Voices from the pandemic PAGE A8 • Meet the contenders running for City Council in 2021 PAGE A10
Vol. 31, No. 25 December 17–31, 2020 southwestjournal.com
FAREWELL issue
Hope to-go on Local businesses look for curbside community support By Michelle Bruch
BY
Inside the archives PAGE A6
Staff remember PAGE B1
Notes from readers PAGE B15
Honoring advertisers PAGE B18
Awards we’ve won PAGE B21
After cold weather closed El Jefe Cocina & Bar’s parking lot patio in Tangletown, the restaurant offered complimentary churro donuts and draft beer with family platters. After the governor closed indoor dining, they cut staff down to three people. “It’s so slow now that, honestly, it’s just not enough to stay open,” said owner Miguel Urrutia. El Jefe plans to go into “hibernation” starting Dec. 20 and reopen the first week of March, bringing heaters out to the patio as soon as the weather turns. Small business owners reached for this story said they are simply trying to stay afloat until the pandemic is over. Harry Singh said business is the slowest he’s ever seen at his Original Caribbean Restaurant. “Definitely not making money but just trying to survive it,” said Danny Ziegler, cooking takeout orders to place outside the Our Kitchen doorway. “If there was snow and 20 below, we’d probably be doing a lot worse.” An October survey of 590 businesses in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan found that smaller employers were more likely to report SEE BUSINESS / PAGE A14
Final delivery Southwest Journal carriers walk their last routes By Zac Farber
Wendy Shelley walks the streets of Linden Hills, West Maka Ska, Cedar-Isles-Dean and Lowry Hill every other weekend, delivering copies of the Southwest Journal to about 2,600 homes. As she walks, she likes to stop and collect bird feathers. They mostly come from turkeys, but she’s also found huge wing feathers belonging to owls and hawks. Since starting as a carrier in 2010, she’s gathered enough feathers to fill multiple boxes. The leisurely stroll, and the opportunities it brings for wildlife spotting, has been the highlight of Shelley’s job at the paper, which she contrasts with her higher-pressure daily gig delivering the Star Tribune in the predawn dark. While the Southwest Journal’s closure will mean the loss of about a quarter of Shelley’s income, she said what she’ll miss even more is the pace of the work, the time she had to admire the city’s hummingbirds, butterflies and bees. “I’m going to miss being outside in the fresh air,” Shelley said. “There are plenty of delivery jobs out there, but I like this because you’re getting out and walking.” Around sunrise every second Thursday, eight wooden pallets piled high with shrink-wrapped
Wendy Shelley tosses an issue of the Southwest Journal toward the doorstep of a home in the West Maka Ska neighborhood on Nov. 28. Photo by Isaiah Rustad
bundles of Southwest Journals are brought by truck to an alley behind the paper’s Downtown office on Hennepin Avenue. Once the pallets are unloaded, Marlo Johnson, the paper’s distribution manager, begins slashing through the plastic and organizing the 30,000 newspapers into individual routes. As he scratches numbers on a clipboard, the paper’s three dozen or so carriers begin to arrive, one or two at a time, sipping coffee, sharing donuts and trading banter as they load their cars up with papers.
Newspaper carriers take the job for a number of reasons, Johnson said. Many are professionals looking for a side hustle. Others are parents taking on routes with their kids. And a few are full-timers like Shelley who have patched together a living delivering the Twin Cities’ shrinking crop of free community papers and magazines. After she retired from the 50th & France post office in early 2018, Crystal resident Kim Kline started delivering the paper to the West
Maka Ska neighborhood so she could keep up with her “old postal customers and the kids and the dogs.” “It’s been enjoyable to stomp on the same territory,” she said. Since July, 11-year-old Annika Peterson has been splitting a route near her Kenny home with three other kids on her street. She’s used the money she’s earned to buy a mini scooter. About a decade ago, Jeff Passey and his three sons began delivering 725 copies of the SEE PAPER CARRIERS / PAGE A12
A2 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 A3
By Andrew Hazzard
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It’s the Natural Choice The newly opened Continuum Center at 28th & Hennepin encourages visitors to think about consciousness in a new way. Photos by Andrew Hazzard
A new business in Uptown wants to change the way people think about the world and their place in it. The Continuum Center, which houses the 40-year-old Continuum Exhibit, has moved into a permanent physical home in the former Emuble Vintage shop at 28th & Hennepin. “Our mission is to explore consciousness, human capacity and the interconnectedness of life,” executive director Jane Barrash said. Inside the building, visitors can explore the exhibit’s displays free of charge and learn about modern metaphysics and ancient practices for understanding consciousness. The original Continuum Exhibit debuted in 1978 in Los Angeles at the California Museum of Science and Industry and came to Minnesota in 1979 when it was purchased by local philanthropist Hugh Harrison. It was featured at prominent Minneapolis locations like the IDS building and Pillsbury Center and was even on display for the grand opening of Calhoun Square in 1984. In the 1980s the exhibit grabbed attention in Minnesota. It was hailed by figures like inventor and Medtronic founder Earl Bakken and its “Whole Mind Learning Project” was supported by the Minnesota Department of Education, which integrated the teachings into public school curricula that became known as “Discovery of Self.” In recent years Barrash worked with the North Minneapolis basketball team in the classroom and on the court to develop vision, focus and mindset development, which she said led to success in life and basketball. “What makes us human is imagination and creativity,” Barrash said. In many ways the Continuum Center was part of the mindfulness movement before it had a name. It teaches people to use the artistic right side of their brain and use abilities many humans don’t embrace, Barrash said. It’s been about a decade since the Continuum Center had a permanent physical home, which was most recently up
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The center, which houses the 40-year-old Continuum Exhibit, has moved into the former Emuble Vintage shop space.
the street at 25th & Hennepin. Barrash said she is happy to have a physical home on a prominent street that will invite in new visitors. The smells from neighboring Isles Bun and Coffee don’t hurt either, she said. While there is no charge to view the exhibit, the Continuum Center has transitioned from a nonprofit to a business model in recent years. It sells books and merchandise in addition to offering training on consciousness. The space also serves as an art gallery, currently featuring Ojibwe painter and printmaker Behon LaPrairie. Barrash said she hopes to rent out the space for events when COVID-19 conditions improve. Continuum Center Where: 2756 Hennepin Ave. S. Info: continuumcenter.net
A4 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
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Southwest Minneapolis parents David Weingartner and Sara Spafford Freeman are pushing Minneapolis Public Schools leaders to improve the district’s literacy practices, especially for struggling readers. They are pictured with Freeman’s 9-year-old son, Jack, at the district headquarters in North Minneapolis. Photo by Nate Gotlieb
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Two Southwest Minneapolis parents are leading an effort to ensure that Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) is better equipped to support struggling readers. Linden Hills resident Sara Spafford Freeman and Lynnhurst resident David Weingartner have created the MPS Academics Advocacy Group with the goal of providing teachers with more training on foundational literacy skills, such as phonics. The group wants the district to partner with an outside organization such as Groves Academy, a private school for students with learning disabilities, to better teach those skills. It also wants the district to develop a formal system of telling families if and when their students are having reading difficulties. “Parents of struggling readers, researchers and the data are all saying what we are doing is not working,” Weingartner wrote in an email. Less than half of all MPS third-graders read at grade level, according to standardized test scores from 2019. (Students did not take standardized tests in 2020 because of the pandemic.) That includes about 75% of white students but just 40% of Asian students and 25% of American Indian, Black and Hispanic students. The district has seen small gains in reading scores among students of color in recent years, but the marks are still well behind most other districts in the state. To teach reading, MPS uses a literacy curriculum from the New York-based Benchmark Education Company that focuses both on reading and writing. Critics say the curriculum isn’t based on best practices when it comes to reading. Specifically, they say that the curriculum places an ill-focused emphasis on teaching kids to memorize words and guess the meaning of words when stumped rather than using phonetic skills to sound them out. Freeman said that such “cueing” can lead to struggles as assignments become more complex and as context clues disappear in older grades. She and Weingartner are critical of the Benchmark curriculum, which has been rejected in Colorado for not being aligned with research on how children learn to read, as the nonprofit news site Chalkbeat has
reported. But they have stopped short of calling for its removal from MPS, instead stressing the need for better staff training. In a letter responding to the advocacy group, the district said that the Benchmark curriculum is grounded in research and includes 20 minutes of daily phonological awareness and phonics instruction for all K-2 students. The letter noted the diagnostic tools MPS uses to identify struggling readers and how students receive small-group instruction when they are recognized to have reading difficulties. Additionally, the MPS Academics Advocacy Group is asking the district how it plans to comply with a new law requiring K-2 students who are not reading at grade level to be screened for characteristics of dyslexia. The law allows districts to determine their own methods for screening students, and it calls for districts to make annual reports to the education commissioner on their efforts. The group has also asked how the district will prioritize the needs of students of color, how it will notify parents and how it plans to screen students in third grade and above for reading difficulties. Weingartner and Freeman have gathered testimonials from parents and teachers documenting experiences of how the district’s current literacy practices have not worked for students. Their group isn’t alone in pushing the district to improve its literacy practices. The district’s “World’s Best Workforce” committee, a primarily parent-run advisory group that monitors MPS’ academics program, is urging the district to undertake a comprehensive review of its literacy program, noting the stagnating proficiency rates. That committee says that the district has not provided enough information to determine whether or not its academic program is making progress toward reducing achievement gaps. It says the pandemic and the Comprehensive District Design restructuring plan that was passed in May have made it more difficult to devote time to the academic goals it is tasked with monitoring. More information about the MPS Academics Advocacy Group is at academicsadvocacy.org.
southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 A5
A bipolar love story
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Bryn Mawr resident’s book shows what it’s like to love someone with a mood disorder By Becca Most
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Jeffrey Zuckerman starts out his memoir like any Minnesotan would: describing the weather. “The January blues are hardly uncommon in the Upper Midwest, where my wife Leah and I have frozen, like human Popsicles, for nearly four decades,” the Bryn Mawr resident writes in the preface to his book, “Unglued: A Bipolar Love Story.” “Over the years, the weight of wintertime was particularly punishing to Leah.” Five years ago, Zuckerman’s wife, called Leah in the book, was diagnosed with lateonset bipolar disorder 30 years into their marriage. Following her fluctuating moods of mania and depression and her subsequent diagnosis, Zuckerman traces the course of their marriage amid her sometimes debilitating illness. Between bouts of manic energy and lethargic depression, tumultuous fights and breakdowns, Zuckerman shows the complexities of navigating self-care and loving someone who feels as if their “brain is broken.” Zuckerman writes with humor and honesty. Including notes from various email chains and text messages that his wife and other loved ones sent to him, along with his own journal entries, Zuckerman pushes back against not only the stigmatization of mental illness but also the assumption that it is impossible to love someone with a mental disorder. Writing the book was difficult, Zuckerman said, as it forced him to relive some of the most intense emotional experiences of his life. In the two-year drafting process, his ending changed three times as his wife’s health changed and ultimately improved.
