Author Archives: michaelwilsonmpls

Anita Tabb: friend, neighbor, Park Board commissioner

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Anita Tabb and her family moved to Minneapolis in January 2004, settling in Lowry Hill. She got involved with her neighborhood association, then with the activist group Park Watch. In January 2010 she took her seat as a Minneapolis Park Board commissioner, her first foray into electoral politics. Six years later, in April 2016, she and four colleagues accomplished an historic “first: a joint City Council-Park Board ordinance providing a new 20-year stream of revenue for park improvements. And in January 2018 she bade us goodbye and moved to Florida.

During her 14 years with us Anita developed close friendships, gave generously of her time and energy, and set an example of selfless and principled public service. The December 17 Hill & Lake Press profiled the friend, neighbor, and Park Board commissioner we all came to cherish. Here is the story.

Several friends, neighbors, colleagues, and fellow elected officials wrote words of appreciation for Anita and her service to the people of Minneapolis. Here is the story.

Campaign begins to take Quigley aerials public

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Joe Quigley’s aerials of Minneapolis schools and neighborhoods in the late 1920s-early 1930s provide an unparalleled view of the face of the city. “Shot from the seat of an open-cockpit plane,” Will Craig wrote in 2018, “his photos show us real places where buildings have sidewalks, windows, and doors.” Clearly, the Quigley aerial collection needed to be made available to the public.

Here is the story as it appeared in the April 2016 Hill & Lake Press.

In March through May 2016 I was researching the 40-year history of Hill & Lake Press, during which I read through all 425-odd issues of the paper and discovered that Will Craig had in fact published the same four aerial photos of the Hill and Lake neighborhoods 34 years earlier.  Here is the same story, updated a bit in 2018.

Quigley aerials (re)discovered

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“Never-published aerial photographs” read the breathless headline in March 2016. Almost true: the aerial photographs hadn’t been seen as a group since Will Craig’s article thirty-four years earlier in the March 1982 Hill & Lake Press. But (re)discovering Joe Quigley’s aerial photos, and learning of the extent of the Quigley archive, was pretty exciting. Here is the story.