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I suppose I was interpreting snootiness to in part mean people who live in the neighborhood yet make to attempts to be a part of it. Not formally (through board meetings, ice cream socials, etc.), but informally, like meeting the neighbors, going to the block parties, shopping locally.
There are people of all sorts in Uptown, which is part of why I like it.
Uptown is fun for a visit, but I sure wouldn't want to live there. It's way too noisy, crowded and busy for me. I need space and peace and a small-town feel, which you just can't get in Uptown.
As for North Minneapolis -- that place is scary. Yes, I know there are a few safe pockets, but as a whole, it's not somewhere I would want to be at night.
Uptown bashing is fun just because it doesn't get done enough. And I personally know I'm painting with a broad stroke when I bash Uptown, and know that all sorts of people live there. And it's not like it's expensive to live there either, so there's no inherent trust-fund type snobbishness. It's obvious why people live there. Every city, or at least pretty much any city that has something going for it, has something like Uptown. It's just unfortunate that it's probably the best neighborhood for so many things, including annoying people (which I care to avoid). Where I live now in Philadelphia has a bunch of active neighborhoods - and there's a fair share of annoying people (bar scene, suburbanites, jerks) coming into where I live, but the critical mass of the bar scene and the snootiness is probably elsewhere (Old City, South Street, Northern Liberties). At the very least, it's more spread out. It's also a bigger city, though. I think that the continued development of Downtown Minneapolis as a place worth spending time in will actually have the benefit of removing the totality of obnoxiousness in Minneapolis wanting to be in Uptown at any given time.
Uptown residents have nothing to worry about from some light bashing though. It's always been a pretty good place to live, from what I gather.
Last edited by FamousBlueRaincoat; 03-04-2011 at 01:51 PM..
Its all relative, you hear it a hundred times. If you've grown up in a city and been to other major cities then north minneapolis is a walk in the park. I live in Jordan, statistically the worst neighborhood in the city. We have had some run ins with foolishness, but for the most part, the crimes that take place over here, at least the major ones, happen to people that live that life. I will say that for the five years we've lived here, every year has been a little better than the previous. People need to understand that if the north side comes around as a area that is considered livable to most, then the rest of Minneapolis becomes a better place.
Uptown is fun to visit, and it's fun to live there too. North side will get there too - it's just underutilized right now. Too many empty lots and houses.
Uptown has come full circle. It was once a blue-collar, industrial part of town & run down (I grew up there in the 1970's). In fact it was even named an "urban blight" zone at one point in the late 1970's-early 1980's. Bowling alleys, 3.2 joints, railroad tracks, warehouses, etc. It's now "Updale" the Yuppie part of town & that's ok (especially for long time property owners!!).
Everything changed when they built Calhoun Square. I recall a group of us neighborhood punks literally pissing on the heads of the construction workers down in the hole that is now the foundation of Calhoun Square & being chased for blocks. We used to prowl the railroad tracks (now the Greenway) loading shopping carts full of bricks & debris setting them in front of trains to watch the impact, hopping slow moving trains to get around town, etc. I remember the old Snyder's on the corner of Lake/Hennepin where Calhoun Square now sits that wouldn't sell model-glue to us because to many kids were huffing. I remember the pub that sits at (just guessing the address) about 3022 Lyndale was a biker bar (the outlaw kind) & they used to roll down Lake St & scare the hell out of everyone & they'd have dozens of chopped down bikes parked down the 3000 block of Lyndale in a neat row. Bottom line...It was a little rough around the edges, lol. If anyone's seen the documentary "Z-boys of Dogtown", I'd say it kind of resembled that part of Venice & Santa Monica (minus the amusement parks). It's no surprise that it became the epicenter of punk rock in the Midwest.
What happened is that because of the poverty & amount of apartment stock, it was affordable for starving artists, musicians & junkies. Punk Rock, The Replacements, Rifle Sport, Skull F*ck, Soul Asylum, et al came out of there & people from around the Midwest started moving in (they still are). It became THE cool place to live if you had any artistic sense about you. During that time though, I never recall it being a great place to raise kids as the yards were smaller, the school's were so-so (at best), there weren't many parks & those that did exist were unorganized athletically compared to more residential neighborhoods & their corresponding parks.
Also, remember "Uptown" had much more defined neighborhoods then & was much smaller geographically. Today people consider anything from 40th St, down to Loring Park, all the way E to Nicollet as "Uptown". When I grew up my buddies and I lived in "Lynn/Lake", "The Wedge" & "Uptown" & we considered it travelling to go from one neighborhood to the other, today it's all just sort of "Uptown". I laughed when recently someone said Lyndale Elementary (35th/Grand) was located Uptown, or the other day I asked someone if there was a post office Uptown these days and they said "Yes, on 31st & Nicollet". Calhoun square..."If you build it, they will come".
Most of the blue collar people & artists I grew up with were priced out (education & work ethic were never strong neighborhood values, lol) & now reside in Northeast, Powderhorn & Nokomis. All that said, it's where I grew up & if budget was no concern I'd probably get a big house W. of Hennepin right of Calhoun. I mean hey...I'm from there & it's gotten really fancy & nice, why wouldn't I want to live there as an adult? I don't fault the 20-something's & suburban/out state transplants for wanting to live there one bit.
I think other neighborhoods should take notice & build something of note like Calhoun Square themselves. I look at the East Lake area, East of Hiawatha today & see a lot of similarities to Uptown cerca 1980. It's a little more Liberal/politically correct/green than Uptown was, but so is society as a whole these days.
