Uptown/Lyn Lake : Featured Stories

To accompany Jay Walljasper's take on bike policy and bike culture in the Twin Cities, here's a video by Streetfilms that shows just how valuable one of the crown jewels in our bikeway system is--the Midtown Greenway, running more or less parallel to Lake Street from Chowen Avenue to the Mississippi River.

A hunger for authenticity as well as for good food--that's what's driving the renaissance of the small neighborhood restaurant here, according to star restaurateur Kim Bartmann. And for Bartmann, authenticity goes a lot deeper than you might think.

When USA Network needed a new brand identity, some of the biggest ad agencies in North America competed for the account. The winner? An 11-person agency in Minneapolis with a company brand so low-key that they don't even capitalize their name. Since then, mono has become one of the hottest shops in America, applying loads of hip midwestern creative power to the proposition that simple messages are the most memorable.

The palmy days of Prince, H�sker D�, the Replacements, and other iconic Twin Cities bands may have passed, but our music scene is just as vital, and a lot more diverse, today. Just as in the golden age, seeing and hearing the bands live is crucial to really getting to know the scene, so here is our list of definitive venues--from the legendary and cavernous former home base of the Purple One, First Avenue, to the beer-fragrant holes-in-the-wall where tomorrow's stars are plugging in their amps.

Nothing helps a new restaurant get off the ground faster than a fresh idea--a brand-new way to dine as well as great food and a hot location. Three new Twin Cities restaurants--the Uptown Cafeteria and Support Group, Barrio Tequila Bar, and Ringo--offer this special kind of conceptual freshness. But they give it an egalitarian Twin Cities stamp too, by fusing the drop-dead hip and the decidedly democratic.

David Byrne has seen a lot of the world as a touring mega-rocker--much of it from from the seat of a bicycle. Last Thursday he joined three notable Twin Cities bike advocates--Mayor R. T. Rybak, author and journalist Jay Walljasper, and walkability/bikeability expert Steve Clark--at the Uptown Theater for a celebration/exploration that looked at the future of urban pedal culture in the Twin Cities and the world. Hint: it's about a lot more than bike lanes.

Design maven Alyssa Ford scoured the Cities for places where great design is for sale, from legendary pottery to elegant, magazine-spread-worthy home decor to art toys straight out of Japanese cartoon culture--and our photographer, Bill Kelley, came along. Check out her picks and his pix.