Catch Up - Part V - Cedar Riverside

One last catch up.  Goes all the way back to August of last year.  Kyle and I visited our old apartment complex at Cedar Riverside on a historical tour.  I've mentioned I lived there a number of times, and I'm often in the neighborhood, in part because Theatre in the Round is right up the street, but I haven't been back inside the building since I lived there in the late 80s slash early 90s over a quarter century ago. When we were there it seemed to be primarily low-income white and Hmong with Ethiopian immigrants just starting to move in.  My understanding is it's mostly Ethiopian immigrants now and the building manager (who was the building manager when we were there) noted that they tend to stay longer because of religious no-interest-bearing loans restrictions which can keep them out of houses.  But the flip side is they're very nice to their apartments because they're there for a long time.

The sign sort of freaked me out because it didn't really occur to me when I moved in that it had only been there about 13 or 14 years.  Kyle and I lived there in the first 1/3 of its existence.



I craned my neck to look at this view more times than I can remember.


When they repainted, they kept the colored panels because there's a lot of nostalgia about them.  Brighter than what I remember some of the older pastel-ish pinks being, however.


At one point they took us to the roof of McKnight where they used to allow residents to go.  Kyle and I must have missed that opportunity by a few years, so it was exciting to get up there.  McKnight is 39 floors high.  Kyle and I lived on the top floor of D, facing Cedar Avenue, which was 21 floors.  That was so high fire truck ladders couldn't reach you, so this was WAY up there.  If you click through to Flickr, some of these are nice in a larger resolution.  I particularly like this one.



Looking at the nearby highways.


The University of Minnesota.


I think we're looking at the new I-35 bridge here.  That tall apartment building to the right of the bridge is where my Arthurian studies professor lived with her older (also a professor) husband.  The windows on the decks were removable, but her husband was too old to handle them, so one class assignment was to swap out the windows while we talked about our Arthurian projects.  That bluish building is Theatre in the Round.  The white building in the foreground is where my wife once got the red bean paste Good Wife cookie she had to spit up in her hand.  To the right of it, with the green awning is the Acadia where Kyle and I went for lunch  Beneath my feet are the Wienery from the post referenced above and the Cedar Riverside Cultural Center.


The new stadium going in.  Much further along now.  As of this week they were working on siding and glass/windows and moving the Star Tribune folks to new digs so they could use their building as a park.  Kyle sent me an article about Jon Bream's 25000 record collection being sold off as part of the move.



You'll have to go zoom in on this one.  Not much point to a tiny panorama.
Larger panorama



They also took us on a tour of a room. These look EXACTLY like the single bedroom Kyle and I shared for two years in college.  More than a bit of deja-vu.  This is the room we slept in.  Kyle had the left side of the room


I slept right next to this window, except 21 stories up.  I loved waking up to the full wall drop off every morning.  Definitely gets your brain going.


This is why we didn't have parties at our place.  Obviously we could have let some of them hang out in the bedroom, but still a bit crowded.  This picture does highlight that we had a pretty nice one bedroom apartment in college.  It's plain, but the fact that these tourists all fit with room to spare shows just how much room we had if you include a separate kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom.  Not to mention it came with cable tv, close circuit cameras for the front doors, sprinklers (after year one), a/c and heat and water shared communist style across everyone, and more (like one of the few apartments at that price with a dishwasher).


Speaking of shared a/c and heat, they took us for a tour of the bowels of Riverside Plaza.


Hard to see it in this picture...


...but the equipment is enormous.  This was just one of the rooms.  At the time, I was just happy for heat and a/c.  I never gave much thought to exactly how big the apparatuses were that kept me happy.

Cedar Riverside

I mentioned Kyle and I lived at Cedar Riverside in that last post. I think it was sort of just becoming a community for Somalis when we lived there. Our neighbors were the weird guy with the German pants and the oversized headphones.  The middle aged lady who liked to chat Kyle up.  The cross dresser with leopardskin pants or transsexual next door (hard to say) who had bang-against-the-wall sexcapades (albeit, we had the paramedics show up for Kyle's knife fight with the floor, so we potentially disturbed more neighbors than she did).  The murderers on the first floor (and the murdered).  And Lynn Rasmussen and Kim Wickline a few flights down (I think Kyle and I should have brokered much harder to arrange a roommate swap, just so everyone got to meet someone new).

So this is more for Kyle than anyone else, but I saw this video on YouTube.  About five minutes in, he questions the hanging wood "art" in the entryway.  That was there in 1988 when we lived there (yes, 24 years ago, almost a quarter of a freakin' century), and the post office boxes looked the same.  It looks amazingly like it did when we lived there, except the hallways had carpet, and the Halal store was a PDQ.

The Wienery, with bonus content

On Facebook, you only get the picture of the hot dog. Here I'll add some content, for all my best friends. Over the weekend, we went to The Wienery with Ming, Cookie Queen, and her boys. I lived almost on top of The Wienery with Kyle for two years and never once partook of their hot doginess. My wife asked why, and for the life of me, the only good reason I have is that I was poor and what little money I did have went to pay for school, ramen noodles, mac and cheese, and beer. And a video game or two. Eating out was pretty far down my list. The Wienery was good, although the chili fries weren't as good as at Ben's Chili Bowl in D.C.

I went with The Upsetter. Bacon and egg. Over easy for me. Scrambled for Cookie Queen. The bun nicely soaked up my yolk with minimal finger mess. Which was good given the lack of bathroom facilities. It was a tough decision over The Tasmanian. Next time I'll go with two dogs rather than fries. Ming and my wife went with The Manhattan. That and chili fries is a bit of overkill in my opinion. Here's my Upsetter. Almost professional looking.
 
Nothing near Cedar Riverside is exactly pristine and shiny. You have to get down the block to the Acadia before anything looks nice. So if you haven't been to The Wienery and expect an upscale, trendy, yuppie hot dog place, check your expectations. Most of the furniture looks like it was picked up after someone had a garage sale, and then they moved out of the house and left The Wienery's furniture behind. And there's no ice. And no bathroom. And bring cash.  Despite the ambiance, I'm definitely going back to try the Tasmanian and mix it up with a spicy sausage instead of the traditional frank.  Perhaps next time there's a bicycling film festival in the neighborhood.

But there's a cool mural next to the Cedar Cultural Center.  It's difficult to think of the towers as art, but there you are.  Kyle and I lived on the top of the first one, floor 18, near the center.


And this mural is on the backside of Freewheel Bike as we walked to our hot dog.