I agree with some of the Uptown analysis, but not all; sounds like that's from the artist/punk perspective, which is just one of many in Uptown. MOstly, though, I disagree about the raising kids thing; my parents moved to Uptown in the '70s because they had relatives there who had raised their family there, and they thought it was a nice, convenient neighborhood. Great place for kids. Probably less so in the mid-70s because there were fewer parks (the Wedge didn't have an official one until then), but Jefferson was considered a good school in the mid-80s, at least. Lots of kids from the neighborhood there. Things changed a lot when West High School closed, though; all of our older neighbors wen there, but by the time I went to high school there was no "neighborhood" option. We all went to Southwest. I loved SW, but it would have been a very different experience to have been able to walk to West. (or Calhoun Elementary, for that matter; that was razed by the time I started school.)
Designating Hennepin and Lake "blighted" (done with the intention of bringing in Calhoun Square) was always a very controversial decision, but it helped with the financing. I think overall it was a good thing for the area, as times change whether one wants them to or not. Good point about the trains; I think the removal of the trains, and the eventual installation of the Greenway, has had just as much impact on both Uptown and Lyn-Lake as did Calhoun Square. A lot of people have already forgotten that 29th Street was an industrial corridor, and was so until pretty recently.
I think it's true that other neighborhoods can learn a lot from Uptown's history. Some of its experiences are certainly applicable to other parts of the city. I'm not sure exactly how current north issues compare (and the history and geography of the areas are different), but definitely an area can change a lot (or even just perception of it can change) very quickly.
Some other north/Uptown similarities: 1970s-era Uptown neighborhoods were VERY active. They got organized, fought back against rising crime, started a recycling program (in the wedge), built parks, and overall really pushed to forge a strong sense of community, and to fight back against people or places they thought were harming the area (like an adult bookstore on Lyndale, problem properties and landlords, etc.). North Minneapolis neighborhoods seem to have more people tackling tough issues in innovative ways these days. (well, Lyndale neighborhood, if one considers it "Uptown," is also doing some neat stuff.)
Last edited by uptown_urbanist; 03-06-2011 at 07:14 AM..
Designating Hennepin and Lake "blighted" (done with the intention of bringing in Calhoun Square) was always a very controversial decision, but it helped with the financing. I think overall it was a good thing for the area, as times change whether one wants them to or not. Good point about the trains; I think the removal of the trains, and the eventual installation of the Greenway, has had just as much impact on both Uptown and Lyn-Lake as did Calhoun Square. A lot of people have already forgotten that 29th Street was an industrial corridor, and was so until pretty recently.
I had also heard that designating Uptown as blighted was mostly political maneuvering to get that project done. While I totally buy the idea that Uptown used to be "rougher" or more cutting edge or blue collar (almost any of these hip neighborhoods anywhere were, on a whole cities have been improving for a while now, and all the moreso the neighborhoods that have things going for them) of whatever. I knew some people who grew up there in the 80's, and I think they probably romanticize it a little though. Particularly based on what they do, and what their parents do, it's really hard to believe that they would have grown up in that neighborhood if it was actually "blighted" in the way other cities understand the term (picture below is from Camden, NJ - although I don't think the block exists anymore, or at least I haven't been able to find it while wandering the city. Although there are similar looking blocks). They sound more like people who just preferred to live in Uptown even if it had some nuisances.
But I also know that when I lived in Powderhorn, there were plenty of people there who were from Uptown or nearby. So I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the story, just on the scale of it. Everywhere you go you hear similar stories, and it's just sort of a hearing how neighborhoods change - particularly since whether the artists/punks want to accept it or not, they were part of the gentrifying trend, even if it's not something they like (and aside from the fact that some of these people probably are native to the neighborhoods). There are people who bemoan the artists and hipsters and bohemians moving in too, since they know it spells gentrification, and then the bohemians act like they lost something when they can't afford the neighborhood either anymore.
No, it wasn't "blighted" in the sense of Camden, NJ. The "blighted" label was, as it often is, applied for the purpose of getting tax increment financing. The neighborhood was still overall good enough, it was an active commercial district, just a bit rougher around the edges, especially when compared to its more glorious earlier days. It was a VERY controversial decision, and the "Updale" tag came out of that fight. Calhoun Square was the "dale." Calhoun School had been razed in the 70s, and that invited the opportunity to take a new look at development in the area.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that Uptown was a terrible neighborhood or anything, but it was definitely not as cleaned up as it is now. I don't even think anyone at the time used the term "blighted" to mean crime-ridden, desolate, or anything else. It was just a way to get the financing to go through. And I suppose one could argue that it was "blighted" when compared to a couple of decades prior.
Uptown has always had a good mix of lower, upper, and middle class residents, even from the very start. It definitely used to have a stronger blue collar vibe than it does now, but there's always been a good economic mix. Actually, it's been kind of interesting in the past 10 years to see how the physical layout of the neighborhood and its demographics have changed; it used to be that the buildings right along what is now the Greenway were the rougher, cheaper, wilder part of the neighborhood (I've heard a Cops show was filmed near 29th and Bryant at one point), as it was right next to the still-industrial parts. Now some of the most expensive new housing and luxury apartment buildings are there, and commands a premium price tag. People want to live next to a bike greenway and converted industrial space; they didn't want to live next to a train track and abandoned grain elevators or industrial spaces. It was like that from early development right up until the late 1990s or so. Uptown always had housing options, though, so you could just go a block or so away and things completely changed.
In Uptown's case, it was not the artists or musicians who "gentrified" it.
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