Great Moments in “Oops, I Missed My Turn”

Sometimes buildings get in the way.
No helmet, no reflective clothing. smh. https://t.co/1kC6Z4GLoM

— § (@section_sign) November 1, 2015


A driver crashed a vehicle into the dry cleaner at 2500 Hennepin early Sunday morning. It’s happened before, in far more spectacular fashion, just one block north. In 2005, the driver of a van nearly demolished the building at 2400 Hennepin (which still houses Sudz Salon, as well as newer occupant Spyhouse Coffee). 

News coverage of the 2005 crash reprinted below—as always, without permission.

Wedge newspaper, April 2005

Photos below from Garrick Van Buren.

Full story from the March 14, 2005 Star Tribune:

A van crashed into a hair salon at 24th St. and Hennepin Av. S. in Minneapolis on Sunday morning, leaving a gaping hole in the storefront and causing the second floor to partly collapse. 

Emergency crews responded to the Sudz Salon at 2400 Hennepin about 8 a.m. and extracted the van’s driver from the wreckage. A medical condition likely caused the man to veer off Hennepin, hit a traffic light and then smash into the salon lobby, said Paul Nemes, a captain with the Minneapolis Fire Department. 

The driver was taken to Hennepin County Medical Center with non- life-threatening injuries. No one was in the salon or neighboring businesses when the accident occurred. An upstairs apartment was severely damaged, but salon employees said no one lived there. 

“Oh my god,” said salon manager Krysta Schrader. “I’m just worried about my employees’ livelihood. It’s devastating.” 

Although much of the salon’s rear half remained untouched, Nemes said that most of the building is a total loss because its structural integrity was compromised; it will be demolished. 

Schrader said the salon will try to lease a temporary space as soon as possible.

2400 Hennepin was stitched back together.

Draft of LHE Historic District Study

We have obtained a draft of the Lowry Hill East Residential Historic District designation study. Is your house “contributing” or “non-contributing”? It’s time to start judging your neighbors.

Here’s a neat detail. There are a cluster of houses on Bryant Ave (2415, 2417, 2420, 2424, 2425) possibly built as duplexes, which are now single-family homes. LHENA tried to downzone a few of those addresses from R2 (two-family) to R1 (single-family) in the great rezoning battle of 2004. This must have been upsetting to our neighborhood’s “Healy originalists” who prefer to interpret zoning as the Master Builder intended.

1899: Healy builds duplex. Anon pamphleteer says: “Greedy developer. No respect for our n’hood of single fam homes.” pic.twitter.com/UNn8hh9Mgk

— Wedge LIVE! (@WedgeLIVE) May 9, 2015

I can clarify some uncertainty regarding features of the very interesting house at 2404 Colfax:

It is not clear if the fence dates to the period of significance. Also, the decorative spindle work and bargeboard are very unusual to see in a Colonial Revival house. While there are no specific building permit references to this element of the design, it is not clear if this dates to the period of significance.

As first reported by the Wedge newspaper, Bob and Jeanie McAloon built that fence (and other stuff) in nineteen hundred and ninety-three.

The Historic Wedge Newspaper

Two of the early hand-drawn front pages.

Last fall, the @WedgeLIVE news team spent an insane number of hours in the remarkably luxurious and well-equipped Special Collections room of the Minneapolis Central Library, doing what no one else thought possible or necessary: scanning nearly 40 years of the Wedge neighborhood newspaper going back to 1970.

Now that I’ve mined it for all the blog material it was worth (and used up all the old unredeemed coupons for Tuthill’s General Store), we’re releasing it to the neighborhood. Check out the archive. It’s more historic than a Healy house.

Print it out. Denny may still be legally bound to honor this coupon.

Many talented and dedicated people put a lot of work into this paper over the last 45 years. It’s an amazing resource. But if you’re too lazy to lift a finger to browse the full archive (I’m looking at you, renters), I’ve condensed decades of accumulated neighborhood knowledge to a manageable number of bullet points.

Alright “Ken”–you say your last name ends in a chant of “USA”? We’re not buying it.

  • “The Wedgies” was a cartoon featuring a Wedge-shaped married couple (unfortunately, not a continuing series).
Next panel: “That’s not a hotel, it’s a former boarding house you converted to single-family. You owe me $200 for historic repairs.”

