Save the Bricks, Save Northeast
(but Kill the Curbs)
Feb 5, 2025
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After 100 years, the Minneapolis wrecking ball has finally come for the unique streets around Northrup King, Indeed, Centro, Dogwood, and Bauhaus known as the Logan Park Industrial neighborhood (LPI). The city’s current plan calls for the sterilization of these thriving roads. We are calling on the public (that’s you) to ask the City Council and the Mayor to preserve the history and the vibrancy of the streets that have fostered a world-class Arts District.
All Minneapolis has to do is keep the bricks and refrain from adding curbs. Curbs banish pedestrians from the streets and clear a path for cars. Curbs enforce traffic domination.
Ward 1 City Council Member Elliott Payne
elliott.payne@minneapolismn.gov
Mayor Jacob Frey
Jacob.Frey@minneapolismn.gov
Public Works project manager Katie White
katie.white@minneapolismn.gov
100 years of neglect has allowed LPI to evolve organically into the world-class Northeast Minneapolis Arts District and the beating heart of Art-a-Whirl. These “broken” streets that Mpls wants to “improve” are magic and it would be a tremendous loss for the city to wipe that magic away. What will become of the Arts District if we damage or destroy its heart?
The Purington brick paved streets are warped and patched and tough to drive on. And they are beautiful. They are indicative of the industrial character of Northeast’s founding. And they are some of the last brick streets in the city. The rest have been lost to development and redesign.
LPI’s uneven driving surfaces cause cars to drive slowly. These avenues have gone so long without reformatting that some places never got curbs and sidewalks. Pedestrians and traffic mix in a rare shared street where people have access to the entire right of way. LPI’s streets are flexible, dynamic, changing. Shared streets have restaurant seating spilling on to them. Without boundaries, there’s room for things that don’t fit on a city sidewalk. A shared street may not even need a barricade before it is ready for a street fair. These are the spaces that bring us together. Here, like nowhere else, we see each other and are seen by our community.
Walkers, bikers, and cars sharing Quincy NE (10/10/2024)
The shared streets of the Logan Park Industrial area are some of the most vibrant and activated in Minneapolis. Quincy and Tyler are arguably the only walkable commercial streets in town. The city wants to “fix” this in favor of “a consistent driving experience.”
A shared street has no difference between pedestrian space and car space. This ambiguity causes drivers to be on the lookout and makes these some of the safest streets in the city despite large volumes of activity.
The Quincy Street Taskforce indicated how “creating an uncertainty in who has priority reduces speed, vehicle dominance, and improves safety.” In fact,
the Minneapolis' Complete Streets Checklist for the LPI project shows, "25 total crashes in most recent 6.5 years of data analyzed - majority of crashes involved single vehicle crashes (typically parking related)” The data showed just one collision involving a pedestrian. (source)
We need to save the 100-year-old brick pavers. There is character in these bricks. This is the industrial heritage that most of Minneapolis has lost to other “improvement” projects. It is the texture and the fabric of LPI.
But the character is also very much in the shared streets structure of Logan Park Industrial. Their slow traffic allows people to activate the entire avenue. This is what makes it unique. This is what makes it magic. This is what is under threat.
LPI’s streets still function as they were built a hundred years ago. All American city streets used to be shared streets. They carried walkers and horse carts and trollies and cars and everything else. Lane markers came later. Traffic signals came later. Sidewalks came later. Car domination over everything else came later.
Everyone shared the same space. Everyone had access to the whole space. And it worked. It worked great. And it still works great on these old streets that have somehow been spared from the modern municipal playbook.
Shared street in the Haga District Gothenberg, Sweden (Photo by Mina Adsit - 2019)
A shared street is a space designed for people where cars are allowed to drive rather that a street for cars where people are allowed walk. Shared streets put people first.
This is what makes LPI ready when Art-a-Whirl comes calling each year. This is why FrancisFest happens on the opposite end of Northeast Minneapolis instead of right outside their door at Central and Lowry. This is why the Northeast Food Truck Rally attracts thousands of people to the Logan Park neighborhood and not University Avenue or Marshall.
This is why people grab a beer at Indeed after dinner at Centro. This is why people walk down to MN Nice Cream after a bite at Vivir. This is why people meet up at Dogwood after working out at CorePower. The walkability of LPI’s decrepit streets is actually fantastic.
There are no other streets in the Arts District that translate so easily into this kind of activation. Really, almost every other street in the city (in the whole country) has been systematically sacrificed to the car. Actually, that’s not quite right. Our commercial streets have been made safe for efficient traffic flow. We have organized walking and driving into separate spaces and everything else has been effectively banished. There isn’t room for anything else. We try to squeeze bicycles in here and there. If we want to put up a food stand or a little market, the whole street has to be closed for safety.
And that’s where it stands. That’s almost all we have now. We almost can’t conceive of walkable spaces free from the threat of traffic. We travel to the old European cities to walk among their street stalls. Walkable urban farmers markets are a delightful weekend novelty in American cities, swept away by important workday traffic.
But here we have it. In Northeast Minneapolis it still exists. These dynamic and flexible streets, these dynamic and flexible SPACES give us so much more than traffic flow.