I’m so heartened that people are talking about this health condition that’s been so packed away and hidden. — Jeffrey Zuckerman
In the memoir, several other names of friends and family are changed; one friend is referred to as Jack Lemmon because he resembles the actor. Through sharing his story, Zuckerman said, he wants to show people they are not alone and highlight the perspective of spouses loving someone with mental illness — a group whose story is not often told. “How do you hold that much responsibility and [make] those kinds of moral decisions? How do you maintain your own well-being in doing so?” he said. “I never expected in my 60s to encounter so difficult an experience.” Since it was published in July, Zuckerman said, he’s been happy to see that his book fosters a conversation about mental health. His wife has been his biggest fan, he said. She proofread three drafts of the book and continues to encourage his work. “I’m so heartened that people are talking about this health condition that’s been so packed away and hidden,” he said. “And from what they’ve told me, they’ve been benefiting and becoming more hopeful based on my experience.” Zuckerman and his wife have been involved in the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) for several years now. The grassroots advocacy group is the largest in the nation and provides support for people with mental illnesses and their loved ones. He also attends and co-facilitates a group in South Minneapolis for partners and spouses of people with mental illnesses, which has since been operating via Zoom during the pandemic. “Mental illness never goes away, but it’s managed,” he said. “Our marriage was tested in a way that neither of us thought would be tested after 30 years, and we’ve both come out healthier and more loving than ever.”
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“Unglued: A Bipolar Love Story” can be found at Magers & Quinn, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Hennepin County Library and elsewhere. More information about the National Alliance on Mental Illness is available at tinyurl.com/nami-minn.
A6 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
Reporting we remember
Inside the Southwest Journal’s archives
Rod Helm R E A L T Y
G R O U P
By Nate Gotlieb
lots of
Southwest Journal reporters have written scores of award-winning stories over the past 30 years, ranging from investigative reports on politicians to features on Southwest Minneapolis students, artists and activists. Below are 10 memorable stories from our archives.
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proposal to reopen Nicollet Avenue and redevelop the surrounding land with new housing, retail and parking. The developer quoted in the article said the project was 90% certain to happen. It never materialized. Today, nearly two decades later, the reopening of Nicollet at Lake Street is almost certain, given that the city has bought out the lease of the Kmart store on the site. The building, currently home to a temporary post office, is scheduled for demolition in 2023.
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Blizzard of complaints buries Park Board’s DQ deal — March 11, 2002
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Task force examines needs of growing minority population at Southwest High — April 1990 In its third issue, the Southwest Journal reported on a pair of fights at Southwest High School that led principal William Phillips to convene a task force to address issues of race and bias. The story quoted two Black students from North Minneapolis who said that the school’s curriculum ignored all other cultures except white culture and that they didn’t identify with Southwest as “their school.” Phillips said he struggled to get parents of color to join the task force, and he noted that the majority of parents of color at the school lived in distant neighborhoods. Schools in Southwest Minneapolis and across the city are still grappling with how best to integrate the district and serve families of color.
How much of a good thing? — May 1994 This story examined the clash in the Linden Hills business district at 43rd & Upton between private investors and residents who wanted to keep the neighborhood’s “village” feel. Debates around commercial development and density, especially in Linden Hills and in Uptown, have been a mainstay of Southwest Journal coverage over the past 30 years. In this case, a proposed Starbucks at 43rd & Upton drew over 300 people to a community meeting, with neighbors saying they didn’t want any more “star shops” like Creative Kidstuff and Wild Rumpus Books in the area.
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Bde Maka Ska and Lake Harriet were almost home to Blizzards and Dilly Bars. In February 2002, a Park Board committee approved a five-year deal to allow Dairy Queen to operate the concession stands at the two lakes. But commissioners reversed course after an overwhelming barrage of complaints, in part because of opposition to corporate logos in parks. Among those lobbying against the plan was a group that called itself SCOOP, short for Stop Commercialization of Our Parks.
Maybe this sounds familiar? “A reconfigured Kmart will open Nicollet Avenue once again…” begins this story about a
Giving and receiving — July 8, 2002 This story explored whether there is a conflict of interest when an individual or organization that contracts with a government body makes campaign contributions to the public officials who lead it. In 2001, attorney and lobbyist Brian Rice, his wife, his law firm and his firm’s members donated over $5,000 to candidates in Park
southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 A7
Board races. In a year in which the nine Park Board candidates raised an average of $7,942, that represented a sizable portion of all donations. Rice and the seven winning Park Board members to whom he donated said they didn’t think there was a problem with him donating to their campaigns. A commissioner who did not take money from Rice said she didn’t think it was appropriate for contracted employees of the Park Board to be involved with political campaigns of any candidates. Rice remains the Park Board’s attorney.
the center of a community of walkers who traversed the lake each morning and it often took him more than two hours to get around the three-mile path. Brice died in December 2016.
We get by with a little help from our friends...
How pensions blew a hole in the city budget — Sept. 9, 2002 This story explained why pensions had become such a drain on the city budget. It noted how city taxpayers bore the investment risk of the Minneapolis police officer and firefighter retirement funds and how city pension funds had sustained losses because of shady activity and fraud. It also noted how the city had minimal control over pension funds. The city’s police, fire and general-employee pension funds have since merged into the statewide pension funds. This story won the prestigious Frank Premack Memorial Award for public affairs reporting.
—Lennon/McCartney
The Southwest Journal has been a great friend to this community. We will miss you. I will miss you. Struggling to understand — July 27, 2017 This story was written after Justine Ruszczyk Damond was shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer, an event that sparked international outrage and calls for reform. The article explained how Damond, an Australia native, ended up in Minneapolis and described the pain and grief of her friends and family. Mohamed Noor, the officer who shot Damond, was convicted of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter and is now serving a 12 ½-year prison sentence.
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R.I.P. Arnold the crime-fighting pig — July 18, 2005 This Stevens Square pet became a famous “watchpig” in 2001 after biting the leg of a burglar during a home invasion. Arnold was popular with police and was filmed for a BBC show called “Miracle Pets.” Said one member of the Stevens Square Community Organization: “Arnold wasn’t the most attractive pet in the neighborhood, but he was a very well-loved character.”
A Lake Harriet legend — July 26, 2010 Throughout the years, the Southwest Journal has taken pride in covering the people who make the community special. This story highlighted 85-year-old Bill Brice, also known as “Biscuit Bill,” who for almost 10 years had walked around Lake Harriet every morning and greeted the dogs he saw with biscuits. (He knew all of the pooches by name.) Brice was at
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Voices from the pandemic — Starting in April 2020 Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Southwest Journal has been documenting the health crisis through the eyes of people who live and work in Southwest Minneapolis. The series has featured, among others, a Fulton couple who are living in a senior living community, a Linden Hills physician and the owners of a LynLake gym. “We’re exhausted and exasperated,” said Jennifer Vongroven, a bedside nurse at HCMC, upon her return to work after recovering from COVID-19. “To sit next to able-bodied people who refuse to believe in science is harder for me as a human being than sitting next to someone and watching them die.”
12/14/20 12:52 AM
A8 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
PUBLISHER Janis Hall jhall@swjournal.com
CO-PUBLISHER & SALES MANAGER Terry Gahan tgahan@swjournal.com
EDITOR Zac Farber 612-436-4391 zfarber@swjournal.com
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Brian Barber Steve Brandt David Brauer Michelle Bruch Chris Damlo Owen Davis Susan Du Mark Engebretson Zoe Gahan Nate Gotlieb Andrew Hazzard Brian Martucci Sarah McKenzie Valerie Moe Becca Most Jim Walsh Doug Wilhide
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Valerie Moe vmoe@swjournal.com
SPECIAL PROJECT DESIGNER Dani Cunningham
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Stories of coronavirus in Minneapolis How do you tell the story of what it’s like to live through a pandemic? Since April, the Southwest Journal has been keeping in touch with a selection of local residents including a pair of small business owners and a bedside nurse. These stories will continue to be published sporadically online at swjournal.com after the paper’s closure. All interviews are edited for length and clarity. Reporting for this issue is by Zac Farber.
Jen and Marcus Wilson, co-owners, True Grit Society gym
“She’s fighting for her life. She may die. So for us it’s a very real situation now.” WEDNESDAY, DEC. 9 Jen: Right around the time we got shut down, both of my parents came down with COVID. They live in Minot, North Dakota, and it’s really a crazy thing because it hadn’t reached that rate of infection where I had first-person knowledge. At first it was a stigma: “Oh, you have COVID, what did you do?” And now it’s turning into six degrees of separation. We never knew anyone who had it and got very ill. My mother, Apryl, has been in the hospital for four weeks. She’s fighting for her life. She may die. So for us it’s a very real situation now. My father is a veteran and he drives all over the state to rural towns helping other veterans get benefits from the government. My mother volunteers delivering Meals on Wheels to older folks. They’re in their 70s, in the age group that needs to be very careful, and according to them, they have been masking it up. My mother has asthma and very quickly after she got it, she developed COVID pneumonia. She now has MRSA [an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection]. She’s on a ventilator. She’s been sedated in a coma. I’ve heard stories of people being in the hospital for months who get better, so I just keep hoping. I think the actual COVID disease is similar to the social aspect of COVID. From moment to moment, I’ll get the call that they’re not pushing as much oxygen and she can maybe breathe a little on her own. Then the very next hour, I get a call that she’s critical — that her oxygen levels are very low, like 70%. It’s so up and down, similar to the social aspect. People right now are all over the place mentally. People are changing what they’re doing and how they’re living in the world from minute to minute. It mirrors the actual virus to me. People are like, “I’m so sorry you had to shut the gym down,” but thinking that somebody at the
gym might catch something like this and have to go through it with their family — man, it would kill us if something happened to a member or someone we cared about. It’s hard to make these decisions. We have a 5-year-old who is greatly affected by not having any friends to play with anymore. We have to weigh what’s best for her and her mental health and make a calculated decision. There’s no shame in the decision of what’s risky and what’s not and how people define that, but it’s something that everybody deals with, and it’s part of the fatigue. There are clear-cut risks to being in a gym without a mask on. I’m an imaginative person, and I definitely see an enormous puke-green coronavirus barreling toward my face, and I think about that and wonder if I’m doing the right thing at this moment. We’ve seen reports on infection rates in gyms and they’re very low — especially boutique gyms like ours. We are well below the standards of what we can have in a class and adhere to 10 feet of social distance in most cases, masks in/masks out and lots of air movement. And we did stay virus free for six months. So it was confusing what the state was basing these guidelines on. You still can go to church? We have a membership at the Arboretum and the Arboretum was closed, which is also very weird because it’s all outside and everyone is distanced there. So it’s a little muddled. Are there numbers that show why gyms should close? Without specific reasoning for why gyms were closed but not other things, it’s hard to try to bring comfort to our customers and to our instructors, who are putting themselves in harm’s way. It starts to feel like it’s very political. We think Gov. Walz has done a great job — he’s in a very difficult spot — but let’s see the numbers behind it. Marcus is very black and white: “We’re OK with shutting down, but give us the why.” The human part of this is that it is the right thing to do. Every time we walk in the gym there is risk involved. We quarantine otherwise, but then we walk into our business because we have to run it. We want everyone to stay safe. You add the whole situation with my family, my mother dying of COVID, and it’s definitely the right decision, but from a livelihood/business perspective, it’s a punch in the gut for sure. The silver lining of being shut down a second time is that you do it a little better than the first time. The minute we got shut down, we immediately spoke to all of our instructors and asked who would be willing to get on the schedule and teach a daily class. We still don’t want to charge people for fitness online — it’s just not something we want to do — so we froze memberships. But we wanted to make it so people could count on going to a workout at a certain time every morning or watch it throughout the day. The downside is we’re incurring a cost while we’re closed. We’re still paying instructors. We’ve been working through rent with our landlords, and they have been very understanding, but owing back rent puts a lot of stress on you. It’s like we keep falling further and further and further behind. You talk to a friend and they’re like, “Let’s meet up for coffee after the vaccine,” but it’s not that easy. There’s going to be so much time for everyone to get the vaccine and so many other variables. How long can we hang on? That is the question a lot of people are asking themselves. Our landlord has told us that we are their best bet. But it feels uncomfortable to owe. Marcus and I have talked about calling our legislators to see if there’s something that can be done in terms of business relief. Residential is the first priority
— to stop people from becoming homeless — but is there something that can be passed to help businesses pay their rent? But ultimately what does it cost? It’s costing people a lot of things that don’t actually have a monetary value. It’s difficult to hold our business up, hold our personal lives up and hold our health up all at the same time. Right now, our professional lives are falling down because it’s more important to take care of people’s lives.