  • This old political ad fills me with transient pride. Who needs a wife and kids when you can tout your amazing “roommate”? This goes both for euphemistic and platonic roommates. 

Recycle this into a historic Christmas card.

The Wedge newspaper archive is brought to you by Homemade Soups™.

Orthghazi: A 2320 Colfax Timeline

2320 Colfax on February 13th, 2015.

You may have heard of the house controversy that’s rocking Lowry Hill East. But unless you’re a house superfan, you probably have no idea what it’s about. With the demolition of 2320 Colfax nearly upon us, here’s a handy timeline to get you up to speed on Orthghazi.

1893: T.P. Healy builds 2320 Colfax, also known as Orth House. Anders Christensen, in arguing for the house’s historical significance, notes that 1893 is the same year as a financial crisis and the Chicago World’s Fair (to find other things that happened in 1893, such as Nabisco’s cream of wheat, visit HistoryOrb.com).

1895: First house fire. Repairs performed by T.P. Healy.

Post-WWII: 2320 Colfax is converted from single-family into a boarding house, a condition which will annoy neighborhood homeowners for over half a century (until 2014, when “Save the low-income boarders” becomes a disingenuous rallying cry).

Nov. 1981: Trilby Busch and Anders Christensen “go on record” in Twin Cities Magazine “contending that 2320 Colfax is an important part of Healy’s architectural legacy.”

Healy descendants pose in historically accurate late-70s costumes.

1991: A second fire inflicts significant damage on 2320 Colfax. T.P. Healy, demolished by heart failure in 1906, was unavailable for repairs; he would have been a historical 147 years old.

2007: The owner of 2320 Colfax, Mike Crow, puts his house on the market.

2008: Future Minneapolis City Planner John Smoley earns an advanced college degree, a credential he will later wield to destroy history.

2011: Third house fire at 2320 Colfax.

Aug. 2012: Mike Crow agrees to sell 2320 Colfax to a developer.

Oct. & Nov. 2012: The developer makes two presentations before the neighborhood regarding an apartment proposal at the site of 2320 Colfax. The developer decides to build within the zoning code, and not seek any variances. This fact, combined with the City’s determination that 2320 Colfax is not historic, paves the way for demolition.

Mar. 2013: CPED issues a demolition permit for 2320 Colfax. Anders Christensen (a long-time neighbor and friend of Ward 10 Council Member Meg Tuthill) appeals this decision to the City’s Heritage Preservation Commission (HPC).

Apr. 2013: HPC rules in favor of Anders Christensen’s appeal, declaring 2320 Colfax a historic resource.

May 2013: 2320 Colfax’s owner, Mike Crow, appeals HPC’s decision to the City Council.

May 24, 2013: Tuthill and her Council colleagues vote 13-0 to uphold the HPC decision (please note: this was an innocent time before the notion of aldermanic privilege).

May 27, 2013: Anders Christensen advocates shutting down the boarding house at 2320 Colfax and “reusing it for an urban hotel or bed and breakfast.”

Nov. 5, 2013: Despite an endorsement from HGTV’s Nicole Curtis, incumbent Council Member Meg Tuthill loses in a landslide to Lisa Bender. Tuthill is the founding mother of LHENA, with a history in the neighborhood that goes back to the early 1970s. Neighborhood long-timers are deeply crushed.

Jan. 6, 2014: The new City Council is sworn in. There are seven new members, out of 13 seats (check my math, Meg). News stories are written about the Council’s fresh faces. Long-time residents from across the city are deeply crushed.

Feb. 3, 2014: Less than a month after Bender’s swearing in, the Facebook action heats up. Minneapolis Residents for Responsible Development Coalition (MRRDC) is founded by an anonymous neighborhood association board member. Thus begins a brutal campaign of kitchen sink NIMBYism (anti-gentrification; worry about future ghettos; too much parking; not enough parking; materials are too cheap; rents are too high). Facebook dissent is weeded out with a merciless use of the ban function.

April 2014

Mar. 14, 2014: Anders Christensen reveals that City Planner John Smoley’s fancy college degree is actually just a Ph.D. in Missile Silos. An embarrassed (probably) John Smoley takes his revenge by engaging in a campaign of lies (allegedly) to destroy 2320 Colfax, all from his base of operations in a fourth-ring suburb.

