Cedar - Riverside/West Bank : Featured Stories

The Central Corridor is becoming the Twin Cities' new cultural hotspot showcasing local diversity, bringing communities closer together, and boosting economic opportunities.

The Minneapolis theater company Ten Thousand Things builds connections  both radical and backed by tradition by telling  stories for intimate and often non-traditional audiences, with the lights up and minimal staging, using the power of communal imagination.

How key non-profits have forged partnerships with healthcare institutions along the Green Line to generate corridors of opportunity for job seekers, residents, and communities.

The burgeoning winter-biking scene wouldn’t be possible without the bike designers, entrepreneurs, co-ops, fests, expos, zines, and coffee shops that give the community its innovative edge and vitality.

This week: A greeting card in a coffee shop sends me to a Minneapolis West Bank memorial that recalls a beloved, vanished building and honors the history and traditions of generations of West Bankers.

Kate Nordstrum's genre-busting musical programming at Minneapolis' Southern Theater caught the eye of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's innovative concert planners. Now she's teaming up with the SPCO to present a new series that explores the space between indie-experimental and concert-hall classical.

BeNeighbors.org, is an online forum that connects people who live near each other to build community and tackle real issues. With a brand-new grant, it's adding Saint Paul neighborhoods to its ambitious goal of getting everybody talking. Can the city become a national leader in "digital inclusion?"

In A Line or Two, I share some of my discoveries and enthusiasms as I make my way around the Twin Cities--call it an editor's-note-as-blog-entry. This week: the first five of my Top Ten Reasons to Visit (and Love) the Twin Cities. It's a list of offbeat but worthy places and happenings that you might miss if you only visit our big-ticket attractions.

With no agenda, no speaker list, and a very relaxed schedule, Minnesota's first City Camp "unconference" brought geeks and government-heads together for a radically democratic exploration of how we might design Democracy 2.0.

Often, says Concordia University economist and biz-school dean Bruce Corrie, our minority and immigrant communities are seen solely through the "problem" lens. Their struggles are real, but their contributions to our prosperity and potential for growth are greater than most majority Minnesotans realize. And Corrie's got the figures to prove it.

Most of us in the Twin Cities are aware that we've become a great town for bicycling in recent years, but urbanist and author Jay Walljasper--an avid biker for decades--has been digging into the trend to find out the what and the why behind it. In this adaptation of an article he wrote for Bikes Belong, he fills in the story and gives us some impressive facts about the sheer scale and promise of our new two-wheel era.

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.

With winter nipping at our heels, we thought it would be appropriate to take a lingering second look at the beautiful Twin Cities community gardens that Managing Photographer Bill Kelley shot back in August--eight little paradises in Saint Paul and Minneapolis where community spirit is cultivated along with the flowers and vegetables.

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.

Colin Kloecker and Shanai Matteson recently got married--but the wedding was only one of the many connections they've been making as members of Works Progress, a wide-ranging, multi-project organization dedicated to bringing people, ideas, and new perspectives on culture together. Call it face-to-face Facebook, a sharing of real concepts and real skills in the real world, all done in the spirit of improvisation and artistic innovation.