Jennifer Vongroven, bedside nurse, HCMC
“We’re stressed to the max because there aren’t enough bodies to go around.” WEDNESDAY, DEC. 2 I still have some shortness of breath and I’m still coughing a little bit, but I’m feeling much better [after recovering from a case of COVID-19]. My taste and smell is mostly back, though I’m a big fan of Diet Pepsi and it’s missing flavor. The taste buds aren’t working on the center of my tongue. But my appetite is returning, and overall I feel pretty darn good. I managed to put down a pretty good Thanksgiving dinner. Because I’m teeming with antibodies as we speak, I was able to visit my parents in La Crosse, Wisconsin. We had turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and I made pretzel buns and lefse. We still practiced as much social distance as possible, making sure the tables were about 10 feet apart, just to be on the safe side. I have been doing a lot of research on antibodies. From what I’ve been reading, the apex of the antibodies in the body is between 60 and 90 days from when your symptoms resolve. So right now is a very good time for me to strike while the iron’s hot and go out and do things. But I will continue to do things safely on the presumption that even if I can’t physically pass the disease to someone else, I may be carrying it on my clothing or my person. So I have to be careful and try to maximize my time with others while making sure that everybody’s safe. At HCMC, we’re now around where we were at the pandemic’s peak in the late spring/early summer, and we’re expecting more. Some people wondered if there’d be a holiday surge. The answer is: “Absolutely, heck yeah, 100%, sign me up, that’s what’s happening!” You see on the news that this was one of the busiest Thanksgivings and you wonder, “What the hell are people doing right now?” We all want to rejoin the human race, but we can’t without consequences. We have lots of staff who are out — many with COVID, but people tend to get the flu or a cold SEE VOICES / PAGE A12
CORRECTION The story “The COVID caseload” on page A1 of the Nov. 26 issue should have stated that data guiding the dial-back order include 223 outbreaks at restaurants and bars since June, rather than in the single month of June.
southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 A9
Dateline Minneapolis
By Steve Brandt
Food, rent, community for undocumented Kingfield parishioners Magdalena and Jose have been sweethearts since they met as teens in the Mexican state of Pueblo. They migrated to Minneapolis. She worked in a suburban fast food shop. He worked a full shift daily in a woodworking shop and another half shift as a cleaner. Jose got sick with flu-like symptoms in early May and got sicker until the night he couldn’t breathe and was hauled away in an ambulance. He went on a respirator and spent 25 days in an induced coma. Meanwhile, Magdalena took ill. One night, when she feared she wouldn’t see morning, her 11-year-old brought a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe to her bedroom and kept vigil. Friends prayed the rosary over the phone and left food at her door. Eventually both recovered, even as the sickness raged through their extended family. But without income the deeply religious couple couldn’t pay their $900-a-month rent and turned to their church for help. When Jose got sick, Magdalena told herself: “With God’s help everything is going to be OK.” She hasn’t wavered from that belief. Father Kevin McDonough jokes that his job description calls for him to celebrate Mass, administer sacraments and perform “other duties as assigned.” That’s why you’ll see the 65-year-old pastor of
Incarnation Catholic Church in Kingfield shoveling snow outside the red brick church whose spire looms as a beacon far down 38th Street. This year McDonough added a new skill: operating a forklift. That’s one sign that his parish and its small staff have deepened their commitment to feeding the hungry and housing the poor as an international pandemic ballooned into a crisis among his flock. The forklift helps McDonough and his staff move dozens of pallets of food every other weekend to hundreds of households across the parish, more than 860,000 pounds as of early December. Incarnation is a parish with a split personality. It has about 400 households whose first language is English, but they’re dwarfed by another 2,500 households who primarily speak Spanish. The latter group moved from another parish two decades ago. Many are undocumented so the names used in this story are pseudonyms. They’ve reinvigorated Incarnation. So has McDonough. Brenda has had a tough year. Last winter, her sister was killed by a truck while walking to work in Minneapolis. COVID-19 shrunk her hours at a Lake Street restaurant; the subsequent civil unrest cut them even further. Helicopters buzzed over her small apartment in the Lyndale neighborhood, she heard gunshots and
Incarnation Catholic Church in Kingfield has distributed more than 860,000 pounds of food as of early December. Photo by Isaiah Rustad
a bank was torched mere blocks away. She and teen daughter Christina fled for a few days to a sister’s home in Edina. Christina has suffered depression and anxiety since a cousin was killed by bullies several years ago, and a grandfather died more recently. Her diligence in school tailed off. The pandemic spoiled plans for her coming-of-age quinceañera celebration in June. She’s suffered from social isolation. With little income, Brenda turned to Incarnation’s food and rent assistance programs for help. Every other week, she picks up extra food for relatives. “More than anything, I don’t care about myself,” she says. “I care about my daughter. That she has a career and doesn’t have to depend on anyone.” The vehicles start rolling through the parking lot tucked under the parish’s school building even before the scheduled start of the parish’s food distribution. They roll in four
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Elections
Meet the contenders Competitive City Council races in wards 7, 10 and 11 By Susan Du
Local races are already shaping up in anticipation of the Nov. 2, 2021, local elections, which could usher in a brand-new City Council. Three candidates are vying for Council President Lisa Bender’s Ward 10 seat and races for more than half of the city’s 13 wards look to be competitive, with Southwest council members Lisa Goodman (Ward 7) and Jeremy Schroeder (Ward 11) both facing challengers. Council members Andrea Jenkins (Ward 8) and Linea Palmisano (Ward 13) are both running for reelection without any known opponents as of press time. Some community organizers we recognize from three years ago will run again. A couple first responders are entering the ring for the first time. Incumbents will be judged on sweeping progressive policies enacted in zoning and affordable housing, as well as their responses to the maelstrom of crises that was 2020: COVID-19 and the subsequent recession, a nationwide racial reckoning sparked by a Minneapolis police officer’s killing of George Floyd and a recent surge in violent crime. How public safety should be reimagined is top of mind for everyone and the area with the most disagreement. Here are the candidates who’ve arrived at the starting line:
WARD 7 Lisa Goodman (incumbent) friendsforlisa.com
Lisa Goodman of Bryn Mawr has served on the City Council since 1998, as well as the boards of Jewish Family and Children Services, Meet Minneapolis and the Family Housing Fund. She also started Dog Grounds, a Downtown network of dog parks. Prior to that, she was the executive director of Minnesota NARAL, the state’s largest pro-abortion-rights advocacy group. Originally from Chicago, Goodman moved to Minnesota in 1989 to work on Paul Wellstone’s U.S. Senate campaign. Her top City Council accomplishments include seeding the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which has constructed more than 10,000 affordable units since 2003, and guiding development of Downtown Minneapolis, the city’s greatest tax base. Goodman believes public safety to be local government’s No. 1 responsibility and the bedrock of economic development. She believes more cops, not fewer, are required to work proactively with residents and businesses. Nevertheless, she agrees with her
fellow council members about the need to redistribute certain police duties, such as filling out accident reports and intervening in mental health emergencies. She wants the state to eliminate binding arbitration and the city to negotiate harder to revise the police union contract. Ultimately, she supports Medaria Arradondo, chief of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), in his efforts to change the culture of his department and bring it in step with the rest of society. “I’m hopeful that in 2021 I will have the ability to work with my colleagues to bring people together to reduce the toxic environment in city politics and policy,” Goodman says. “The all-or-nothing approach, the environment where some people win and others lose, does not help build cities in an equitable and sustainable way. It holds us back and needs to change.”