Mar. 23, 2014: A group with an even longer acronym, MRRSVLD, is founded as a satirical counterpoint to MRRDC. It takes months for most people to sort out who’s who.

Apr. 2014: More than a week of candle-light vigils for the house at 2320 Colfax are capped by a guest appearance from home improvement icon Nicole Curtis. This event also serves as a posthumous campaign rally: recently defeated former Council Member Meg Tuthill is caught on video tutoring Curtis on the finer points of Minneapolis politics.

Nicole Curtis’s dog’s eyeballs escape the vigil with only minor burns.

Apr. 22, 2014: MRRDC coins the phrase Bendrification. Meanwhile, chemists at MRRSVLD invent the muscle cream Bender-Gay (For when your muscles are tired from destroying the neighborhood™).

Apr. 25, 2014: The Council follows recommendation by City staff and votes 11-2 to approve the homeowner’s application to demolish a historic resource. HGTV’s Nicole Curtis films an episode of her television program during the vote. Critics wonder if she’s secretly profiting from the controversy.

Late Apr. 2014: The Healy Project files suit to stop demolition. The judge rules against them. It becomes clear why Anders was so agitated over Smoley’s education.

May 1, 2014: Once again, Trilby Busch and Anders Christensen cite a 1981 article written by noted experts Trilby Busch and Anders Christensen (who, you may recall, went on record “contending that 2320 Colfax is an important part of Healy’s architectural legacy.”)

May 11, 2014: A 170th birthday party is thrown in honor of T.P. Healy. Healy’s ghost is reported to have blown out the candles.

Aug. 13. 2014: Anders Christensen’s group, The Healy Project, puts forth a plan that would preserve the house at 2320 Colfax, while converting the existing structures into 1 & 2 bedroom apartments. Under this plan, the boarding house would be shut down.

Sep. 30, 2014: Anders Christensen rebukes the City Council’s Z&P Committee for permitting the owner of 2320 Colfax to shut down his boarding house and sell his property. His argument: allowing a property owner to displace “vulnerable adults” is not the “decent thing” to do.

Oct. 3, 2014: The Council approves developer Michael Lander’s plan for an apartment building at 2320 Colfax. This is despite continued credible assertions from Anders Christensen that developer Michael Lander has been to London, England.

Oct. 18, 2014: 2320 Colfax’s owner hires a contractor to perform asbestos abatement without the proper permit for work on a Saturday. Former Council Member Meg Tuthill and other neighbors are not happy. Pictures are taken of at least one worker’s ID card and posted to Facebook (since deleted). Meg is reported to have said to the workers (and I’m not making this up): “I’m the Council Member!” The workers leave and return another day.

Oct. 19, 2014: Word of the previous day’s dust-up reaches Nicole Curtis, who calls out Lisa Bender (blaming Bender both for a homeowner’s permit oversight, and the disappointing 2013 election results). 700,000 Facebook fans from across the country are suddenly very unhappy with Lisa Bender.


Oct. 27, 2014: A story is published about Nicole Curtis performing house rehab without the proper permits.

Dec. 6, 2014: Nicole Curtis vows to “stockpile” her money for the purpose of defeating Lisa Bender in 2017.

Dec. 16, 2014: Lisa Bender is banned from a Facebook group run by The Healy Project: “North Wedge Historic District.” This is seen by some as a bold move, considering the Council Member is uniquely positioned to help them achieve an actual Wedge historic district.

Dec. 18, 2014: HGTV personality Nicole Curtis boasts of her generosity in funding (at a cost of $102) The Healy Project’s last-ditch attempt at a temporary restraining order to stop the demolition. Once again, the judge rules against them.

Dec. 21, 2014: Trilby and Anders again “go on record,” citing their own article from 1981 as evidence that 2320 Colfax is historic.

Jan. 2015: Lisa Bender experiences increased online harassment, and is frequently locked out of her Facebook account due to unauthorized log-in attempts.

Jan. 21, 2015: The Healy Project publishes part one of a soon-to-be 87-part blog series targeting all the liars: The Truth Will Out: Lies that Brought Down 2320 Colfax Avenue South.

Jan. 28, 2015: The Healy Project publishes an open letter to the City Council, along with an invitation to view pictures and videos of the interior, courtesy of their friend Ezra Gray.

