Above: Nicollet and Lake, Christmas 1949. From the Minnesota Historic Society’s online archives (here).
The intersection of Nicollet Avenue South and East Lake Street should by all rights be one of the most-used, most-loved public spaces in south Minneapolis. It’s where two of the most interesting, defiantly weird streets in the entire city meet up: Nicollet Avenue, which runs from a high Modernist fever dream of a transit mall downtown through a number of high-density, food-stuffed ethnic enclaves into the more downmarket southern suburbs, and Lake Street, which runs from the lakes and Uptown through a few miles of construction, taquerias, theaters, dive bars, car dealerships and the agreeably scuzzed-out 21A Metro Transit bus line on to the river and Minneapolis’ saintly neighbor to the east.
Of course, that intersection was ruined when the city built a K-Mart there a few decades ago. Here’s what I wrote about it in a post for The Rake this summer:
For a city that is second-to-none in making catastrophic urban planning blunders, surely the decision in the late-‘70s to plop down a strip mall in the middle of one of the city’s most-used thoroughfares ranks as one of the most nearsighted. It has essentially created two different Nicollet Avenues in south Minneapolis: the fun Nicollet Avenue north of Lake Street that is full of bubble tea, brownstones, MCAD students and Asian fusion restaurants; and the crappy Nicollet Avenue south of Lake Street, where you go to drop off U-Haul trucks and test drive your new car tires to find out how well they deal with potholes.
I mention this because Barbara Flanagan, the Star-Tribune’s urban planning writer (and one of the very few left at that august insitution worth reading), made a very, very brief reference yesterday to the situation.
Barbara’s right — when can we expect to see the street reopen?
Above: Nicollet and Lake, 1926. From the MNHS online archives.
On this topic, my colleague Jay Gabler at ARP! has written a fascinating article about the Potemkin-ish protest mural that went up on the K-Mart at the time of the building, and has quite a lot of background on how this arterial street was choked off by bad planning, greed and the general sort of civic shortsightedness that our beloved city has known to dabble in from time to time. Gabler says:
It seems increasingly likely that the point will soon become moot: Mayor R.T. Rybak has called for the reopening of Nicollet Avenue and included the project in the city’s five-year capital improvement plan.
I certainly hope so.
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