Nick Kor nickkor.com
Nick Kor of Downtown West, the son of immigrant small business owners from Hong Kong, is the senior manager of movement building at the Coalition of Asian American Leaders. He’s a community organizer who helped secure marriage equality in 2012 and lobbied with OutFront Minnesota to pass anti-bullying legislation. He also served as Gov. Mark Dayton’s civic engagement director for the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. “I am grateful for the service that current Council Member Goodman has given to our community over the last 23 years, but with Minneapolis facing new challenges, now more than ever, we need leaders that can bring us together to heal, to rebuild and to meet this moment,” Kor says. “This past year has been
extremely difficult for our city and tensions are high. I think the current council members’ hearts are in the right place, but we’ve been managing from crisis to crisis and we can do more to plan and think bigger.” Ward 7 is racially and economically diverse. Kor intends to uplift the voices of low-income constituents and renters specifically. Safety is among their biggest concerns, he says, and the solution must come from the public. “Safety and security is necessary for all of us to thrive, but many Black and brown people continue to feel unsafe with our current systems,” Kor says. “At the same time, we must acknowledge crime has increased in some parts of our city. Police are overburdened and are not well equipped to respond to the wide range of calls coming from the community. We must transform our system of public safety, rebuild trust and accountability, while at the same time addressing the rise in crime through prevention and by taking care of our people through investments in affordable housing, good jobs, youth programs and access to basic support services.” With local businesses and frontline workers devastated by 2020, he vows to prioritize them in a rebuild that involves creating green jobs, investing in renewable energy and striving to become a zero-waste city. Minneapolis should redress its racial disparities by giving workers of color opportunities to compete, Kor says. In 2015, as an organizer for the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability, he worked with contractors and government to ensure people of color were hired to build U.S. Bank Stadium. They surpassed their goals and funneled $39 million in wages to diverse workers. He also supports investing in alternative homeownership models like land trusts and cooperatives. Kor started 2020 abroad on a Bush Fellowship, studying how communities around the world organize for social change. He came home when the pandemic forced his mom
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to close her St. Paul salon. He took to the streets when George Floyd was killed in May, then joined the Coalition of Asian American Leaders to turn new voters out to the polls amid a surge in anti-Asian xenophobia brought on by President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the pandemic.
Teqen Zéa-Aida Teqen Zéa-Aida of Loring Park is a transracial adoptee and naturalized American who was raised in rural Minnesota. “I understand our state, who we are and where we come from,” he says. “I also fully believe in our potential and see where we can go together as a great American city.” For 22 years, he ran the modeling agency Vision Management Group, which took aspiring young models from diverse backgrounds to runways as far away as Paris and Singapore. He also owned a gallery on Nicollet Avenue and managed a Downtown law firm for the past few years. Zéa-Aida has been involved with mutual aid and rehousing work since fire destroyed the Drake Hotel last Christmas. After George Floyd’s killing, he maintained frequent contact with Council Member Lisa Goodman, Mayor Jacob Frey, faith leaders and other community stakeholders. Following the subsequent unrest, Loring Park experienced a shocking uptick in crime, he says, compounded by Downtown’s homelessness crisis, addiction and alleged sex trafficking. “Development — or gentrification depending on who you talk to — steams ahead, while we have lost countless businesses, Nicollet Mall is a wasteland and neighbors are either being displaced due to rising costs or fleeing due to feeling unsafe,” Zéa-Aida says. “Our Down-
town community services infrastructure is crumbling, low-income and public housing is in danger, social [ills are] rampant and much of the vibrancy and creativity that once illuminated our Downtown is temporarily gone.” Minneapolis needs big creative ideas and a focus on children, small business incubation and deep reform of policing in order to rebuild, ZéaAida says. He’s deeply concerned with the rise of paramilitarism in local police departments across the nation. As a Humphrey School Leadership and Public Policy Fellow, he also studied police mental health and its role in systemic reform. His first objective in office will be to convene a task force on police and safety to create honest dialogue between people with complex views. “This council calls themselves ‘the most progressive ever’ but leaves far too many people and perspectives behind,” he says. “To me it is kindness, transparency and a sense of responsibility to each and every constituent regardless of social position or political expediency that seems most needed.” Zéa-Aida spent much of 2020 taking care of his partner as he battled stage 3 colon cancer. He’s now in recovery and doing well.
WARD 10 Alicia Gibson votealiciagibson.com
Alicia Gibson, who stepped down as president of the Wedge neighborhood’s board in November, is a community organizer, writer and a former bookshop keeper. While studying for a Ph.D. in comparative literature and cultural studies, she taught students critical theory in white supremacy, patriarchy and economic exploitation. The first thing Gibson would do in office is
link up with the five neighborhoods of Ward 10, grease their lines of communication and enhance constituent services. That means tackling development without displacement, as well as preventing both community violence and racially motivated police brutality, which she views as the ward’s biggest challenges. She’d do it by shoring up services for youth, whose lives have been upended by COVID-19 and the killing of George Floyd, and embarking on a precinct-by-precinct truth and reconciliation process with police. “I think the current council has not adequately engaged the community in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, squandering a considerable amount of consensus and leaving us in unprocessed trauma,” Gibson says. “Expecting city staff to do the bulk of engagement work in the form of a city-wide survey is the lowest common denominator of engagement.” Gibson favors reparations for redlining and stolen land, specifically through using affirmative action to place African American and Native people in stable, wealth-building housing. Ward 10’s immigrant communities have also suffered from a crisis in affordable residential and commercial rents, and deserve greater representation in City Hall, she says. It’s been a year of grieving for Gibson, who recently lost her beloved grandmother. She spent 2020 sewing masks for health care workers, retooling her neighborhood association as a mutual aid network and pandemicparenting her children, who just began immersion Chinese virtually.
Katie Jones katieforward10.org
Katie Jones of the Wedge is policy manager at Center for Energy and Environment, a nonprofit that
makes buildings more energy efficient. She’s also a small landlord who participates in Stable Homes, Stable Schools, which houses Minneapolis students in need. She has worked in the city’s Sustainability Office. The first thing she’ll do in office is set clear definitions for fireable offenses so that bad cops who get the boot aren’t cycled back into the MPD through arbitration. Ward 10 residents want more compassionate cops, Jones says. One woman recently complained that after she was assaulted walking home from the grocery store, the officers who responded treated her with callousness and impatience. Jones believes housing and jobs prevent violence, group violence interrupters should be employed to their full potential and greater accountability — like amending the city charter to give the council greater authority over the MPD — will create better cops. Jones positions herself as a champion of renters. Preceding Gibson as president of the Lowry Hill East Neighborhood Association, Jones aggressively recruited renters to serve on the board, where they’re now in the majority, reflecting the makeup of the ward. She wants to create a “15-minute city,” where everyone’s everyday needs can be met within a 15-minute commute, all renters will have a place to take their compost and property owners get help decarbonizing energy-gobbling heating systems. (This year, she and her husband constructed a house made of straw bales on their property.) As retail recedes into the shadow of online shopping, she hopes to retool vacant commercial spaces into housing for the unsheltered and community gathering spaces. “I shared my neighbors’ anger and sadness at the murder of George Floyd. I joined you in marching for change and justice,” Jones says. “I attended reflective community meetings and had deep, uncomfortable conversations about systemic racism and white supremacy culture. SEE CITY COUNCIL / PAGE A13
A12 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
Feathers collected by Wendy Shelley.
FROM VOICES / PAGE A8
this time of year as well. We’re stressed to the max because there aren’t enough bodies to go around. There are more beds than we have nurses to fill the bedsides. They’ve offered bonuses to pick up extra shifts and increase the number of hours you work in an average pay period. Most days they’ll ask if you’d like to stay late. But overtime is a short-term answer to a long-term problem. I’m back working my full schedule, but I am not taking overtime at this point because I need to make sure my body is getting what it needs. I don’t want to commit to anything until my body is healed enough. I’m still huffing and puffing when I take one flight of stairs. I know there’s a lot of belief in the community that this disease isn’t as bad as it still is. People keep talking about deaths with COVID — more than 270,000 deaths and the number growing exponentially. But it’s not just the deaths. Even for someone with a
those didn’t materialize,” he said. Before the pandemic, he said, carriers would frequently take a route, decide it wasn’t for them and then “vanish off the face of the earth.” Johnson still marvels at the moxie of the high school girl who quit her Kenny route with flair by tossing several bundles of papers into Grass Lake. Newspapers have also turned up in Lake Harriet. There are plenty of other humorous stories to go around. A few years ago, two of Passey’s sons mastered the art of delivering newspapers without dismounting their bikes. “There was a customer who complained that they hit his door with the paper, not knowing that the kid was 30 feet away flying by on the bicycle. I was like, ‘Man, that’s a skill.’” Johnson remembers the time he picked up a load of advertising inserts from the Art Materials shop in the Wedge. He was driving north on Lyndale Avenue when a box of them fell out the back of his truck, busted open and spewed art supply deals over several blocks of traffic. “I thought it was funny; the advertiser didn’t,” Johnson said. “I think the advertising was a little too condensed for them.” Johnson said when he started working for the Southwest Journal’s parent company in 2004, he never thought it would become his career. “It could be a hard job, it could be physically demanding, it could be frustrating, but I liked the combination of physical, outside work and inside administrative office work,” he said. “I know the Southwest Journal is still
beloved by so many people and it’s a shame to see that that’s ending.” As carriers walked their routes for the penultimate time in late November, they said many readers stopped them to express their sadness at the paper’s closure. “A community newspaper is still really important to have,” Shelley said. “I know a lot of people rely on their phones and the internet, but I like to read the paper. I like to see events that are taking place. I like the light-rail coverage, the COVID stories, new businesses that are starting or moving on. You get a lot of information in a small paper.”
super mild form of it, like myself, there may be consequences down the road we aren’t aware of yet. Once you’ve had chicken pox, you can get shingles many, many years later; we have no idea what this disease holds in store for us. And for people who’ve been extremely ill, many of them will have long-term effects and never return to baseline. Even though they haven’t died, their life will never be the same again. It’s not just the number of deaths, it’s the number of people affected. I’d like to talk about what happened on Monday. It’s Monday, and I have a patient who has COVID. This patient has been in the hospital with COVID for a week or two, and now this patient denies our request for a ventilator. It is a vehement “no,” and we have to honor it. Maybe their brain isn’t getting enough oxygenation, maybe it’s their choice. But we can’t get a hold of a family member to intervene, to make decisions for them. We can see this patient’s oxygen dropping and their mentation changing. But we have to go with what the
patient says. And two hours after the patient refuses the ventilator, the patient is gone. Due to HIPAA, I can’t share the patient’s age or gender or race, but I will say that English was not their first language. So I searched the internet for music in their language and words I could say so that the last thing this person heard was in their own language. That’s all I could do, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a family member in another country dying, with nobody next to them to give comfort. It’s tough because it’s not just the people who die who are affected. Maybe the family member won’t know what happened because we couldn’t get a hold of them. Maybe the nurse went home and cried that night. Maybe a lot of people are affected in a lot of different ways by this disease. But we’re going to keep doing this, because that’s what you do. It’s tough, but I wouldn’t be anywhere else because I’d rather be there than have that person die alone. There’s an expense to this work, but that’s why we’re nurses. We do the hard things, the gross things that other
people don’t want to do, don’t want to see and don’t want to talk about. We’re exhausted and exasperated. Four days ago I was told that this disease is a lie and that hydroxychloroquine is still the answer. I have no more words. I’ve said everything I can possibly say and repeated it how many times? But this disbelief is still out there because people are promoting this disbelief. To sit next to ablebodied people who refuse to believe in science is harder for me as a human being than sitting next to someone and watching them die. We haven’t heard anything about vaccine rollout yet at HCMC. I’m so happy they’ve come up with a vaccine for this terrible, terrible disease, but for a vaccine to be rolled out this quickly is of some small concern. There’s more chance for inevitable quote-unquote bugs. Do I want to wait for the second or third iteration? Considering I have some natural antibodies right now, I have the gift of time on my side. But I hope it becomes available soon to our elderly population and our health care workers.