Jan. 30, 2015: The geniuses at MRRSVLD produce a hilarious parody of Ezra’s videos.

Feb. 4, 2015: With neighborhood tension at an all-time high, a local journalist becomes the target of a PDF-attached email campaign.

Feb. 7, 2015: Healy Project videographer Ezra Gray publishes the following post to Facebook. Anders and Trilby go on record, liking the post.

Feb. 9, 2015: Robin Garwood (a Bender supporter and aide to Council Member Cam Gordon) publishes a powerful indictment of The Healy Project and their allies, claiming they are analogous to the Tea Party circa 2009. Among other things, he cites their knee-jerk rejection of nearly everything Bender proposes. Garwood also notes that members of The Healy Project sent emails to the City Council in defense of the above Facebook post, with at least one person using the phrase “Je suis Charlie” (because, if you defend yourself from a weirdly disgusting and completely unfounded accusation of corruption, the terrorists win).

In the comments of his post, Garwood makes the case that, despite the constant references to corruption and lies, The Healy Project doesn’t have their facts straight.

Feb. 10, 2015: In the wake of Garwood’s post denouncing The Healy Project, Nicole Curtis calls him out for a recent work trip to Cuba. Curtis also takes issue with Council Members receiving paychecks.

Curtis claims to have been sent “disturbing” emails written by Council Members Andrew Johnson and Lisa Bender. At Johnson’s request, Curtis promises to release them. At the time of writing, she still hadn’t released the emails.

Lisa Bender nominates the “Lowry Hill East Residential Historic District.” Fans of old houses are not impressed.

UPDATE: 2320 Colfax demolished on February 24, 2015.

Cross-posted to Stubble Magazine.

Violence Against Houses

It can be hard for carpetbaggers to understand the special relationship between the Wedge’s long-time residents and certain neighborhood buildings. It’s a forbidden love; the house belongs to someone other than the love-struck neighbor, and a deep affection only materializes when the owner finds another suitor. To help me understand this dynamic, I spend an absurd amount of time poring over old newspaper articles. As an example of my ignorance, when I came upon the headline, RAPE IN THE WEDGE, I just assumed it wasn’t a weirdly offensive metaphor for perceived crimes against houses (sorry, I gave away the surprise ending).

June, 1981.

In case the author or his family are still around, let’s call this guy Shermann. Shermann once slapped a friend of his 6th grade daughter after the two girls made a mess playing with paint in the basement. How do we know this? Because Shermann published yet another weird metaphor in the Wedge newspaper. In this one, retirees who sell their homes to the highest bidder are the equivalent of child-slappers (Also, Reagan).

Maybe it’ll make more sense if we put it in meme-form.
On the left: the classic Healy Project meme.
On the right: Shermann’s 30-year-old metaphor/confession.

The last thing I want to do is imply that all neighborhood house-fans think like Shermann, but it sure would explain the vigils.
Deep down, you know this many people
wouldn’t vigil in your honor.

“Vigil” image credit: Tony Webster

The Basketball NIMBYs

Just under the feather boas, Mueller Park’s dark underbelly.

The 1974 plans for Lowry Hill East Park (as Mueller Park was originally known) put the basketball court on the western side, along Colfax Avenue. Two hoops were available for full-court play until they were demolished as part of a park renovation that began on May 4th, 1998. The newly renovated Mueller Park opened later that summer with one half-court hoop, located on the Bryant Avenue side of the park. Considering the events of the intervening years, those of us who live in the neighborhood today are lucky to have any basketball court at all.

Lowry Hill East Park plans, 1974.

Mueller Park hasn’t always been about free piano concerts and historically accurate ice cream socials. There was a time, as the Wedge newspaper tells it, when Mueller Park was dominated by basketball-wielding “ruffians” and sharp-shooting “toughs” raining chaos down on the neighborhood like a barrage of Ray Allen 3-pointers.

The first published complaint about Mueller Park comes from Meg and Dennis Tuthill in May of 1977, just a year after the park opened. Their concern had nothing to do with basketball. It was more their way of saying the neighborhood had too many children already:

We have witnessed children with BB guns, knives and air rifles. It occurs to us to ask where the parents are. At any given time there seems to be about 30 or 40 children playing at the park but at the very most 2 or 3 parents.