This is the magic of a shared street. There is room for EVERYTHING! It can’t all happen at once, but so much of it can coexist, more than you would think. Pedestrians and cars can share the same place at the same time. When cars move at jogging speed, everyone can see everyone else and adjust.
We don’t need a lane for this way, a sidewalk for pedestrians, and another place for bikes and, oops, we’ve run out of space. We only need this kind of structure when cars are moving so fast as to be dangerous. If we have slow cars, there is room for everything. (Except when there’s parking. We need to know where to put the parked cars.)
If the city gets its way, we will have nice clean black asphalt for cars and shiny new concrete sidewalks for walkers. Everyone and everything will stay in its lane. We will lose that character, that energy. We will lose the bricks and the history for sure. But we will lose the activation potential. We will be messing with the formula that has given us Art-a-Whirl, an event that draws 100k people to Northeast Minneapolis every year. We will be stifling the energy that inspires hundreds of working artists every day.
There are more than a thousand artists and businesses operating in the Logan Park Industrial (LPI) project area which includes Quincy, Tyler, Jackson, 14th, and other streets. The LPI streets are actually wonderful. They are not a problem to be solved. Logan Park Industrial is a guidepost for other neighborhoods (and for other cities!) and Minneapolis must be thoughtful when messing with the ingredients in this formula.
To be fair to Public Works, they have been given a square peg and asked to pound it into a round hole. They do not generally have access to the toolbox that is appropriate for this project. We’re asking the city to authorize the use of that toolbox. This is the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District, jewel of the city, economic powerhouse, job generator, cultural center, heart of Art-a-Whirl. We do not want to get this wrong.
Our efforts over the past few weeks have won a significant victory. Public Works recently announced that they are willing and able to use a different toolbox for Quincy NE. Community feedback has shown the city that at least this one street has enough assets to be considered for more than the standard playbook. We’re asking Minneapolis to allow Public Works to use this expanded toolbox on the entire Logan Park Industrial project, a total of just one mile of streets.
There’s little downside to a shared street. Snow plowing is more complicated and cars have to go slower. That’s it. None of LPI’s streets are through-streets. This means drivers are stopping or starting. Almost all of the cars are arriving or departing a destination. Traffic flow is not a high priority because drivers are not flowing through the area and it should not be the focus of the design. Frankly, parking is more important here than efficient traffic flow and you’ve never heard me advocate for vehicle parking.
So tell the city to keep the bricks and keep the shared streets. The focus of a shared street is people. At issue is approximately 1 mile of pavement. Thousands of people live and work on this mile. And many more visit Logan Park Industrial every day. The people are there. We just need slow cars.
Shared Street Design
The red brick Purington Pavers are actually an important traffic calming element. Drivers can feel them. And they can feel when their car speeds up. After leaving the smooth(ish) streets of Broadway or Central, driving on a brick street feels pretty dramatic. The bricks need to be removed, cleaned, and reinstalled.
No curbs. Frankly, if Public Works just kept Northeast’s bricks and refrained from adding curbs, Logan Park Industrial would continue to thrive. Curbs banish pedestrians from the streets. Curbs clear a path for cars and enforce traffic domination.
A shared street lacks curbs and other markers (like sidewalks) that tell pedestrians they are not welcome in the street. Traffic ambiguity is an asset on a shared street. It makes drivers just a bit nervous and causes them to pay more attention. A level road surface (with minor slopes for drainage) and no particular pathways offers pedestrians access to the WHOLE street. The block behind the Pillsbury A-Mill shows how the only defined space is an indicator for parking. There are pavement differences for texture and color, but not for defining where anyone should or should not be.
The shared street behind the Pillsbury A Mill (2024)
Raised entrances into LPI from Broadway, Central, and Monroe communicate to drivers that they are leaving through-streets and entering a different kind of driving area. This increases their attention.
For the LPI project, narrow driving lanes (but wide enough for two-way traffic and emergency vehicles) give drivers less room for picking up speed. It also creates “edge friction” which puts drivers closer to fixed objects (like parked cars) so that they are more aware of their own speed relative to the objects they pass.
Limited traffic signage keeps drivers’ attention on the road and on the people in the street. When the road design doesn’t tell you where to go, you have to look for other clues. This creates a higher level of engagement from drivers.
Last but not least, LPI needs ADA accessibility. The current state of the LPI streets presents lots of unnecessary challenges to accessibility and this needs to be fixed (Note: ADA is already included in the Minneapolis plan).
Again, whether you live, work, or visit the Logan Park Industrial area, write to the city and let them know we want Northeast’s history and character to remain intact. Tell them we don’t want to mess with the vibrant Arts District. Tell them we want brick-lined shared streets with all of the elements above. We have more than 3,000 miles of car lanes in Minneapolis. It's okay if there is one mile of street where people come first.
Ward 1 City Council Member Elliott Payne
elliott.payne@minneapolismn.gov
Mayor Jacob Frey
Jacob.Frey@minneapolismn.gov
Public Works project manager Katie White
katie.white@minneapolismn.gov
Click here to automatically send an email to Minneapolis
Project website:
https://www.minneapolismn.gov/government/projects/logan-park-industrial/
Read more about Northeast Minneapolis from the Placemaker here!
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