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Southwest Journal to the northeast corner of Fulton. This year, the local Boy Scouts troop that Passey leads delivered about 4,500 papers per issue to all of Fulton and about two-thirds of Armatage. The money the boys earn has gone directly into the troop’s coffers, Passey said, and paid for boat rentals, archery range fees, tractor tubes to float down Minnehaha Creek, sleeping bags, tents, boots and a high-end stove for summer camp outings. Many of the boys in Troop 6 come from low-income families, and Passey said working to fund their activities as a team has brought the troop closer. “Why should mom and dad pull out the checkbook when the kids can work a little and pay for the things we’re doing?” he asked. “Our troop has this feeling that, ‘Hey, we’re all together, so if we’re going to get some new
equipment, we’re going to work to pay for it and then it’s all of ours.’” The hardest part of delivering a newspaper in Minnesota is the extreme temperatures, carriers say. Yet the Southwest Journal’s lax delivery schedule — after picking up papers on Thursday, carriers have until Sunday to finish their routes — allows for some flexibility. During a summer heat wave, Shelley might not begin her route until 11 p.m. If there’s a winter blizzard, she can usually wait for the streets to be plowed before she starts pulling her garbage-bag-lined delivery sled. “Nobody seems to do their route exactly the same,” she said. “You have to figure out what works best for you.” Southwest Journal routes pay between 10 cents and 20 cents per paper, with rates varying based on the difficulty of the terrain. “A neighborhood like Kingfield — with real small 40-foot lots and flat, grid-patterned streets — is a lot easier to do than, say, Linden Hills, where you have curvy streets because of the lakes, some dead ends, some big hills and some big lots,” Johnson said. “One of the routes in Tangletown by the water tower is the most difficult, not only because of the hills but all the streets are curvy and have names that aren’t anywhere else in the city. Even with a map, it’s very difficult to deliver there.” Johnson said carrier turnover has been lower during the pandemic than any other time in his 16 years with the company. “The high school kids were planning on getting jobs with the Park Board or the restaurants, but
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southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 A13 FROM CITY COUNCIL / PAGE A11
We will need to continue pushing and doing this internal work to realize the just and equitable community we seek.”
Chris Parsons tinyurl.com/ chris-parsons-mpls
Chris Parsons of South Uptown is a firefighter and EMT with the St. Paul Fire Department. For the last seven years, he’s been president of the Minnesota Professional Fire Fighters union. This spring he helped pass a bill that protects health care workers’ wages and benefits should they contract COVID-19. “As a firefighter I have daily contact with individuals and families in the community that are struggling dealing with poverty, lack of access to affordable healthcare and medicine, and addiction among other things,” he says. “During the course of our interaction I hear their stories and it strengthens my resolve to help make change.” The first thing Parsons would do is ask all the other council members about their wards’ needs and aspirations, in order to serve the whole city. As for Ward 10, he considers safety to be the biggest concern. Having a walkable community loses its meaning when people are afraid to be on the street at night, Parsons says. He was upset this spring by council leadership’s promise to end the MPD without a road map to deliver. He’s in favor of maintaining the authorized size of the MPD at 888 officers — per Chief Arradondo’s request — prioritizing recruits of color. At the same time, he hopes to decriminalize low-level drug possession and limit police response to violent offenses. The key to reducing Minneapolis’ racial disparities is to build wealth and affordable housing among Black, Indigenous and other people of color, Parsons says. He applauds the
City Council for raising the minimum wage and mandating sick time. Furthermore, he wants to partner with Minneapolis Public Schools and unions to provide robust training in the trades.
WARD 11 Dillon Gherna dgmpls.com
Dillon Gherna of Windom is the public initiative coordinator of the Hennepin County Sheriff ’s Office, where he worked on expanding safe drug disposal sites and organizing town halls for the sheriff to hear from the public. He volunteers with Twin Cities Pride, YouthLink and Children’s Miracle Network, and spent much of his 2020 quarantine time buried in books. “Across the Bridge” by John Lewis, “Pothole Confidential” by R.T. Rybak, “Promise Me, Dad” by Joe Biden and “The Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein are a few he’s read this year. The first thing Gherna will do in office is find a way for every Ward 11 resident to get in touch with him beyond the standard work week. He also plans to meet with every other council member and department head to identify the biggest challenges ahead. In Ward 11, he says, this includes an increase in violent carjackings and homicides, rising homelessness, and small businesses on the brink of collapse. Residents tell him they want council members to engage more directly with them, even if they don’t agree on policy. As a gay man, Gherna says he wants all marginalized people at the table where decisions are made, sharing their varied perspectives instead of being spoken for. He commends the council’s commitment to transportation improvements, neighborhood walkability and sustainability goals, and
its desire to reimagine policing. Yet he felt disconnected from current representatives when they promised to defund cops without a clear definition of what that means, nor understanding of the limitations imposed by the city charter. Such a promise was confusing and divisive, Gherna says. He supports greater investments in violence prevention, mental health co-responders and restorative justice as things that should precede police intervention. Creating a new MPD requires gathering ideas from residents, expertise from law enforcement and social work professionals and road maps from other cities that have found success in reform, he says. “My No. 1 goal in this campaign is to listen to the constituents and to represent the array of diverse voices in a way that is mindful and respectful of everyone involved,” he says. “I place a high value on equity and inclusion and I believe these principles build the strongest communities.”
Jeremy Schroeder (incumbent) jeremyschroeder.org
First-term Council Member Jeremy Schroeder of Diamond Lake is a career advocate of progressive policies who came to the City Council by way of the Minnesota Housing Partnership, where he lobbied for affordable housing, and the government transparency organization Common Cause Minnesota. He also raises chickens. Schroeder says one of his top accomplishments as a council member is co-authoring the Inclusionary Zoning policy, which requires affordable units in new housing developments. Co-authoring a package of Residential Energy Disclosure policies is another. These policies
educate homeowners and renters about how their buildings use energy and provide guidance on how to reduce it. Schroeder also helped secure ongoing funding in the budget for the city’s four senior service centers, which offer preventative health care, transportation to doctor’s appointments, home repair and fitness classes. If re-elected, he’ll focus on finalizing the Opportunity to Purchase policy he’s authoring, which would give renters a chance to buy the building they live in if it’s put up for sale. In addition to a shortage of affordable housing — which prevents the ward’s seniors from aging in place and has contributed to the surge in homelessness during COVID-19 — Schroeder calls the climate crisis one of the greatest challenges of our time. And like many cities across the country, Minneapolis is facing an immediate crime wave fueled by the COVID-19 recession and loss of trust in the MPD following their killing of George Floyd. Schroeder trusts the Safety For All plan, which cuts $7.7 million from the MPD’s $179 million budget and invests in a mental health crisis unit, to steer Minneapolis in a more humane direction. He wants to unburden cops by sending specialized responders to deal with nonviolent thefts, parking issues and other busywork that doesn’t necessarily require an armed officer. “When Minneapolis residents, including many of my constituents, literally march in the streets in protest of MPD officers — who are city employees — I take that very seriously,” Schroeder says. “I have spent the last several months working with my colleagues to improve our public safety system so that it better serves everyone in Minneapolis, work that has included many tough conversations with community members. This has been some of the most challenging but important work I’ve been a part of, and we’re not finished.”
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A Farewell Poem for the Southwest Journal12/7/20
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Hats off to Terry and Janis Their paper has reached its end, The Southwest Journal will be missed, But we continue as friends. They have had a healthy run, Their staff did their best, But the pandemic is no fun, It put them to the test!
2:30 PM
And who knows which way to go As the death toll goes off the charts, All we can ever know Is that you followed your hearts! Happy Trails, friends, Mark Brandow, Quality Coaches
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A14 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
The challenges
FROM BUSINESS / PAGE A1
continued declines in revenue. And the survey, conducted by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, said businesses owned by people of color, which tend to be smaller employers, have fared worse. Attorney K. Davis Senseman is working with small business owners who see revenue down about 30%-80% across the board this year and suggests that customers help lobby elected officials for relief, buy gift cards, order takeout and show patience with service. “We just can’t wait for the New Year,” said Amazing Thailand General Manager Yin Muangmode. She’s trying to generate more bartender and server hours by creating a new coffee and bubble tea bar and a Thai Market featuring products made by staff artists alongside the restaurant’s chili oil. “We still have hope.” Ruth Bender recently grabbed her favorite doughnut from Bogart’s Doughnut Co., where the treats are displayed in the front window and a card reader is set up outside. “I’m getting takeout from places that I love,” she said, adding that she’s shopping local for the holidays. “I feel like I don’t do enough.” Tangletown Gardens and Wise Acre Eatery created a retail market and year-round Farm Direct program with customizable orders for weekly pickup. Co-owner Scott Endres said that while the pickup is popular, restaurant takeout is a fraction of normal business volume, especially during the winter. “Quite frankly I think a lot of restaurants are in a situation where we’re trying to minimize the amount of money we lose every month,” he said. Shuttered Southwest Minneapolis businesses include Egg and I, Fuji Ya, Burger Jones, the Apple store, Chino Latino, Fig + Farro (now launching a cookbook and a foundation), Sushi Tango, Penny’s Coffee in Linden Hills and Dogwood Coffee’s Uptown location, as well as Giordano’s, Herkimer, Grand Café (now creating luxury meal kits) and Little Tijuana. Many more venues are closed until further notice, including Saint Sabrina’s and Liquor Lyle’s.
