Forgot to mention this yesterday: it was the 31st anniversary of one of the largest and most influential failures in modern urban planning.

Just kidding. I would be torn apart by harpies for heresy if I meant it; the Mall is given credit for saving downtown, or at least preventing a steep decline in the 60s and 70s. But it didn’t save retail. Downtown retail was beyond saving. The Mall kept Nicollet from looking as junky as Hennepin, perhaps; it gave downtown a certain futuristic oh-so-Euro appeal. But retail left anyway. The skyways saved downtown, not the Mall.

But it’s still around, and it looks good. The northeast end is a ghost town, alas – it never recovered from the demolition of the Gateway, and the buildings that went up in the urban renewal program didn’t last. Powers department store was razed, which seemed almost vindictive. Oh, so you can’t stay in business? Well, take this. Otherwise it’s holding up well.

Most of the imitators didn’t work. Even Fargo tried a pedestrian mall, an ill-starred three-block mistake that looked like a demonstration project by Soviet concrete company. All over the country,  towns reacted to the loss of downtown retail by squandering their advantages:   they razed whatever they could to accommodate cars for parking, and “modernized” their downtown buildings by smothering the lower floors of every building with blank sheets of stone.

Denver’s downtown is one of the exceptions; as I discovered last summer, it has a mall that makes ours look charmless and abandoned.  Pedestrian malls can work, I suppose, but the days of I-scale downtown versions are probably gone. We’re told now that two-way streets given pedestrians a sense of safety and vitality. All that congestion and contrary motion. Just like it was 50 years ago, in other words.

It’s difficult to untangle, and there weren’t any good answers. Skyways may have saved downtown, but they killed ground-floor retail – which was leaving anyway. And let’s not forget bad bunker architecture. They took away this . . .  Read more...

I am ready for Friday. We are all in a mood for Friday, I think. You know that cat in the office poster, clinging to a branch, fearful it will fall and crack its neck on the unyielding ground below, with the words HANG IN THERE ‘TIL FRIDAY written in flower-power-style font? We are all that kitten. Friday night is the day when the Dow can’t do any more damage – in fact, now we can pretend there’s an Imaginary Dow that only opens on weekends and goes up nine thousand points every time the bell rings. Friday night is when we can stay up late or go to sleep early, depending on your preference –

Say, there’s a morning thread. I prefer to stay up as late as possible every night, but Friday is the whee-ha-all-bets-are-off night; two AM is the new midnight for your host on a Friday night. Some like to sleep early as some sort of treat, which I’ve never understood; I’d rather take a late nap and spank the sun as it rises than climb into the tomb of an early bed. And you?

Back in a while – more column work to do, but we should have something up before everyone flees the internets at 3 PM and starts to begin the weekend.

First time I've ever heard Lance A) not solve the crime in six seconds, and) admit he was stumped. Note: this requires some rather arcane knowledge - current in 1947, but not so well-known among menfolk today.

It’s a cold, hard noon. When it’s 23 at the sun’s zenith, there’s not much hope for the rest of the day. Or the month. Twenties, teens, single-digits – it’s all the same. COLD. The only distinction we’ll make in the months to come is bitter cold and deadly cold. Which reminds me: Buzzy the Anthropomorphic Weather Triangle is back from vacation!

Enjoy this noontime mystery while your host polishes a piece for the paper-style Strib. Notable for many things, not least of which is Lance having a smoke while standing on a roof. He smoked constantly in the early strips. I know this sets a bad example, and kids exposed to this strip will want to stand on a roof with a dead body, smoking, so we offer a warning: don’t.

Solution around 1:43 PM, followed by another mystery at two. Good luck!

It's another proto-Lance day. Sorry, but the supply of these things is finite, you know. Some of the old old ones are tough, too. First off: WHAT'S YOUR STORY, DOBMAN? Try to work that into conversation today - it has the ring of an archaic catchphrase. 

Solution around 11, with another to follow around noon. And it's a corker. I'm serious: it contains cork, and is capable of corking. Steel yourself for corkage.

Our weekly report of the crime report’s crimes, re-reported here for your enjoyment.

This one will either make you mad or make you cheer. I don’t think there’s any in-between.

“Littering. A man was issued a citation for littering on the 9000 block of University Avenue NE. While driving, an officer saw him discard a cigarette filter out of the window of his vehicle.”

Butt-flickers rarely consider their act to be “littering,” but it is. It’s not as bad as throwing an entire fast-food-meal’s worth of trash out the window, as we saw in the famous commercial that showed a single tear coursing down the noble face of a Native American impersonator’s face, but it is. It’s like solid spitting.  

If you know what I mean. In other cigarette-related news:

"Fire. A woman woke to find her bed on fire.  She had fallen asleep with a lighted cigarette. The woman got out safely. There were no smoke detectors in the residence."

