Mitch Pearlstein: Hennepin Avenue: One mean street

Ah, spring and soon summer in Minnesota. Fishing, swimming, hiking, playing ball -- and the most challenging exercise of all: running assorted gauntlets in and around Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis.

I don't know of any several-block stretch in any good-sized American city on which so many people feel as uneasy as they do on Hennepin Avenue, but which at the same time (here's the key) is home to institutions so demonstrably vital to a city's livability and well-being. In the case of Hennepin, the key venues are three (soon to be four) beautiful theaters.

I'm happy to stand corrected if I'm wrong. But I've spoken to any number of women as well as men over the years who say they feel a lot less comfortable on Hennepin than they do on other signature streets such as Fifth Avenue in New York, Michigan Avenue in Chicago and Connecticut Avenue in Washington.

How heavy-duty is this obsceneness? Not just rough manners but crude manners. Not just bad language but foul language. Not just panhandling but in-your-face panhandling. Not just hanging out at street corners and storefronts but obstructing them, purposely or not. Not just innocently flirting but treating women and girls atrociously. Here's just one example.

The Center of the American Experiment brought in a young woman for a series of job interviews a while back. Having time to kill on a Saturday morning, she spent about three hours at City Center (before it was denuded of most shops and restaurants), where she reported being solicited and otherwise "hit on" upwards of 15 times, more coarsely than ever before in her life (in the United States, anyway).

Would any of this be a little less frightening to white folks if so many of the young and not-so-young people causing trouble weren't minorities? I frankly acknowledge that the answer, in some instances and to some degree, is doubtless yes. But would most everyone offended and scared still be that way even if everyone doing the offending and scaring looked just like them? You betcha. (To be clear, this takes into account that people of color can be as petrified and as outraged as anyone on any avenue, regardless of a boor's complexion.)

None of this should be read as an indiscriminate blast at the mayor's office, the City Council, the Minneapolis Police Department or anyone else in government. I've met with senior officials and it's clear they understand the seriousness (and difficulty) of the matter and have been working on it hard and not without progress. For example, there's a stronger and very much welcomed police presence.

The same appreciation holds for the downtown business community, which is voluntarily taxing itself an additional $6.5 million to create a Downtown Improvement District, modeled after similar, privately led antinuisance and sprucing-up initiatives in New York and other cities. And there's a public-private Downtown Minneapolis Safe Zone Collaborative.

Yet, while this assessment is not an across-the-board blast, neither is it an awarding of medals, as this classically continues to be the kind of problem in which high-ranking attention, regardless of quarter, still hasn't matched the acute and legitimate concerns of rank-and-file citizens.

The kind of hesitation and timidity that invariably marks racially charged issues has been a reason for years of abridged responses. But especially with a new Twins ballpark opening a few blocks away next year, along with a new Shubert Theater at some point -- not to mention how this is precisely the coldest time to make it even harder for merchants and others to earn a living -- enough meandering. Hennepin Avenue needs straightening.

Mitch Pearlstein is founder and president of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.