Towards the end of their letter they caution parents, “There just are not that many things for older children to do at the park.” Which is an odd starting point for what would become a decades-long push to remove the basketball hoops from Mueller Park.

Behavior in 1980 was good.

I’m not sure where our current neighborhood nostalgia for children and families comes from, because the children of the late 1970s sound like the meanest little bastards the world has ever known. In June of 1979, resident Mary Atkins describes seeing two 8 year old boys taking up sledgehammers to destroy “everything in both bathrooms.” At the end of her letter, Mary vows to  keep “watching, phoning, and getting angry until someone listens!” She would go on to become an integral part of the LHENA “Park Watch” program in the early 1980s.

What started for Mary as an act of resistance against a “massive act of vandalism” would turn, inexplicably, into a crusade against basketball. She spent a lot of time in the park–watching. Based on accounts from Park Watch, the summer of 1980 was a “good” one. Despite the reported good behavior, Mary writes another letter the following May:

Last summer, and again this spring, I have noticed that the basketball courts at Mueller Park have been completely taken over by adults, many of whom I do not recognize as residents of the Wedge. 

I have watched the younger children and adolescents from our neighborhood stand on the sideline for hours, waiting to get a chance to play on the courts, usually to no avail. Often the people that use the courts descend on our park by the carload, beer in hand, and hook up their speakers to tape players or radios and turn the music on full blast…

Mary was concerned for the plight of “neighborhood youth who would like to play basketball at the park.” So, naturally, she suggests a “petition to have the basketball hoops removed.” She ends her letter with a question: “How do we assure [the youth] a fair chance to use the facilities at Mueller Park?”

On May 6th, 1981, the same month Mary’s letter is published, there is a public meeting; “the hottest item on the agenda was the issue of the basketball courts.” Mary alleges “physical aggression by adults” towards children. Dennis Tuthill suggests removing the courts. Another resident, David Forney, advocates lowering the baskets “to discourage ruffians from outside the neighborhood.” Neighborhood hero Glen Christianson stands up for basketball, while pointing out the shortage of hoops available in the city; “Let’s not tear it down,” he says.

Outside of Mary’s incredible accusation of violence against children, which is absent from her just-published letter, there’s not one specific allegation of criminal behavior. So, what is it about these basketball players–ruffians… many of whom I do not recognize… descending on our park by the carload… music on full blast?

Suddenly, “ruffian” doesn’t seem like such a cute word.

Glen Christianson, rim-protector.

Ostensibly this started as a quest to preserve the basketball court for neighborhood children to play basketball. But Dennis’ solution is to reserve the court for Tuesday evenings of adult volleyball. Mary Atkins organizes Wednesday night volleyball for kids (volleyball really is the antidote to basketball). Glen Christianson, legendary neighborhood rim protector, organizes pickup basketball games for adults. And there’s this excellent suggestion from the following year: “roller skating to music on the basketball courts.” Hilariously, I can find no trace of anyone ever suggesting they reserve the court for children’s basketball.

Park Watch continues through the summer of 1981. A September article announces that neighbors “have helped solve the problem about the use of the basketball court and the park.” Mission accomplished, but how?

  • Park Watch. Mary Atkins’ eyeballs are the best deterrent.
  • “They informed park police about beer drinking, dope smoking and bad language among the white and black teenagers in the park.” [italics added]
  • Family volleyball night.
It’s not just the blacks.

These teenagers, white and black, need better coaching; shooting the ball with a beer in one hand and a marijuana cigarette in the other won’t get you to the NBA.

In the same article that declares victory in the war on basketball “bullies,” the Wedge reports for the first time that race may be a factor:

[Park Board representative] Hutera described the basketball players as young adults. He said, ‘I do think some racism is involved.’ But he said blacks were being bigoted also, calling others ‘honky.’

Both Atkins and [Dennis] Tuthill as Mueller Park spokesmen pointed out that racism had no part in the issue. Tuthill said the inappropriate behavior among blacks or whites drinking beer, smoking dope or using bad language in the park was unacceptable. Atkins described the problem as more the neighborhood “toughs” than the basketball players….

…. 

Another problem at Mueller Park is that it offers few facilities for recreation… [Asst. superintendent Feldman] agreed a sand volleyball court at Mueller Park would be safer and more enjoyable for volleyball than the asphalt court currently being used. He said Mueller neighbors have legitimate reasons, and not ideas coming in from outer space, about removing the asphalt. 

