Feb. 24, 2009: Would you want to live tangled in the Crosstown?

Mary VanSlooten's home on 1st Avenue South in Minneapolis hasn't gone anywhere. It's her neighborhood that disappeared, under mountains of dirt, concrete barriers, chain-link fences and an immense concrete overpass that curves above her house.

The state's reconstruction of Crosstown/35W, the metro's most notorious highway bottleneck, claimed about 20 homes in Richfield and Minneapolis. VanSlooten's house was left behind, reachable only by sidewalk, because 1st Avenue now ends one house away.

As the construction laid siege to her property over the past year, VanSlooten complained repeatedly to the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Her concerns were met by promises to fix the problems. But with her walls cracked, her neighbors gone, the tranquility of three decades shattered, VanSlooten, 65, decided she couldn't live there anymore.

Finally, on Monday, MnDOT said it now wants to buy VanSlooten's house, acknowledging that its right-of-way acquisitions may have stopped one house too short.

"Who wants to live under a freeway?" VanSlooten said. "It's been pure hell."

When she bought her home 28 years ago, VanSlooten lived close to the end of a leafy cul de sac. A line of trees and homes provided a buffer to the noise and traffic of Interstate 35W and the Crosstown. She raised three sons and managed to pay off her mortgage while working as a house cleaner.

She first got wind of the coming change in 2007 at an information session on the reconstruction project. She asked about her house and was told it wasn't on the right-of-way map. In the summer of that year, the big oaks came down, and the houses as well -- four across the street and one next door. A vista of craters and peaks, construction vehicles and workers in hard-hats took their place.

At one point, a worker knocked on her door and announced an intention to acquire 10 feet of her yard. She refused. The worker came back. We don't need it anymore, she was told.

VanSlooten, an avid gardener, planted 70 hostas to stop the advance of crabgrass from the construction wasteland. It failed.

Last year, the pile-driving started. VanSlooten's cabinets flapped open and closed. Pictures fell over. The siding loosened. Hairline cracks crawled over her sidewalks and up the walls.

The street in front of her house was taken for the work zone. VanSlooten got a sidewalk, and instructions to park down the street.

The concrete overpass was the final insult. It advanced across the landscape until it towered over her yard. "Every day, I wonder, where's that thing going to go?" she said. Now she imagines breathing in the exhaust from cars, dodging rubbish pitched from car windows, trying to grow flowers in the artificial shade.

On Feb. 5, VanSlooten wrote a letter in longhand to MnDOT. "This is no way for someone to have to live," she wrote. "I can't even begin to write the toll it's taken on my life."

MnDOT sent out a worker to take pictures. Those images made an impression. The agency has scheduled an internal meeting Wednesday. But Deb Anderson, the metro district right-of-way engineer, already sounds convinced. VanSlooten's property may even be in the "drip line" when plows push snow off the highway.

"We want to meet with this woman and figure out a way to purchase this property," Anderson said. "This is something that we didn't anticipate. ... On paper, everything fit. We were 10 feet away. After construction, things look a lot different."

Still, with 10 years in the right-of-way office, Anderson couldn't think of another situation in which the agency had to acquire an additional home after construction was underway. "This is an unusual situation," she said.

VanSlooten is worried that the construction has rendered her home, whose tax value is $196,500, almost worthless. Anderson said the state typically pays fair market value for homes acquired through eminent domain. "We definitely want to work with this woman and make her whole."

Upon hearing MnDOT's position, VanSlooten was cautiously optimistic Monday that the state would buy the home where she had planned to live out her days: "I hope they go through with it," she said.

James Eli Shiffer • 612-673-4271