Yesterday B and I drove around our new neighborhood for awhile, to see what's available and how to get from various point As to various point Bs. This neighborhood, Elliott Park, is a pennisula surrounded on the south and east by interstates, on the north by industrial areas and the Metrodome, and on the west by downtown. Before the interstate was carved in a massive ditch through the city, our neighborhood was part of the neighborhood south of the interstate, a neighborhood of stately Victorian or Italianate houses with gorgeous detail. Now it's just a few blocks of "leftover." Moreover, as the housing stock declined after the highway was built, large-scale projects were seen as the solution, so there is an elderly housing complex across the street that takes up the whole block and some others further northeast of it. I find these disruptions of the street grid, the pre-existing rhythm of yard/building, and the entire scale of the large projects to be disconcerting, even annoying.
Still, it's interesting that the City of Minneapolis wants greater density and more population. I've never lived anywhere where that's been the case - elsewhere, people whine about development and how it's ruining their quality of life.
Other factoids about the 'hood': there is a coffee shop nearby. There is an Indian restaurant "coming soon." There is a Christian college around the corner, whose students are not allowed to dance, drink, smoke, gamble, OR WATCH R-RATED MOVIES. Also, they are not allowed to steal or lie etc. and unbelievably all these things are IN THE SAME LIST. Yeah, social dancing is bad, very bad. Moses must've dropped the tablet with THAT part of the list on his way down the mountain.
The Metrodome has a sort of ring-road around it, a one-way loop that shoots cars off to various on-ramps for the various highways. It will be interesting to see how well that works; it appears to be a miracle of rationalistic transportation engineering. The Dome, like the big housing projects, destroyed the existing grid-based fabric of the city, looking rather like a space ship that settled on a random four-block section of real estate.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll be writing much more about the new neighborhood in a few weeks. I love that hyper-vision you get in a new place, when you really SEE. Then you get used to it and you don't really see anything, unless something changes and you notice the contrast.
Happy Easter, everyone!
Posted by otto0114 at April 11, 2004 09:36 AM