Local Motion Boutique is closing at the end of the year. “We’ve been around for so long that people thought, ‘You’ll survive this, you’ll be fine,’” said owner Tonya Bryan. But business is down 76%, despite a Paycheck Protection Program loan, a ticketed outdoor art fair, product livestreams, dresses swapped for leggings and comfy tops and after-hours private shopping. “I feel like we’ve done just about everything that we can do. … Go out and shop. Don’t use your gift cards, don’t use your loyalty points right now,” Bryan said, adding that a typical retailer with $10,000 in monthly expenses can’t hold on until the summer for conditions to improve. Rather than spend $40,000 to bring in a new spring line, Bryan is planning future pop-ups at one of the many vacant storefronts
THE HELPERS Customers • Curbside pickup preferred to third-party delivery • Gift card purchase; many promotions underway State of Minnesota • $88 million in grants to temporarily closed restaurants, gyms and other venues with at least 30% sales decline • $14 million in grants for movie theaters and convention centers Hennepin County • Administering new infusion of state funding for local business grants • Elevate Business HC offers free consultations Business associations • Lake Street Council, Main Street Alliance, Southwest Business Association, LynLake Business Association, Uptown Association, 50th & France Business Association
she expects to become available. Suburban customers are afraid to visit Uptown, she said, and the rise in crime has changed the way she operates, keeping the doors locked and removing merchandise from the store. Salon Levante was broken into twice, and owner Dwight Carlson misses the street parking removed during reconstruction. Without destination shops like the Apple Store, he said, foot traffic is down. He normally sells 40 to 50 Halloween wigs; this year, he sold three. “But this probably is the most beautiful block in all of Uptown,” he said, referencing the 3000 block of Hennepin’s new decor, lighting and street trees. “I look at the positive side of everything as much as I can.” Fire sprinklers saved the Iron Door Pub building during the civil unrest. Repairs are nearly complete, but owner Dan Fehrenkamp isn’t looking to open anytime soon — he tried takeout for three weeks, but sales were only 10% of normal. “Restaurants aren’t and shouldn’t be open now given the state of COVID-19,” he said. “We’re an on-site venue. We’re a place for people to hang out, and we can’t hang out right now.” For the time being, Fehrenkamp said he’s teaching kids at home and repeatedly hitting refresh in a Google search for government stimulus updates. Minnesota legislators passed a COVID-19 economic relief bill on Dec. 14 directing grants to businesses that closed due to the governor’s executive order. Hennepin County recently started “Elevate Business HC” with pro bono consultations. The Twin Cities metro lost about 67,000 lodging and food services jobs between the second quarters of 2019 and 2020, according to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development’s quarterly census. The metro also lost nearly 28,000 jobs in retail trades and nearly 22,000 jobs in the arts, entertainment and recreation. James Kenna made an offer to open a bar at the former Soap Factory building last spring
Owner Miguel Urrutia is taking El Jefe Cocina & Bar into “hibernation” until March. Photo by Isaiah Rustad
but shelved that dream when the pandemic hit. Now he’s started a Facebook page for hospitality workers transitioning into real estate, and he’s showing Uptown condos. He loved working in hospitality for 20 years, most recently bartending at JJ’s Clubhouse, but industry management experience doesn’t necessarily translate to a 9-to-5 career, he said. “I’m sure a lot of people in hospitality are now struggling,” he said. “I worry about how long it takes to recover from that.” Maari Cedar James of Chowgirls, which has partnered to create emergency meals through Minnesota Central Kitchen, talked about the challenge of monitoring staff health during a Nov. 5 Minnesota Events Coalition meeting. “This has created some HR quagmires, because a lot of times what was illegal to talk about with staff in the past is now a requirement, and there’s a lot of gray area,” she said. “We’ve probably revised our COVID-19 case response plan 15, 20 times.” At the same Zoom meeting, D’Amico Catering operations director Cathy Bovard talked about the anguish staff have felt after testing positive, requiring their co-workers to miss shifts. She recommended a free contact tracing course available from Johns Hopkins University. SEE BUSINESS / PAGE A15
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southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 A15 FROM BUSINESS / PAGE A14
Businesses that temporarily closed for a few days due to COVID-19 exposure and have since reopened include LynLake Brewery, the Uptown VFW, Butter, Hola Arepa, Bulldog Uptown, Broders’, Patisserie 46 and Red Cow on 50th, among many others. Namaste Café recently closed for a few days in mid-December due to a staff member’s exposure to COVID-19 outside the workplace, the first health issue they’ve experienced since the pandemic began. Co-owner Nadine Schaefer said many regulars called while they were closed to show their concern and support. The restaurant could always use more takeout orders, she said. They’re selling chai growlers, taking preorders for holiday meals with mulled wine kits and lending patrons reusable containers. Another new challenge relates to third-party delivery services. “A lot of people are scared even to go out right now. … They’re inclined to do delivery instead of ordering and picking up,” said Urrutia of El Jefe, who said slow service and delivery charges up to 30% finally prompted him to axe delivery a couple of months ago. “The reality is you’re not making any money. Delivery companies are taking a huge portion of profits.” Minneapolitans appear to be staying home at higher rates than others in the region, according to Google mobility reports shared by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. Retail and recreation mobility in Minneapolis was down 42% as of Dec. 1, compared with a 33% drop statewide and a 26% drop nationally, based on a seven-day rolling average measured against a five-week period at the beginning of this year. Google creates the reports using anonymized datasets from users who have turned on the “location history” setting. Travel to workplaces was down 52% in Minneapolis, compared with the state’s decline of 44% and U.S. decline of 40%.
The pivots
Businesses continue to innovate with new offerings suited for the times.
FROM BRANDT / PAGE A9
community service hours and senior citizens like me (I’m an Incarnation parishioner). They come month after month, shivering in April and sweltering in July. Contingency plans are being made to operate through the winter. Spanishand English-speaking church members work side-by-side, which McDonough believes brings them together. He expects to distribute food every other week through Memorial Day, by when he hopes vaccines will help breathe life back into the economy. Maria has been fighting the odds since she was a teen in her Mexican hamlet of a couple of dozen houses and a politician tried to renege on an election promise to help villagers build better homes. Her sit-in in his office got results. But that put her at risk of reprisals, so she moved to Guadalajara where she was looked down on for her Indigenous heritage. She’s worked since high school while raising six children. After migrating to Minneapolis, her job in a child care center covered the rent on a four-bedroom house just off Lake Street. When the pandemic closed her workplace, she made some money cooking home-prepared meals to sell to mechanics at a nearby garage. But rioting along Lake Street forced the garage to close. Like other undocumented residents, Maria is ineligible for federal unemployment assistance, even though she pays taxes. “There’s so many walls and blocks when you don’t have documentation,” she said. Yet in Minneapolis she’s been a tireless volunteer in both church activities and at the state Capitol for legislation to ease conditions for undocumented workers. Meanwhile, she needs rent help. The parish has a leadership group for Spanish-speaking organizations. Its monthly meeting fell just before the governor’s shutdown orders took effect in March. The group found consensus on the community’s key needs: food and rent help for the hourly workers facing
The Jungle Theater’s fall season is virtual, including the full-length production “Is Edward Snowden Single?” Isles Bun & Coffee is offering frozen ready-to-bake buns and puppy dog tails. Wild Mind Artisan Ales added a menu by chef Ian Gray and the Wild Grind coffee bar. The former Gigi’s Café has converted to Café Wyrd, which is taking weekly pre-orders for coffee beans, brioche and scratch-made soups. Don Raul became the takeout-oriented taqueria El Travieso. Broders’ added Pork & Piccata, specializing in pickup and delivery. Red Cow created the “virtual food hall” Chicken Republic. Nightingale added Lake City Sandwiches with focaccia made daily. And new venues continue to open: Rosalia Pizza and Fire & Nice Alehouse are making woodfired pizza, Yeah Yeah Taco is sharing Zettas’ kitchen on Eat Street, Petite León offers a takeout-friendly menu, Cafe Ceres is headed to the former Penny’s location, Gyu-Kaku Japanese BBQ’s tableside cooking is adapted for takeout and Sooki & Mimi is hiring for a new Uptown space. Taproom Direct, a partnership that includes Fair State Brewing and Sociable CiderWerks, will pop up every Monday this winter at Pizza Luce’s Uptown parking lot, providing a pickup site for pre-ordered beer and cider. The Driftwood Char Bar launched a fundraiser, opened its kitchen to the family-owned soul food eatery Wholesoul and continues the Shotgun Ragtime Band’s 500-show streak through livestream every Sunday. “The fundraiser has done real well. The problem is, with this going on for so long, we’ve really used up every reserve,” said booker Larry Sahagian. At Polished Nails and Spa, which is making 20% of normal revenue and cautiously serving about eight clients per day, staff are selling at-home spa kits and applying for as many grants as possible, even though a $10,000 grant is quickly consumed by rent and other expenses. “I don’t want to complain because my main goal is to keep the business,” said owner Ivy Le. “I’m thankful that it’s still here.”
layoffs or shorter hours. The food program was operating within three weeks. The rent assistance model was McDonough’s brainchild, based on the concept of shared sacrifice. Tenants are asked to come up with a third of their rent, the parish matches that and landlords are asked to forgive the remaining third. The incentive for landlords is that they keep a tenant who has previously made rent on time and are spared the much larger costs of turning over a unit. Some $200,000 has been raised for about 100 households. McDonough expects the food need will continue at a lesser level for another year or two. So he’s beefing up the modest food shelf the parish has operated for at least 20 years. He hopes to double the number of households served. Meanwhile, the parish has built new networks with the city, county and state. It has become a higher-profile player, not only in the world of food distribution but also as a place for services like flu shots, COVID testing and energy assistance. “They told us, ‘You’re reaching people that no one else is reaching,’” McDonough said. Rosaria’s work hours at a Lake Street sandwich shop were already cut by the pandemic; vandalism during the unrest closed the shop altogether. Many nearby businesses she patronizes were looted or burned, meaning she couldn’t find work there either. The disruption hit the apartment where she lives near the 3rd Precinct. First there was the noise. Then her apartment was evacuated at 2 a.m. when authorities feared gas explosions as buildings burned. As tenants waited, cars exploded nearby. Tenants took turns guarding the apartment’s entry door. Rosaria, a native of the Mexican state of Morelos, not only turned to the Incarnation parish’s food program for help; she also volunteers with it. The parish rent assistance program temporarily cut her monthly payment from $900 to $300. “I feel better, less worried,” she said. “It’s very difficult now to find work.”
I’ve supported Southwest Journal since the beginning, showcasing many of Minneapolis’ finest homes.
HOLLY FIREHAMMER, REALTOR www.hollyfirehammer.com 612-388-7579
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FAREWELL issue
Southwest Journal December 17–31, 2020
Southwest Journal contributors look back over 31 years of community journalism. Recollections by (some of) the folks behind the scenes.
