Demolition is pretty hard to undo, all right. Creative re-use strategies will help. The Ramar building (formerly Hennepin County) is being converted to residential use. Didn't the Centennial office building (also Hennepin County) usta be a vo-tech high school? Whittier Coop is a large converted school building first built for the waves of immigrants in the first part of the twentieth century. There's a charter school on Blaisdell in what usta be a community mental health clinic. African American Family Services now anchors what usta be Franklin National Bank. Blind, Inc. now lives in a restored Pillsbury Mansion facing Fair Oaks Park. A tremendous rebirthing awaits the Sears complex. Sabathani is another large-scale example of creative re-use of what usta be a school building. "Usta" should be in the dictionary - it gets a lot of use.
Conversely in the early 1970s Nicollet Island residents monitored a systematic examination of the historic value/restoration/re-use feasibility for built structures in the Nicollet Island-East Bank Urban Renewal Area while taking note of the St. Anthony Falls Historic District scenario and in due course released interest in 50-odd obsolete buildings that were then demolished. The old sash and door company that had been a residence for Salvation Army clients was retained and reborn as the Nicollet Island Inn. Other major conversions of usable commercial structures contributed (sometimes expensively, admittedly) to the rebirthing of Main St. There's plenty of precedent for setting aside the easy cure for obsolete functionality - demolition. There may well be another major surge in school-age population over the next decade or two when the suburbs can't absorb that predicted increase in metro population of one million souls. Their municipal infrastructures are a bit lightweight for a doubling of population, population density increases are politically unpalatable, and the core city remains a terrific centralized destination. So perhaps the thing to do is to look at service functions that can be shoehorned into school buildings in interim and even long-term, the idea being to have enough rent revenue coming in to keep the buildings up and running providing functions of readily recognized value to the adjacent community. Duplication of services is an approachable issue - many NRP neighborhood organization storefronts are now in a bad way fiscally. Maybe some consolidations are in order that can be housed in municipal structures - not my place to get specific, just a variation on the theme of economy of scale. Fred Markus, West Phillips REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
