inflammatory language in that draft so it is better to start afresh. So this story is more of an editorial than a narrative, as it awaits a true storyteller with more time and access to facts than I possess. This piece begins with a plea to our state elected officials””Senator Berglin and Representative Clark and our county and municipal officials, Peter McLaughlin, Robert Lilligren and Gary Schiff”” requesting that we begin a forensics investigation into the practice using one property to leverage another when public monies were originally used and were obtained to serve a given locality. In a shifting economy, this conduct has the makings to destabilize an area that was only recently stabilized, with investments of more than $130 million and crime [...]
An urban first home for roots, commitment, and creativity A Community Investment
by Lotus Lofgren In all, we looked at over one hundred properties. Every weekend we would create etch-a-sketch lines across town, peering in broken windows, walking through abandoned yards where the grass grew past my knees, and sheepishly apologizing to current renters as we disrupted their day, tiptoed around their child”'s play things and wondered where they would go once someone bought the place. The houses held stories, old stories that we would never know, and others more recent and potent; an orange home that had suffered years at the hands of absentee landlords, been foreclosed on and left its tenants homeless. They scrawled their anger on the lime green walls, words written with human feces and punctuated with urine, a two story white house with all of the upper unit windows blown out from a grease fire in the kitchen. I won”'t forget the charred women”'s shoes, still hanging on a rack attached to half a closet door. A yellow house where the previous [...]