You thought the last word of this
paragraph would be “basketball”

Mary just admitted that the problems in the park were unrelated to basketball players. It should also be mentioned that removing the basketball court and replacing it with a sand volleyball court would have resulted in no net increase in the number of recreation facilities; though I can imagine it would have resulted in an emptier, less useful park. The article closes with Dennis complaining about the kids being excluded from basketball fun; followed by Dennis reserving Wednesday night court-time for a children’s activity that isn’t basketball.

The neighborhood stops targeting the basketball court from roughly 1982 until 1990, when LHENA begins having one of the hoops variously hooded, capped, or locked for most of the next decade. A “vandal” (more like freedom fighter) breaks the lock off the south hoop in 1996; Glen Christianson would have been proud.

Basketball: the least of your problems.

In the summer of 1993, in an item headlined “Mueller Park Crowd Getting Out of Hand,” LHENA vice-president Audrey Johnson notes “there have been problems with noise, bad language, rowdy behavior, fires being started in the bathrooms and under trees, and glass being dumped in the swimming pool.” She doesn’t mention basketball, but it’s not hard for some to connect the dots. Notes from the August board meeting mention the fires, the glass in the pool, people being “accosted by hidden persons,” and the need to call the police to close down basketball. It’s possible that accosted by hidden persons is just a euphemism for good, hard defense; though it could also be the case that your neighborhood has bigger problems than basketball.

In 1998, the basketball court was cut in half as part of renovations at Mueller Park.

1995 lockdown.

The idea that basketball courts bring crime to a neighborhood is not all that uncommon. There’s the case of a 2011 hoop removal in one racially diverse Chicago neighborhood. It emptied the park, but it failed to reduce gang violence as intended. Critics say it was about targeting black kids and pushing a gentrification agenda. My favorite response to the basketball-haters is from Arlene Rubin in 1990, based on her experience living across the street from a Chicago park: “To hear some people, you’d think that taking down the hoops would solve AIDS, unemployment, and the national debt.”

The only study I can find on the topic shows that parks with basketball courts, as opposed to those without, are “associated with lower rates of violent and property crime but not disorder crime.” Basketball courts can be noise generators, but fewer people get hurt.

The whole story makes me wonder if the LHENA crowd ever regretted tearing down a half-block’s worth of houses to build this nuisance of a park.

1997 renovation plans for Mueller Park.

Previous posts on Wedge history are available here and here.

The Weird ’90s

This is part of an ongoing series on Wedge history, culled from the archives of the Wedge newspaper. We wish we could direct you to a gofundme page devoted to saving the historic Wedge newspaper, but it’s too late. It died in 2013–nobody vigiled.

Early 90s LHENA was Bizzaro World.

The early 90s was a weird time in Wedge history. LHENA had one board member named “Bizzaro” and another named Basim Sabri (if you’ve ever wondered why LHENA has Texas-style voter ID requirements, it all dates back to the Sabri-era). Weirdest of all: LHENA’s board voted out their new president, in a secret ballot, for what seems like manufactured nonsense.

We begin in February 1994, with an item about former board member Steven Prince. It concerns his dispute with LHENA President Brian Nelson over Prince’s refusal to hand over the results of a housing survey (this catches my eye because Steven Prince–who some in the Wedge call the Prince of Downzoning*–commented recently about the attention I was calling to a 2007 LHENA survey).

Mr. Prince, release the surveys!

Then, in March 1994, the headline: LHENA Board Ousts President (in other words, Mr. Nelson got downzoned). You’ll never guess who made the motion to depose Nelson; it was my good friend, the 1994 version of board member Bill. Also on the board at that time: Meg Tuthill and Leslie Foreman (our current President). Talk about neighborhood stability. If you go to a LHENA meeting today, in 2014, you can reach out and touch some of the same people (please be gentle).

On the surface, this was about Nelson involving LHENA in allegedly unauthorized discussions with other neighborhoods about applying for a $10,000 grant (the he said, she said is available here, here, and here). But there’s more.
After the vote against Nelson, the staff of the Wedge newspaper resigns en masse (read their letters here and here). 
From editor Katy Reckdahl:

“I’ve heard that the paper is too zippy, too hip hop, shouldn’t cover rock & roll. I thought we were trying to capture some of the artsiness, some of the neighborliness, something to appeal to everyone–even the long-ignored renters that occupy 85 percent of the Wedge’s housing units, most of them between the ages of 25 and 34.

