Riverfront/Mill District : Featured Stories

Get ready for some changes in our already-stellar park system that will expand your ideas about recreation, ecology, and economic development.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my discoveries and enthusiasms as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: a lunchtime celebration of local Japanese food.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my discoveries and enthusiasms as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: Watch the local entries in the 48-Hour Film Project--and quaff a microbrew or two.

Capturing hundreds of sequential Street View images from Google Maps using ScreenHunter software, then stitching them together  and time-lapsing them in Windows Movie Maker, the peripatetic highway videographer who goes by the YouTube handle eluko79 has created a real-but-virtual photographic journey into the heart of the city.

Most of us in the Twin Cities are aware that we've become a great town for bicycling in recent years, but urbanist and author Jay Walljasper--an avid biker for decades--has been digging into the trend to find out the what and the why behind it. In this adaptation of an article he wrote for Bikes Belong, he fills in the story and gives us some impressive facts about the sheer scale and promise of our new two-wheel era.

To accompany Jay Walljasper's take on bike policy and bike culture in the Twin Cities, here's a video by Streetfilms that shows just how valuable one of the crown jewels in our bikeway system is--the Midtown Greenway, running more or less parallel to Lake Street from Chowen Avenue to the Mississippi River.

CrashPlan, the backup software from Minneapolis-based Code 42, is a major local tech success. Matthew Dornquast, cofounder of the company, has learned some serious lessons about how to do tech startups--like spending a little more time on details and letting your passion show.

For urban designer Peter Musty, who's collaborating on plans for the Loring neighborhood in Minneapolis and the Ford site in St, Paul, walkable, transit-focused neighborhoods are non-negotiable. We need them for our health and prosperity--and to help our culture calm down.

Hobbled by a broken ankle but determined to see as much glow-in-the-dark art as he could, our reporter plunged into the dusk-to-dawn art extravaganza called Northern Spark on the night of June 4. He saw luminescent plankton, 1,600 light-bulb pixels, and a wall of perfectly legal virtual graffiti.

Most medical spaces and procedures aren't designed with the patient in mind. But that's beginning to change as health-care designers pay more attention to making the patient's experience pleasant and even fun. Here are four local examples of "human-centric" med-design.

Going to the theater can be soul-satisfying and exciting, but it also prompts questions. How did they get that lighting effect? Why did they decide to put the lead actress in such a strange costume? Why did they choose this play? This Saturday, fans of Minneapolis' internationally renowned Guthrie Theater get a chance to ask anything they want about a major current production, George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man, and get answers from senior Guthrie staff and starring actors.

Our Resident Tourist takes a tour of a boxcar-shaped building on the Minneapolis riverfront where, even in winter, scientists use inflowing water from the Mississippi to model all kinds of interactions between land and water. Scientific esoterica? Not really. The scientists at the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory want to help Louisiana rebuild its delta. They want to understand the algae blooms that create fish-killing "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico. And with new federal support, they're turning their expertise toward the study of wind power, biofuels, and "hydrokinetics"--nothing less than the discovery of "new ways to power our civilization."