Downtown : Buzz

The Hyatt Regency in downtown Minneapolis has been re-imagined as a “hotel for locavores,” according to a recent New York Times story.

Part of the hotel’s recent $25 million renovation used area manufacturers, artisans, and artists. Its new décor “pays tribute to the city’s heritage and industry,” it states.

While the hotel is internationally known, architect Mike Suomi of Stonehill & Taylor says in the story, “We also wanted to craft a narrative that is specific to the location.”

Design touches reference timber and woolen mills while an oversized map of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers is tied together with Post-Its, which the city is also known for.

Bon Appetit magazine recently pulled together a list of the top five soda fountains around the country.

“A band of bartender converts are stepping up to the seltzer tap, returning us to the era of phosphates and egg creams,” the story states. Eat Street Social in Minneapolis made the list.  

“Sodas go toe-to-toe with craft cocktails at this lively bar,” it reads, adding that the Raspberry Rickey is a must-order.

In a recent story, Slate.com profiled a Texas library that occupies a building that had once been a Wal-Mart.

The Minneapolis-based architecture firm Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, Ltd., “breathed fresh life into the warehouse, about as big as two-and-a-half football fields, late last year, when they repurposed it as the country’s largest single-story public library,” it reads.  

Interesting signage, reading nooks, and special spaces, such as a quiet room, several computer labs, and a bookstore and café, have redefined the place.

So much so that the McAllen Public Library won The International Interior Design Association’s 2012 Library Interior Design Awards, the story states.

The Walker Art Center magazine features a story about the “Art of Placemaking,” as it pertains to Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis.

“Despite its status as a major, historic thoroughfare in Minneapolis--or maybe because of it--Hennepin Avenue has for decades been regarded as a problematic, contested public space,” it reads.

A project called Plan-It Hennepin aims to change that, by turning it into a “lively, compelling cultural corridor,” the story says.

The story touches on the Walker’s perspective on the process, in which it’s a participant:  It quotes the Walker’s Olga Viso, who says, “Along with our partners in Plan-It Hennepin, we thought that the Walker could help lead a different conversation in terms of creativity and envisioning possibilities, by bringing artists’ voices into the process.”

This story dovetails with The Line's feature this week on Candy Chang.

Minnpost has a brief piece about photographer Bruce Hemmelgarn’s 23-hour time-lapse of Target Field.

The result, which is posted on its website and Hemmelgarn’s blog, brings together day and night games from April 11 and 12.

It uses thousands of images to show the transition from one game to the next. At one point in the evening, the moon is visible in the scene, Hemmelgarn notes on his blog.

The time-lapse has been posted in many places, including the CBS Sports Daily Blog and the Major League Baseball website.

Recently, Brad Conley, a student at the Minneapolis Community and Technical College, was recognized as a member of the All-USA Community College Academic Team and a New Century Scholar, representing the state.  
 
He’s one of 20 students selected from a pool of 1,700 nominations that came from around the country to be part of the team, according to school information.
 
On April 23, Conley was recognized for the achievement at a convention in Orlando, Florida, and he got a shout-out in USA Today.
 
The honors come with $4,500 in scholarship money.
 
“The New Century Scholars program and the All-USA Community College Academic Team honor outstanding community college students for their grades, leadership, extracurricular involvement, and volunteerism,” MCTC materials read.

Source: MCTC
 

 

A recent USA Today story highlights the makeover of the Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Minneapolis.

As a part of a $25 million project that started in December 2011, the hotel charged its designers with creating a “sleek, new look with an eye towards all things “local”--including Red Wing Pottery,” the story states.

Michael Suomi, design chief for Stonehill & Taylor, which came up with the architectural and design plans, is quoted saying "We had a specific goal of bringing as much of the manufacturing and sourcing back to America to promote job growth, increase speed to market and celebrate American craft"--adding that this way, “we saved money!"

Four local eateries landed on a list of restaurants that provide the best service in the United States.
 
Compiled by restaurant reservation service OpenTable, the list is based on reviews submitted by users of the website.
 
The quartet that rose above the others locally: Acqua Restaurant and Wine Bar in White Bear Lake, Capital Grille and La Belle Vie in Minneapolis, and Joan's in the Park in St. Paul.
 
"A huge part of what makes many of these restaurants great are the people themselves, working tirelessly to delight their patrons," OpenTable noted about the list.

At the recent Innovations in Criminal Justice Summit in Chicago, Minneapolis’s Downtown 100 program was honored as one of the top 10 national criminal justice initiatives, according to MyFox9.com.

The collaboration between local government, businesses, nonprofits, and community members has a goal to “both reduce crime in the short term and develop solutions for maintaining law-abiding conduct in the long run,” the story states.  

Downtown 100, which started in April 2010, helped reduce crime from top offenders by 74 percent, according to MyFox9.com.

It also led to more offenders being placed on supervised probation and obtaining housing, the story states.  

Johnny Michaels, who works as a bartender at La Belle Vie restaurant in Minneapolis, was recently featured in Esquire magazine.

"Mixology is sort of like cooking with liquor," says Michaels in the interview, joking,  "With my looks and personality, I should've been a cook."  

He describes his good fortune to have wound up at La Belle Vie, which he imagines is "like getting drafted by the New England Patriots."

Although he claims he's not a popular "silver-tongued" charmer, he admits that he's in a good position to see people's moods brighten.

"What's good to hear is when people tell you, 'That's the best drink I've ever had in my life.' That's my crack. That's my home run," he says in the piece.   

The New York Times gave some ink to two recent digital conferences in Minneapolis that were on opposite sides politically.

"It is no secret that much of the blogosphere is sharply, often loudly, divided by politics," the story starts out by saying.

Netroots Nation is liberal, while Right Online has a conservative bent, the Times reports.

The groups scheduled their gatherings simultaneously in the city, mere blocks away from each other, the story notes.

Looking at some of the cultural and ideological differences between the two groups, the story shows how the vibrant politicking in Minneapolis is demonstrative of the national political climate.

In a recent New York Times FiveThirtyEight blog post, writer Nate Silver ranks downtown Minneapolis' Target Field as the fourth-best major league ballpark, overall.

Pittsburgh's PNC Park, Boston's Fenway Park and San Francisco's AT&T Park top the list of 30 ballparks, while Toronto's Rogers Centre comes in at the bottom, according to his calculations.  

Silver gleaned these findings through a simple Yelp.com search, he writes.

Each of the 30 major league stadiums had received between one and five stars, according to Yelp's rating system, which is a more holistic way to look at it than from a single reviewer's perspective or the technical-type fan review sites, he explains.

The popular review site is helpful because it uses dozens, if not hundreds of fan reviews to score the stadiums, he states. This way, readers get a greater sense of the user experience at each ballpark.  

The Minnesota Cup has added $35,000 to its 2011 pool of prize money, reports Wendy Lee in a May 9 StarTribune article. That's 42 percent higher than last year's total prize money, she writes.

The increase is the result of the competition adding sponsors, a Cup spokesperson tells Lee. Carlson Companies was already a new sponsor at the time of the competition's launch last month, and General Mills is the most recent addition as a new General Division Lead Sponsor, according to a press release from General Mills.