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.

Stone Arch

Sunday we went to the Stone Arch art festival and car show downtown.  My father in law often shows his car there, so we check out the cars, find Eryn a snack, and have a family lunch/dinner (and get my wife some jewelry, at least this year).  It's also a good chance to see a lot of coworkers, as no fewer than five of them were there.  At one point, I saw a coworker I didn't know, but recognized and asked, "Do you still work at [My Company]?"  The woman next to him in the line looked at me and said, "Why yes, I work in creative services."  That's right.  There were so many coworkers, they were standing next to each other in line amongst thousands of people and didn't even know it.

This isn't of art or cars or the Stone Arch bridge, but it's a nice photo from near the Avanti II I was looking at.  That's a weird car.  It looks like it's driving backwards.


I like this picture because the sign says not to walk on the street.  I'LL DO WHAT I WANT!


And we walked past this wall on the way to the festival, near the Metal Matic warehouse.  This wall is at the rear of where my wife and I lived on University Avenue and is famous for being the hill and wall where Dan'l tumbled down and hit his head while peeing drunk one night - while...we're pretty sure he tumbled through his own urine given his smell - and then stumbled inside to where Kyle, my wife and I were hanging out with some story about being jumped by a gang of frat boys.  I think it needs a plaque.

Segway

On Saturday, Pooteewheet and I went on a Segway ride at St. Anthony Main.  She bought two gift certificates as a birthday present 11 months ago, and we finally got around to using them.  It was a perfect day for it as far as I was concerned.  Just a little on the cool side, but not so cold my hands hurt, and I didn't have to worry about sweating or having to strip off clothes.

You do have to wear a helmet during the ride, but for the introduction - stepping on and stepping off before the video - there's someone there to catch you. Here's Pooteewheet learning to move around in front of the Segway shop.  The little round circle by her feet gives her a shield frequency of 257.4.  Useless against polaric energy, but useful against uncloaked Romulans.
 

Jason, one of our two tour guides, and the voice over actor who did the narration for the training video, done in something of a native Chicagoan.  Perhaps one of the better training videos I've ever had to sit through.  He and Renata did all of the history bits of our tour and they did a great job.  We talked to Renata for quite a while at the back of the pack as I knew just enough history about the falls area from the  underground Twin Cities book I'd read to be able to have a conversation.  Later, when we went out to the open area by St. Anthony Main that allows you to get close to the falls, there was a plaque talking about what I'd heard about how they'd almost collapsed the falls in the past.

In the background, you can see our famous Grain Belt Beer sign.


The rail bridge between Boom Island (where they used to process lumber in the lumbering days) and Nicollet Island (home of the Grain Belt sign and DeLaSalle High School).  I hadn't realized there was a whole neighborhood out there.  Apparently it used to be the hangout for a bunch of a hippies and a pet donkey.  I remember this bridge from when I was in college and it didn't have the safety rails.  People would sit on the girders on the sides and fish.


THIS IS MY SEGWAY.  THERE ARE MANY LIKE IT, BUT THIS ONE IS MINE.  MY SEGWAY IS MY BEST FRIEND.  WITHOUT MY SEGWAY I AM USELESS.  I MUST DRIVE MY SEGWAY TRUE.  I MUST DRIVE IT SURER THAN ANY OTHER SEGWAY WHICH IS ATTEMPTING TO RUN ME OFF THE ROAD...



The Mill Museum.  We stopped here for a cookie and coffee.


Dorks on Segways!  I told Pooteewheet it's my goal to always have my picture taken in Marvin clothing from now on.  Proof I'm rapidly sliding toward retirement age.  That's the Stone Arch Bridge in the background.  Where we're at is a common place for people to smoke their weed, according to our tour guide.  We didn't smoke any weed - we were driving.


Stone Arch Bridge sans dorks.


Putting one dork back in the view.  Pooteewheet is apparently monstrously shorter than I am when I'm up on a Segway.  The ride was 2.5 hours long.  Quite the trip and we were actually sort of tired at the end.  It went across the Stone Arch Bridge, down into the ruins park, back up past the 35W Bridge Memorial and the Guthrie, into the Mill City Museum, along the riverfront to Boom Island, and back along Nicollet Island.  Eryn was incredibly jealous, as we'd dumped her with Grandpa and Grandma for the evening.  She was too young for the Segway and too young for the Haunted Basement.  We let her have our Segway drivers licenses and told her if she saved her allowance, she could buy a Segway for $6999 and then the age restriction wouldn't apply.