[Mpls] Barbarians at the gates.

[Fredric Markus]

I gather that the De LaSalle commissioners on the Park Board are preparing
to cross the Rubicon and lay siege to our fair city, cheered on by a coterie
of the school's students and alumni and turning a deaf ear to the reasoned
arguments that come to them despite their best efforts to stifle these
voices.

This is a public policy disaster in the making. Breaking long-standing
covenants arrived at by a many-sided negotiation process is bad enough.
Abusing public process by blatantly advantaging the school's spokespeople in
violation of the Park Board's very rules of engagement - can this be
"conflict of interest"?  Will this attempt at shared-use agreements open the
door to the gradual transfer of our park land to private use on a broader
scale? 

I have every reason to agree with those who say that the De LaSalle
commissioners have turned a deaf ear to history. It was not by accident that
the St. Anthony Falls Historic District came into being. Nor was it by
accident that the Bicentennial Commission under Gladys Brooks' leadership
chose to invest their budget in a bicentennial park on the South Tip of
Nicollet Island, nor that major parks and open space money was applied to
the establishment of ribbon parks along both banks of the Mississippi, to
the transformation of Boom Island and the East Bank part of the Nicollet
Island East Bank Urban Renewal Area and its environs and to the improvements
on Hennepin Island, Father Hennepin Park, the Stone Arch Bridge, and the
Mill District on the West Bank.  Nor that a hefty sum of MHRA's money was
spent moving the old fire barn into Riverplace's plaza, that another major
gesture by the Hennepin County board put a span of the old Broadway bridge
between the South Tip of the Island and Main St., that the new suspension
bridge over the main channel at Hennepin Ave. is designed with an eye to its
predecessors built in 1890 and before that in 1876.

De LaSalle spokespeople have tried to paint the north tip community as being
elitist, wishing to reserve this end of the Island for their exclusive
benefit. I can't begin to estimate how many thousands of people have been
able to view the old Queen Anne structures or admire the restored Limestone
Flats on Grove St., or stroll comfortably around the Island's perimeter or
stop by the vest pocket park we established within the heart of that cluster
of buildings on the North Tip so many years ago now. Or to walk safely down
the old rail bed and across the bridge to Boom Island Park. 

We argued a generation ago that a residential presence was an essential
ingredient for reasons of safety and I have no doubt that the attitude of
stewardship of the public's trust that has characterized good faith
dialogues with the larger community in the vicinity - for decades now -
remains a shining beacon and a reassurance that the grasping excesses of
this De LaSalle crowd will not prosper in the fullness of time.

There are a lot of Catholics in this town, Commissioner Dziedzic is alleged
to have said. Do not Catholics also hear the songbirds in the back channel?
Have not the residents in the vicinity put up with De LaSalle keggers by the
black bridge for generations? There is a long-standing reality called "live
and let live" that is being breached here and to me this is a far deeper
wound in the life of the city than the recent ambitions the school has put
forward so clumsily in public process. 

All the city benefits from the Historic District. The folks I drove around
the Island in the 1980s via horse-drawn carriage came from around the region
and beyond and from four generations of our families. There are memories of
the Island we will never be able to recapture in their entirety, but surely
we can do more to preserve the sense of history that pervades this place. 

Fred Markus, Ward 6, Phillips West