JANIS HALL
PUBLISHER & CO-FOUNDER 1990-2020
pages on huge paste-up boards. Zoe’s first Southwest Journal appearance was on the front page of the Dec. 11, 1996, issue, with her teacher. In 1994, we took the news staff on a retreat to Bluefin Bay on Lake Superior, where we created the Southwest Journal’s mission statement:
Mission statement
Our company exists to serve our community with integrity by producing a reliable, professional newspaper, Southwest Journal. We are committed to fairness, teamwork, and openness to new ideas. On the last day of the retreat, we were sitting in the living room enjoying the morning sun, when a workman ran up and yelled, “Get out, there’s a fire!” A welder, who was heating up frozen pipes, set a fire in the adjacent townhouse. We scrambled to get our suitcases and run out of there, but we left one important object behind. I discovered the lack of it when we unpacked at home. We had left Zoe’s favorite blanket. I jumped in the car and went into Dayton’s in a panic. Thank goodness they had the same yellow and blue blanket! I got home and washed it a few times. I held my breath as Zoe climbed into bed with her imposter blanket. She didn’t suspect anything, and I didn’t tell her the real story for about 20 years. The Southwest Journal was a hit. We were
printing 80-page issues once a month and giving a lot of our income to the printer. In 1995, Terry and I took a retreat to Lake Pepin to talk about the business and came back with a plan to double both the frequency and ad prices. We were concerned about losing advertisers, but every one of them stuck with us. The additional money allowed us to hire additional staff and a consultant, Donn Poll, who helped us redesign the paper. We had expected Donn to advise us about fonts and ways to improve our photos, but he changed how we thought about the paper. He created a list of categories from City Hall to churches – all of the entities that affected the lives of people in Southwest. We used that list to track the stories in each issue to ensure that we covered each category at least once every six issues. Now we had a way to gauge the success of our coverage and make sure we weren’t missing anything. In 1997, we bought our first office building at 31st & Lyndale and maxed it out within a few months. We were up to four or five reporters, two editors, four salespeople, three designers and a photographer, plus Terry, me, numerous freelancers, several dogs and Zoe running around. We were lucky to have our own parking lot. Linda Picone came to us from the Star Tribune in 1998. She brought a level of professionalism that we had never experienced. Linda assembled an outstanding team of reporters and broadened our coverage to larger issues of race and innercity poverty. Over the next six years, Southwest Journal editorial staff would win four Premack awards — the most important journalism award given to Minneapolis newspapers. In 1998, Martiga Lohn won for her story “Painting the town.” In 2000 and 2001 the editorial staff won for special sections on affordable housing and racial issues. In 2003, reporter Scott Russell won for several stories he wrote about Minneapolis city pensions.
Mark Engebretson, Mark Anderson, Janis Hall and Cynthia Scott after fleeing the fire at Bluefin Bay that occurred on the last day of their 1994 retreat. SEE HALL / PAGE B14
LIST OF SOUTHWEST JOURNAL EMPLOYEES AND CONTRIBUTORS: Aaron Rupar • Aaron Straka • Abbie Burgess • Abby Doeden • Adam Boyadjis • Adam Bradley Jonas • Adam Epperson • Adam Overland • Adit Kalra • Aime Karam • Aimee Johnson • Alan Craig • Alan Worman • Alex Smith • Alex Van Lepp • Alexandra Cortes • Alicia McCann • Alison Fiebig • Allen Brisson-Smith • Allen Smith • Allison Kaplan • Allison Schlesinger • Alyssa Graham • Amanda Alexander • Amanda Hane • Amanda Kushner • Amanda Wadeson • Amber Billings • Amber Schadewald • Amy Anderson • Amy Fastenau • Amy Lotsberg • Amy McDougall • Amy Rash •
I
’ve lost count of the number of times someone has asked me if I edit the stories. So what exactly does the publisher do? The answer is whatever needs to be done. In my years with the Southwest Journal, I’ve written stories, laid out issues, delivered the paper, run payroll, sent out invoices, recorded checks, hired employees, fired employees, reviewed countless pages, argued with advertisers, fielded reader complaints, taken out the trash — and the list goes on. I was even tech support for our company for many years. I graduated from the U of M in 1987 with a degree in technical communications and planned on a career of writing computer manuals. When the Apple Macintosh came out I bought one as quickly as I could. But the purchase that made the difference in my life was a $5,000 Apple LaserWriter (which I still have – the damn thing weighs 80 pounds). That technology put the task of desktop publishing into everyone’s hands. I started up a small business to produce business cards and brochures, got hired by the Whittier Globe to produce page galleys and never looked back. Terry Gahan and I moved into a duplex in Linden Hills in 1988 and quickly realized that the neighborhood didn’t have a newspaper. We started planning to publish one with Terry in sales, me in tech and typesetting, Mark Anderson (from the Globe) as editor and Paula Keller as photographer. We published our first issue in January 1990. Terry and I agreed that I should have the title of publisher and have the final word, because Terry sold the ads and we didn’t want that to influence our decisions. As it happened, we never disagreed on the big issues. We never ran print ads or stickers on the front page and we never published “sponsored content.” The two of us filled positions FIRST ISSUE until we could afford to hire for them. Terry delivered the paper and I typeset it. Our daughter Zoe, who was born in 1991, grew up with the paper. When she was 3, she loved the rolling waxer that applied hot, sticky gunk to the back of white paper. Zoe loved nothing better than sitting up on the layout counter, gluing sticky paper to everything in sight, while we waxed down the actual
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southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 B3
SALES MANAGER & CO-FOUNDER 1990-2020
Illustration by Brian Barber
fter Janis Hall and I moved to Minnesota in 1982 from San Francisco, I was working as a dishwasher at Broders’ and jobbing as a musician when someone mentioned that our community paper at the time, the Whittier Globe, needed a delivery person. For the next six years, I became the Globe’s delivery driver and gradually took on the sales and collections tasks, while Janis typeset the Globe pages on our Apple laser printer. When Janis and I moved to Linden Hills in 1988, we realized the neighborhood really needed a newspaper. So after a year of planning we started the Southwest Journal in our home at 39th & Sheridan. Once again, I took on the role of delivery driver until we could afford to hire delivery folks. Our first issue in January 1990 generated enough cash to pay for itself. We skipped February, and the March 1990 issue revenues doubled. We were on our way. Within four years we were publishing 80-page newspapers once a month. It was like delivering a phone book. We changed our publishing schedule to every other week and by 1995 we had a solid little business. We moved operations out of our home to an office at 49th & Washburn and never looked back. I remember the second issue of the Southwest Journal especially well. We had purchased a rustedout, baby blue Ford van to do the deliveries. We had our name painted on the side and drove to Shakopee to pick up the papers from the printer. I drove the van, fully loaded, over the Old Shakopee Road, when the load shifted on a turn and I was two wheels on the ground and two in the air. It was not smart to put a ton of newsprint in a half-ton van. We finally hired a distribution company and used them until we received a call from a Southwest resident informing us that two of our delivery folks were passed out on their front lawn. The distribution service we had hired was employing some questionable folks. We fired the company and brought distribution in-house, hiring a manager, who created routes
and managed our delivery drivers. It was an expensive model, but it has served us well for all of these years. I’ve also been the sales manager since the paper began and eventually developed a series of video training lessons because the turnover was so high. Over the years, we developed a list of advertisers who had real success advertising with us. One day in the early 1990s, a young guy pulled up in a pickup with a lawn mower in the back. He was covered with grass clippings when he came in to ask about advertising. We started running small classified ads for him. He got great results and wanted to run bigger ads. Based on the success of his ads with us, he hired a crew and bought a couple of trucks and decided to run some inserts. He now runs a $4 million to $5 million per year operation in the Twin Cities. We provided that kind of opportunity for a lot of small businesses. Janis just heard from our gardener that she was upset at the closing of the Southwest Journal because she gets all of her customers from it. For many local businesses, the Southwest Journal was their entire marketing plan. Our circulation area was large enough that a business could focus on the Southwest area, which was good for Southwest residents. Our strongest sales category has been home improvement. In April 1990, a guy called in and wanted to run a half-page ad. We agreed to run it for $300. I called him the next month and he said he didn’t get any calls from the ad. We learned from that mistake, and from that point on, we helped advertisers develop a budget to help them get results. We trained our ad salespeople to sell $50 ads for six times. We figured out that if we spent the advertiser’s money as if it were our own, they usually got good results. My experience at the newspaper has given me a sense of community in Southwest, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of it. We happened to start the paper around the time the city launched the Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP), helping to fund neighborhood programs and improvements. Neighborhood groups were forming to take advantage of the money that was available from the city. Residents from one area were interested in the news about other neighborhoods and the paper enjoyed a great readership right from the start. It wasn’t all positive at the beginning. As the Southwest Journal expanded into more neighborhoods, we became a choice for advertisers over the existing, smaller papers. We decided to expand the circulation into the Uptown area and asked to introduce ourselves at the East Calhoun Community Organization.
Illustration by Greg Holcomb that first appeared in the 1991 issue of the ECCO newspaper.
A reporter from the ECCO, the area’s newspaper, wrote a scathing piece on us, explaining that ECCO residents already had a newspaper and quoted one resident as saying, “The Southwest Journal is too much to read.” The article was accompanied by a large illustration depicting us as a shark with dollar-sign eyes eating up a smaller fish below the headline, “Residents Tell Southwest Journal ‘We Don’t Want You Here.’” We expanded into East Calhoun anyway. Janis and I were always aware of the conflict between advertising and reporting. It was very common for new advertisers to try to link a story (written by us) to an advertising contract. Now we call those agreements “sponsored content.” No matter what you call it, we never crossed that line between advertising and journalism. We didn’t even buckle when a developer from Chicago flew in and threatened to pull a $70,000 advertising contract if we published a story about their condominium development having water leakage problems. A resident had reached out to one of our reporters, the reporter got the story and reached out to the developer for a comment and the developer came straight to us to kill the story. After meeting with our editor, we stood behind the story and suggested the developer write a letter to the editor if they disagreed with the story. In the end the story ran and the developer didn’t pull the ads. About a year later the Star Tribune got the same story from the same resident. Soon afterward, a 10-year warranty requirement was put in place on all new condo developments, which is one reason so many developers started building apartments instead. I am grateful for the opportunity I have had to work with a dedicated group of reporters, editors, sales folks, admin staff and delivery people. Together we had a great run of 31 years. It has been my privilege to work directly with hundreds of small business owners who spent their hard-earned money with us to support the Southwest Journal. Without their commitment to advertising we would never have had a chance. With it we were able to produce the best community newspaper in Minnesota and quite possibly the country. Thank you to all of those advertisers for giving us the chance of a lifetime. Finally, it has been the readers of the Southwest Journal who made our model of community journalism work. When a readership supports local businesses, everybody wins. Our local businesses are a big part of what makes Southwest a great place to live and I for one will continue to support them. As for the future, I plan to spend my retirement in the recording studio writing songs and performing around the area when the pandemic lifts. My band’s name is Terry Hughes Music and terry my website is terryhughesmusic.com. In between sessions you will find me on the golf courses around the Twin Cities.