Even when I smoked I didn’t smoke in bed. You went to bed to sleep. If you wanted to read, you sat in a chair. If you wanted to read in bed, you didn’t smoke, because you’d been warned about that – as if there was something in cigarettes that turned you into a boneless dreamer halfway down the Winston. I’d guess there might be other contributing factors here that cause one to fall unconscious; no one ever thinks Man, I’d love to stub out this cigarette, but I’m too exhausted. I’ll just put it between my knuckles and point it at the ceiling and put my hand on my chest.  Smoking  between sheets while being more sheets to the wind is probably the cause for most of these cases, no?   Read more...

Man wants to bring Diner to Prior Lake. He wants to take an old disused classic American diner, fix it up, and serve thick sturdy American food. The good news? The city might actually let him do it. Really! The diner conflicts with the city’s vision for its future, but let’s let the mayor speak:

“Mayor Jack Haugen is intrigued nonetheless. 'I’m really excited about the prospect,’ he said. ‘If we can resolve the questions that need to be resolved, it could really be unique and exciting.'"

Nonetheless? What questions? What needs to be resolved? It’s a Diner. It’s a 1947 Diner.  It’s exactly the sort of endangered Americana cities put in their travel brochures and videos to get people to show up. What could possibly be the problem? Says the news article:

“A single-story diner doesn't exactly fit the specifications Prior Lake has created for its downtown. The city has in mind a Stillwater-like ambience in which offices and condos sit above ground-level stores.”

Oh. Right. And Lyaman McPherson, the man who wants to bring the Diner, knew this all along. From the story:

"’The fly in the ointment,’ he admitted, ‘is the verbiage for “downtown redevelopment” -- three-story buildings with brick facades. Hopefully they can finagle the wording to allow it. It's not something anyone would have envisioned. But I'm willing to allow for public opinion: If you don't want it, so be it.’  Read more...

Glad you enjoyed yesterday’s Parade of Small Towns; it will be a regular feature of buzz.mn 2.0, which will not be called buzz.mn 2.0. I’m pushing for a cutting-edge name like Cybertopia, an “Internet Diner” where you can find “links” to things like “multimedia” and “virtual shopping malls.” We may even spend $200K on an “online” community that has “webisodes” of an ongoing cast of characters, with grainy, stuttering video one-third the size of a DS screen. It’ll require a plug-in whose parent company got $45 million in start-up money and signed up exactly 124 people for the “pro” version. If you’d like to invest in this company, please invent a time machine, go back to 1997, give me the money and wait 11 years, because I would have put it all in Apple stock. Seriously, aren’t you glad I did? APPLE? you yelled. Why not just dump the cash into AMIGA peripherals? Because Mac people hate AMIGAs. If you have to ask, I don’t expect you to understand.

So, that’s your buzz.mn 2.0 update for the day.

Much more to relate, but we’re going to gently wean you off the morning updates. First step: nonsense like this.

Oh ALL RIGHT, here’s some history: on this day in 1945, “Super Value Groceries receives Minnesota's first shipment of air freighted vegetables. The cargo includes tomatoes, asparagus, figs, and avocados, and a special basket is given to Minneapolis mayor Hubert H. Humphrey and Governor Edward J. Thye.”   Read more...

I assume it has an infirmary. It does have  a slogan – “Small town living . . . . big time opportunity.” It has a page for the town theater, and you’ll note no address is given. Because everyone knows where it is.  And huzzah, it has a history page. Its name appears to have been bestowed arbitrarily by a railroad president, and that was certainly his right, since the town didn’t exist before the rails came through. They laid out the town, opened a lumber store, and just like in SimCity, people showed up:

“Sept. 20, 1870  J.R. McLean & E. Zelna arrived and commenced erection of their business houses (grocery & spirits)”

Food and hooch. The basics of life.  The libraries and schools can come later after bellies are full and the construction crews have had a beer to reward their labors. The town was built in six weeks, and it’s still there.

Meet their descendants: the City Council. Put your hand over the identification line, and pick out the mayor. I’m not saying the job is easy, but the calendar for the month’s pretty much wiiiide open.   Read more...

Now we swing up to the middle of the state.  I used to drive up to Aitkin now and then to visit a friend. Big enough to stand by itself, small enough to make you want to head down 210 to Brainerd for a taste of cosmopolitan pleasures.

Old-timey picture enthusiasts will sigh, dramatically when presented with the images, here: a  collection of old Aitkin photos.

It’s been a long time since I visited Aitkin - I had no idea the downtown was that large, once.  Much has changed, he said with the sonorous tone that makes banal observations sound like wisdom, but the Rialto theater is still around. It’s not just restored – they have 1930s-style letters to spell out the name of the current movie. Sweet.

The World Famous Fish house Parade is coming Nov. 28th, and it’s a perfect run-down of a small-town event: Pancake Breakfast Raffles, Santa, a Parade, a Fish Stew, and the “Downtown Lights of Love Tree Lighting. “See the North Star Roller Derby girls in the parade!”

(That would be these battlin’ skaters. And you thought roller derby died a long time ago.)