“This month, I sat through an agonizing LHENA meeting as the board voted Brian Nelson out of the board presidency. But the personal attacks that came before that vote were something I have not witnessed since the Anita Hill hearings…”

Fortunately, Reckdahl resigned in time to give the new editor a chance to apologize to Steven Prince (Prince of Downzoning, Keeper of the Surveys, Lord of the Wedge) in the next edition.

Reckdahl’s March 1994 resignation.

Steven Prince gets an apology in April 1994.

The resignation letter from Wedge writer Barbara Knox references the “ugly–and very public–attack last fall” against Reckdahl by the LHENA board. So, further down the rabbit hole we go, back to late 1993: it’s election season and Lisa McDonald–a former Wedge editor, and then-current LHENA board member–is running for City Council (she would go on to a narrow victory).

In October 1993 the Wedge ran a full page ad for McDonald’s opponent. Tuthill and friends freaked out. Meg and Dennis Tuthill co-authored a letter calling for Wedge editor Reckdahl’s resignation. A “representative from the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office” was summoned to a board meeting. The editor of the Southwest Journal felt compelled to write a letter defending Reckdahl; she makes the point that the Southwest Journal ran basically the same ad in their paper. And just when you thought the plot couldn’t get any thicker: soon-to-be Council Member Lisa McDonald is forced to produce Kinko’s receipts to answer questions about whether she used her prior role as Wedge editor for politics.

I have no grand conclusions about any of this, other than to say, this is one very weird piece of Wedge history. Also, don’t mess with friends of Meg. And one more thing: Meg is totally pulling Bill’s strings in this episode, right?

Timeline:

  • Oct 1993: Wedge editor Katy Reckdahl allows a full page ad to be placed for candidate running against Team Tuthill’s choice for City Council, Lisa McDonald.
  • Nov 1993: Controversy over the ad. Meg and Dennis Tuthill call for Reckdahl’s resignation. Editor of Southwest Journal writes letter in defense of Reckdahl.
  • Dec 1993: LHENA President Brian Nelson writes a can’t we all just get along editorial, defending Reckdahl.
  • Jan/Feb 1994: President Nelson calls out Steven Prince for withholding results of a LHENA survey.
  • Feb 1994: Nelson voted out by LHENA board.
  • March 1994: Entire staff of Wedge newspaper resigns. Letters here and here.
  • April 1994: Prince gets an apology from the new editor of the Wedge. Meg Tuthill’s you can’t believe everything you read letter is published in the Wedge.

*Editors Note: The author of this post is the only one who refers to Mr. Prince that way. Our apologies to Mr. Prince for not getting the facts correct.

If You Thought House Vigils Were Good…

This is the true story of LHENA’s 1977 protest against an adult bookstore at Lyndale and Lake. Michael Lander is lucky these people aren’t bringing bags of “stuff” to his neighbors. Not that I’m equating Michael Lander with pornography (though his new development is an obscenity, as well as an affront to family values and porch culture).

What is a “double brother-in-law”?

Should have used a naughty bachelorette party cake.

The cake!

This is not about pornography; it’s about economic justice.

Full story here (from the August 1977 issue of the Wedge).

Where Will They Park Their Zeppelins?

In 1976 LHENA got together with some architects and planners, and collaborated with them on something called the Wedge Design Framework Plan. This proposal includes one-way conversions for all north-south streets; it would have turned Aldrich, Colfax, and Emerson Avenues into cul-de-sacs at 29th street. It’s also got diagonal parking (LHENA later disapproved this) and a rec center for cats (I don’t know what became of this). Bonus points if you can find the zeppelin.

This is just a small part of the Wedge Design Framework Plan. It should be fodder for at least a few more posts–lots of cool maps. There are three pages on what color you should paint your house. LHENA was still citing it in 2004, during their campaign to downzone the neighborhood.

Took me 10 minutes to decide this wasn’t a 70s slang term.
Diagonal parking.
Cul-de-cacs were proposed for Aldrich, Colfax, and Emerson.
Would you like a privacy fence or hedge with your cul-de-sac?