The southside easily wins. So what happened to the Northside and Northeast's lake's? And why doesn't the Northside have picturesque ponds like the south side has in Loring and Powderhorn Park? And a winding and beautiful creek like Minnehaha? Why is their an Oak Lake Avenue on the Northside, but Oak Lake is gone? Why does 33rd Avenue North run down a valley from a low area just west of Lyndale to the river?
It would have been just as convenient for 19th century trash haulers to dump their loads in Loring pond rather than Oak Lake or the Bassett Creek bogs. The railroads could have just as easily built their shops and yards on the southside as the Northside.
Take a look at the swank homes that line Lowry Hill and Kenwood around Loring Pond. Note the names of the WASP aristiocracy that settled their- Lowry, Pillsbury, Washburn, etc.. Please compare that aristocracy with the working class Jews, Blacks, and others who settled the near Northside. Is it any wonder that Bassett Creek's bogs, Oak Lake, and who knows how many others were filled with garbage and pollution? Is it no surprise that unlike the south side's treasured Minnehaha Creek the last mile of Bassett's Creek was confined to a sewer pipe so factories and warehouses could be built above it? And is it no surprise that while the south side's railroad was confined to a trench and near invisible, the Northside was splattered with giant yards and shops complexes?
Then came the first round of urban renewal, the "projects". The south side was never even considered as a site for the projects. North of Shingle Creek on firm ground in Camden was the original site for the "projects", but the bigots up there would have none of it. So the projects were dumped into the now confined Bassett Creek bogs. So the projects were begun during the depression as a jobs project.
The depression was a time of many huge job projects like the CCC, WPA, etc.. Many of these were conservation projects, and the "projects" should have been a cleanup of Bassett Creek rather than hiding it under a housing complex. Here was an opportunity to restore and conserve Bassett Creek before the onslaught of leaked fuel oil, PCBs, and pesticides that came after World War II.
Despite idealistic intentions, the projects gradually became a ghetto. Then in the 1990s the city lost a huge discrimination suit and had to find more scattered housing for the minority community stuck in the projects. The city retaliated by demolishing the projects long before replacement housing was available. By this time the booming housing market made this a valuable property and our city tried to make lemonade from it's lemons by subsidizing the latest attempt to hide Bassett Creek's bogs, Heritage Park.
That lemonade is becoming way too sour. I heard promises that 25% of the units in Heritage Park would be set aside for low income folks. Now their talking 10%, and for seniors only. Must be figuring that the seniors will leave sooner and their units converted to market rate thereafter. The lemonade that is Heritage Park is proving to be a pricey and subsidy rich brew- besides the above board subsidies to the developers, how many millions in "site preparation" has Public Works provided? We sidewalk superintendents have noted Public Works crews busy making the Bassett Creek bogs safe for Heritage Park's developers practically every workday for a couple years now- anybody priced what a front end loader and operator costs per hour lately (think hundreds of dollars)?
Despite all this subsidy Heritage Park has been a hard sell. And then the oil started oozing up from the bog...
maintaining the high ground in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.)
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