Anne McCandless wrote:
Jim,WM: There are a whole series of water rills that were tiled under on the Southside.
While I agree with much of what you say, I really have to take exception your comment, 'show me anything on the Southside that rivals Theodore Worth Park.'
There is a creek running under the parking lot at Sears. There was, according to people who lived near Chicago and 34th, another lake very close to their houses. (I learned it from people in their 50s.) I do know that in the past 10 years the Southside has had to take down a huge number of buildings in toto at 60th and Nicollet, 42nd and Park, 37th and Columbus, and 42nd and Bloomington. At 42nd and Park, the raw storm ponds, with their spindly new trees, the great old trees having been removed. This new cement pond is on both sides of Park. The one on 37th and Columbus isn't finished yet.
I think that had the invaders not been hell bent on using St. Anthony Falls to create Minneapolis they might have studied all the water in this section of the watershed. We're only a couple hundred miles from the official source of the mother of all rivers, it's hardly begun taking on water at this point. So every little low point digs a channel to wash away the loess from among the boulders. I would be willing to bet that three centuries ago Minneapolis, as we know it, was rills, stream, creeks, water meadows, swamps, fens, and etc. Do you know that big hill that runs between the Lake Harriet Band Shell and Lake Calhoun? That started out as a giant beaver dam that the beavers had been working on for quite some time. Apparently the city decided, early on, that undoing beaver engineering was not the way to go.
Because the city is already in place, anything we do to remediate the situation is going to be an engineered event. It's heart breaking for those of us who grew up in cities where there were creeks just down the street a bit, or across the big streets, or back in the woods. I caught an 18 in. diameter snapping turtle once, in a water meadow of Muddy Creek. Good eatin for lots of folks. On the other hand, god only knows what was in Muddy Creek along with the water. Ain't nostalgia fun?
I feel really bad for all of us that Heritage Park is resting on something that was forgotten, even though a record exists in storage somewhere. A lot of pain and agony went into what became the reason for Heritage Park to be a solution. It's a crying shame that even a part of it appears to be screwed up.
WizardMarks, Central
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