New business on Dayton's Bluff

It appears that Baldinger Bakery will be leaving the West Side and that Health East’s ambulance depot will be leaving the North End. Both will be moving to Dayton’s Bluff, the latter to part of the Minnesota Mining site and the former just east of it. I assume that the affected Dayton’s Bluff neighbors will be receiving more information and given a chance to address whatever concerns they may have.

Both moves will be heralded by all the right people as great steps forward in the economic development of our city. We will hear the gooey comments from Mayor Coleman the Second and Council President Lantry [into whose ward the moves are being made] and business association types. Yet both are just moving within the city, not into it.

I don’t know the details of either move, but on the surface the Health East one certainly seems to make sense. Storing ambulances indoors in Minnesota winters makes more sense than keeping them outdoors.

It seems reasonable to think that both moves indicate companies who are willing to make a long-term investment in the city and that has to be good. But the Port Authority and other development agencies need to start working with the North End and West Side communities to fill up the holes being created in their territories.

And all of us will have to watch what happens.

[Ironically, old timers will remember that until the mid 1980s that Health East had a hospital just a few blocks from where they used to operate a hospital. There’s a story there.]

North End Community Fireworks Display

This happened all over the city, I assume, but I had the special opportunity of observing part of the North End’s unofficial fireworks display last night. This Fourth of July celebration was going on concurrent to the Taste of Minnesota demonstration. Neighbors on both sides of Rice Street were lighting the sky with an amazing collection glaring rockets and other works of pyrotechnical art. More seemed to come from west of Rice than east, but that is likely because the inhabitants of the condominiums between Jackson and Sylvan south of Magnolia don’t participate much. One of the disadvantages of this kind of varied-site display is that one does not know where the next blast is coming from and misses the upgoing parabola of the display.

And, as far as I can tell, this whole display neither received any public subsidy nor charged admission.

District 6 Planning Council annual meeting report

I just attended the District 6 Planning Council’s annual meeting held this evening at St. Bernard’s Social Hall. I am willing to announce any district’s annual meeting about a week ahead, but I had learned about this one just this afternoon.

I have been to such meetings in my own and other districts before, including all of my own since 1981, and this was about the tamest I have ever seen.

By my count there were a little over thirty people there, but I don’t know how many were qualified meeting participants. I don’t think it was announced. [Even with so few there the acoustics were not great and there was no sound system and I do have some hearing problem, so I know I did not catch everything.]

The business portion of the meeting went smoothly. A few introductions were made, the first round of elections was held [by subdistricts called “precincts” although they all stayed together in one body], Jane McClure gave a very good presentation on city and North End history, the second round of elections was held [for at-large seats] and Councilmember Helgen and Commissioner Rettman spoke. The Commissioner tried to rationalize her vote for the sales tax for transit. I am not certain that I follow her, but her record on protecting taxpayers in the past is excellent and maybe I should give her the benefit of the doubt.

It appears that everybody there who wanted a Board seat got one through one of the two methods. One [and maybe two] of the new Directors are from the Karen community.

Based on questions and comments raised it seems that vacant housing and mortgage foreclosures are of great concern.

Whenever I go to a district’s annual meeting and things are that calm I wonder if it is because they are doing things so well that nobody wants to make a fuss or that they are so irrelevant that nobody cares. I am inclined to give them a break and think the first, but if anybody out there from the North End has a comment, there is a comment place below.

Also, I learned from a conversation before the meeting that the former Dutch Del Monte’s bar site and the barber shop behind it which were leveled last week were taken down for intersection improvements, apparently something similar to what happened two miles east at Arcade and Maryland a few years ago.