Nick Coleman: Riding toward the future on University Avenue

To see the future of the Twin Cities -- and the past -- go to University Avenue.

For some of us, it's personal: There's a Vietnamese restaurant at University and Lexington, where there used to be a funeral home, the place where we waked my father in 1981. And, a mile and a half to the east, where my mother rolled dice against cigarette-buying customers in her parents' grocery store at University and Farrington, the building now is full of nonprofit groups wanting close access to the Capitol.

(If Bridgie beat them at the dice, they paid double for smokes. If they beat her, the smokes were free. She didn't lose. And she is still glad to take your money. My advice: Don't play dice with my mother).

But even if you didn't grow up around here, you can time-travel on University, looking backward and forward.

Streetcars ran on tracks on University Avenue until the 1950s. In six years, they will again.

On Wednesday, a Metropolitan Council committee unanimously approved the plan for what it calls the "Central Corridor" light rail (proving what gifted poets bureaucrats are), a $900 million project that will join the downtowns by 2014.

Finally.

Instead, we got a tryout train from downtown Minneapolis to the megamall and the airport, so that visitors can be whisked to their hotels and get off at City Hall, where they will be welcomed to Minneapolis by a bail bond agency billboard --just in case they plan on getting arrested while they're here.

The Hiawatha Line is a hit. But the Central Corridor will be a big-city line, the kind we need most, the kind that will begin laying the bones for a real transit system that will carry the Twin Cities to the future.

It's fitting that the Real Rail should go down University Avenue, which runs through St. Paul the long way, east to west, from Interstate 35E near the Capitol to the Minneapolis line, and the University of Minnesota campus. It also is fitting that its approval came two days after the Legislature broke the transportation impasse, overriding the millionth veto from Dr. No (Gov. Tim Pawlenty).

(Dr. No and his radical anti-transportation allies are still going batty, kneecapping rogue Republican lawmakers who -- zut alors! -- voted their consciences and threatening revenge against those big-spending libs from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce who supported the override. The word "meltdown" comes to mind).

But even if Carol Molnau gets the heave-ho from her job as Commissioner of Transportation today, I believe we can stay calm.

When a train is coming, you can get out of the way. Or not.

University Avenue has always been a boundary of sorts. Until I was in high school, it was a color line that marked a shameful divider in what was a segregated city. If a black kid wandered north of University in those days, he was likely to run into a white cop who would steer him back "home," toward Rondo, the African-American neighborhood south of University. And none too kindly.

The color line is gone, along with the big-name car dealerships, the Monkey Wards store, the Notorious Faust (the porn palace that blighted the University and Dale intersection through the 1980s, and the heavy highway traffic that shifted a few blocks away onto Interstate 94, which tore the heart out of Rondo.

But University Avenue still runs through the cities, and beats with the pulse of them. On the east end, from Lexington to the Capitol, Asian markets, restaurants and small businesses thrive. On the west end, toward Minneapolis, lofts and business spaces are being built and sold with the promise that, six years from now, the light rail line will be in place.

Maybe they'll even find a better name than the Central Corridor: the Capitol Comet or Twin Cities Rocket or the Gopher Express. Whatever.

University Avenue is still setting boundaries. This one is the boundary between yesterday and tomorrow.