Category Archives: Hill & Lake Press

Clear-cutting of Kenilworth Corridor set for mid-May

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After a torturous, blundering, contentious planning process to route a commuter train from the southwest suburbs into downtown Minneapolis, it’s finally come to this: on May 13, 2019, the Kenilworth Trail will be closed and earthmovers will lumber in a few days later to scrape the corridor clean.

The battle has gone on for almost 40 years (see the October 1984 Hill & Lake Press front page, below), and it’s been epic. The loss of irreplaceable urban woodlands and critical pollinator habitat will be felt by the hundreds of thousands of people who bike, walk, and savor the Kenilworth Corridor’s rare oasis of open-air beauty. The loss will also be felt by the couple hundred thousand Minneapolis residents who will never get to use the train, even though their taxes are paying for it, because this $2-billion mass-transit behemoth completely bypasses the densely populated south side of the city.

Here is the story from the April 26, 2019, Hill & Lake Press.

Here is an August 2009 article, “Southwest Minneapolis’ Transit Route Selection Process May Rule Out Light Rail to Uptown,” from The Transport Politic website, detailing why the Kenilworth route was “the wrong decision.” The reasons from ten years ago are even more valid today. The highlights are mine.

Here is the front page of the October 1984 Hill & Lake Press, with its prescient headline.

Joe Quigley’s aerial photos leave North Star, head downtown to Special Collections

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Great news for history lovers! After a two and one-half year effort, Hennepin County Library’s Special Collections department and Minneapolis Public Schools finally reached agreement on donating Joe Quigley’s aerials. They are now being professionally archived and scanned and will soon start appearing on HCL’s Digital Collections website for everyone to enjoy.  Here is the story.

Meet your neighbor: Shawn Smith

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Craig Wilson has been profiling interesting people in the Hill and Lake neighborhoods since September 2008. In the June 2018 “Meet Your Neighbor” column, Craig and I interviewed Shawn Smith, Kenwood Neighborhood Organization board chair and resolute moderator of the Minneapolis 2040 information session on June 6. This 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.