On the Logan Park Industrial Project: Keep Quincy weird

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In his article on Nov. 27, “Unusual Minneapolis enclave skeptical of city’s planned redevelopment,” Elliot Hughes spotlighted the fears being voiced by artists about the Logan Park Industrial Project’s current proposals. At several community engagement meetings, many have voiced their concern that the city’s proposed upgrades to Quincy and adjacent streets will fast-track the gentrification that pushes artists out of the very neighborhoods they’ve helped beautify.

This has precedent. When the once-thriving gallery scene in Minneapolis’ Warehouse District was displaced by redevelopment as an entertainment and sports campus, many artists migrated to Northeast Minneapolis — and now they are showing up to prevent it from happening again.

But Hughes’ reporting suggests that most artists are also opposed to pedestrian, biking, rolling, accessibility and environmental upgrades. As an artist, writer and cyclist working in the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District, I came away from the same meetings with the opposite impression.

Most artists acknowledge that the neglected streets are well overdue for reconstruction. But where Hughes’ article focused on those advocating for truck access, it underrepresented those focused on pedestrian and other non-vehicular use. At recent meetings, responses to the community engagement survey ranked traffic-calming and preserving the unique character of the area as top priorities.

A growing coalition of artists and cyclists, led by Seth Stattmiller, owner of Recovery Bike Shop, and Josh Blanc, chair of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District Board, has advocated for utilizing the area’s distinctive brick pavements to slow traffic. Stattmiller has proposed a shared-street design that keeps the road at curb level, giving pedestrians and cyclists full use of the street and forcing cars to slow down.

At the September community engagement workshop, there was energy around options that made portions of Quincy pedestrian-only. By the November open house, those options were gone. When I asked city representatives what had become of them, they said, “The city doesn’t really do that.” (In fact, the city is currently exploring proposals that would make Nicollet Mall pedestrian-only.)

The surveyed community’s top priority, the “unique character of the area,” gets little more than lip service.

In the absence of other proposals, saving the bricks has become a proxy for the effort to preserve the area’s historic flavor. City representatives have all but insisted that the bricks can’t (or won’t) be saved. But when asked what other unique designs they propose, they indicated they likely won’t have the funding for anything beyond public works and that any integration of public art would be the purview of other city departments.

The Northrup King Building redevelopment project, right in the heart of the Logan Park Industrial area, offers a prime example of improvements that are appropriately tailored to the arts character of the neighborhood. The project will overhaul the decrepit streets, integrating watershed management and prairie restoration alongside parking and loading access. Between two of the site’s buildings, the pedestrian-only “Stormwater Street” will give residents and visitors a unique, car-free oasis. The plan keeps the artist studios intact and affordable for existing tenants, while developing other buildings into live-work space for more.

Quincy and the surrounding streets do not have historic designation, but many of its buildings do. Moreover, the surrounding area is a city-designated arts district, and the nearby Central Avenue is one of seven city-designated cultural districts. What is the city willing to do to proactively empower the arts and cultural character of these places?