Amy Sutton • Andre Eggert • Andre Triplett • Andrea Webster • Andrew Hazzard • Andrew Heiser • Andrew Magill • Andrew Newman • Andrew Tretter • Andy Prasky • Andy Scott • Andy Sturdevant • Anjula Razdan • Ann Knuttila • Anna Pratt • Anna Rockne • Annabelle Marcovici • Anne Discher • Anne Geske • Anne Hanson • Anne Noonan • Anne O’Konski • Anne Torkelson • Annette Gagliardi • Ariella Schreck • Astridita • Austen Macalus • Barbara Gildner • Bart Johns • Becca Most • Ben Johnson • Bernadeia Johnson • Beth Wohlberg • Bill Green • Bill Lindeke • Bill Minge • Bill Morrish • Bjorn Saterbak • Bob Eleff • Bob Fine • Bob Gilbert • Bobbie Keller • Brad Branan • Brady Gervais • Bre McGee • Breanne Doroff • Brenda Taylor • Brendan Olszewski • Brent Killackey • Brent Nelson • Brent Renneke • Bret Ryan Brian Barber Brian Ehlers • Brian Lambert • Brian Martucci • Brian Voerding • Bridgett Erickson • Britt Aamodt • Bryan Anderson • Bryan Nanista • Cailtin Pine • Caleb Williams • Cali Owings • Callah Nelson • Cam Winton • Camille Gage • Candice Gillmore • Carissa Wyant • Carl Alstad • Carl Hamm • Carla Hinkens • Carla Waldemar • Carly Ettinger • Carly Reynolds • Carol Johnson • Caroline Daykin • Carolyn Karlin • Carter Jones • Caryl Yvonne Hunter • Cassandra Gifford • Cassidy Curry •
TERRY GAHAN
B4 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
I
t is a frequent and innocent question, and one we’ve all received at our respective jobs: “So, how long have you been with the Southwest Journal?” After all these years, I’ve never quite figured out how to answer that question. My parents Janis and Terry started the paper in their basement in 1990, a year before I was born. I grew up in a home with newspapers — our family’s, the Star Tribune and the Sunday New York Times — strewn across the breakfast table. From a young age, afternoons were spent at the Southwest Journal’s first office on 50th & Washburn, cutting and pasting my own mini newspapers on the wax and light tables. Yes, that’s the original cut and paste. I joined my father on sales calls, standing by quietly while the details were negotiated, fascinated at the behind-thescenes activities of whichever restaurant, HVAC company or landscaping company we happened to be meeting with that day. The post-meeting rundown that followed in my dad’s car was full of wisdom on negotiation and sales tactics. Most of it went over my head. My dad still harps on me when I don’t negotiate hard enough. I entered young adulthood having been steeped in my parents’ discussions of running a small business. Contracting a third-party distribution company alleviated a bottleneck in their small operation and gave them a chance to let someone else do the heavy lifting. But the subsequent phone call — “Excuse me, but I found a dozen
In Zoe’s first news story, which she published at age 7, she reported on a bad, bad day.
together for the next three years, and I got a crash course in managing a business, managing people and managing the unexpected. I built on the lessons my parents had knowingly or unknowingly taught me, and we shared laughter, joy, tears and pride, all strapped to that rollercoaster together. I recall we spent one morning on final preparations for a difficult and long-planned meeting with an employee, only to have a fireman stride up the steps of our downtown office building, yelling, “Everyone out! There’s a gas leak next door; you all need to get two blocks away now!” As general manager, I spent evenings researching new models of journalism for the digital age, conjuring big visions for the future of our small paper. I developed new methods to measure our success and made a hell of a lot of spreadsheets. It was intimidating to lead such a talented team of reporters, designers, salespeople and delivery personnel, many of whom had known me as a surly teenager with a mohawk. I saw countless examples of the paper’s importance to our community during conversations with advertisers and readers. The paper meant something to each of them, and they saw themselves and their community reflected in its pages. Even disagreements or conflicts about the paper’s ad or editorial content showed me that readers paid attention to what was printed in those pages. Despite our best efforts, a talented team and all those spreadsheets, our sales continued to decline. A small business is nimble but also fragile. As revenues declined, so did our budget. And a shrinking budget made large-scale transformations to our business model seem further and further out of reach. A potential purchase of the paper by someone we hoped could invest in a game-changing transformation fell through amid the pandemic, and the way forward became less clear. And after 30 years of leading the charge, my parents were ready to retire. I decided that my future was not in management or publishing. I made the decision to depart the company this May and return to Alaska, where I fish and
don’t make nearly as many spreadsheets. It was a formative experience to help nurture the business my parents began and manage the team that got an awardwinning paper out the door. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity and the trust of my parents and our employees from whom I learned so much. The phrase “high-quality, hyperlocal journalism” might sound like buzzwords used in sales pitches or lofty conversations about the virtues of a free press, but my family lived those words. We have countless stories that we tell at the dinner table, rehashing the hilarity of the unexpected moments, the excitement of our new ideas, the despair of a well-made plan deteriorating. High-quality, hyperlocal journalism is messy, fun, unpredictable, difficult and rewarding. It is ultimately produced through the hard work of many people, each with their own collection of stories. The union of all those stories and experiences is what made the Southwest Journal the gem that it is. So, I guess the answer to the question is that I’ve been with the Southwest Journal since the beginning and just about to its end. And I still hope that a new generation of savvy and tenacious journalists and business owners will carry the community journalism torch in some form or another. As Henry Ward Beecher said, “The newspaper is a greater treasure to the people than uncounted millions of gold.” This paper has provided incalculable value to our community for three decades, and it will be greatly missed. Thank you to everyone who made it possible.
Cassie Jones • Cassie Limpert • Cate Fedele • Catherine Hageman • Cathy TenBroeke • Cecelia Garcia-Velez • Cedar Imboden Phillips • Charlie Anderson • Chris Damlo • Chris Havens • Chris Luse • Christine Nunez • Christopher Greising • Christopher J. Hamilton • Christopher Kasic • Christopher Koehler • Christopher Shea • Christy Hegeholz • Chuck Terhark • Claire Thiele • Clare Jensen • Clay Oglesbee • Cody Nelson • Cole W. Williams • Colin Perkins • Connie Baker-Wolfe • Connie Levi • Courtney French • Courtney Lowe • Craig Churchward • Craig Wilson • Cristof Traudes • Cynthia F. May • Cynthia Moothart • Cynthia Scott • Cynthia Stenehjem Sparks • Dan Breva • Dan Haugen • Dan Marfield • Dana Croatt • Dani Cunningham • Dani Litt • Daniel Brazil • Daniel Plotkin • Danielle Nordine • Danny Guy • Dave Anderson • Dave Aron • Dave Burnside • Dave Graf • David Anger • David Birchard • David Brauer • David Bresler • David Johnson • David Luger • David Motzenbecker • David Nicholson • David Ritsema • David Streier • Dean J. Seal • Deb Pilger •
ZOE GAHAN
GENERAL MANAGER 2017-2020
bundles of your paper floating in Lake Harriet” — meant it was time to rethink and plot a new course. I saw that running a small business was a constant rollercoaster of action and reaction; taking the best shot and adjusting when it fell short or missed the mark. My parents worked as a team and held on through it all. I’m sure some of those periods felt more akin to being strapped to the front of the rollercoaster than to riding safely in it. But the paper never missed a deadline and arrived on doorsteps, brimming with ads and valuable local news coverage. The readers and advertisers were happy and never saw the behind-the-scenes triumphs and tribulations. I learned that the readers and advertisers were happy when I took the position at the front desk of the paper during the summers of my high school years. I fielded calls from advertisers frantic to get in touch with their sales rep: “Can we increase our ad size and extend our contract? We’re getting a great response and don’t want to miss the next issue.” I took messages for our reporters when readers called in to thank them for shedding light on a pressing issue in their neighborhood, or for stories that rekindled cherished memories of their youth in the City of Lakes. Years later, while working full time as the client services administrator, advertisers would do a double-take at my name and exclaim, “I remember when you were this tall! We’ve been advertising with your parents since you were in diapers!” Embarrassing, sure, but I really did enjoy those years at the Southwest Journal. After some time away from the paper after college, during which I traveled and worked out of the country, I found myself mulling over the future of the family business. At the heart of all those discussions I had overheard at the dinner table years ago was the underlying principle that honest journalism is the cornerstone of a functioning society. “Thank god for reporters,” my mother always said when a big story broke. I couldn’t let the opportunity pass to help navigate the paper, our paper, to its next stage. I called my parents from a train in Argentina and told them I would take the open general management position that they had offered. My parents and I worked closely
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B6 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
I
REPORTER AND ASSISTANT EDITOR 1991-1999
n one way, writing this is an actual dream come true. You see, I had three stints at the Southwest Journal and twice I quit full-time jobs to return to the paper. Since leaving “for good” in February 1999, I have had a recurring dream that I returned one more time. So, I guess this represents my return, albeit for one brief journey down memory lane. I met Mark Anderson and Paula Keller in 1990. They were the caretakers for our apartment building at 37th & Garfield. It didn’t take me long to make the connection that Mark was the editor and Paula the photographer for this great new community newspaper, the Southwest Journal, which I discovered in the foyer of our building. At the time, I was a reporter for Lillie News, primarily covering suburban St. Paul governments. As a Minneapolis resident for nearly 10 years, I was a geeky spectator of Minneapolis City Council meetings on the Minneapolis Television Network. These were the days of Mayor Don Fraser, and
encouraged to apply for a full-time position with MSP Communications, which was about to launch Twin Cities Business Monthly. It was a great opportunity to work not only for an established and well-respected publishing company, but also to be part of a startup publication with an office in the heart of Downtown. I became assistant editor, and under the guidance of editor Jay Novak, I sharpened my business reporting skills — all the while continuing to freelance for the Journal. In fact, I had a big role in the 1993 election coverage, which saw Sayles-Belton ascend to mayor, while Steve Minn (Ward 11) and neighborhood activist Lisa McDonald (Ward 10) won election to the City Council. With new city leadership and momentum building for the city’s Neighborhood Revitalization Program
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(NRP), it was an exciting time to be covering Minneapolis and I wanted a bigger part in it. In March 1994, Mark took me to lunch to discuss a proposal he and Janis had hatched to bring me back as a full-time reporter. I accepted, of course. As the Journal continued to grow, it now had its own building and I had my own office. For the next five years, I covered City Hall, the airport, the Neighborhood Revitalization Program, local business issues, the Midtown Greenway and many feature stories. I fondly recall writing about the Finnish stamp club, the Minneapolis Audubon Society, the lakes and so many other stories that shone a positive light on Minneapolis and its residents. Above all, however, I was driven to report on city policy and politics in a meaningful, tough-but-fair way — in pursuit of the truth and in hopes of elevating civic engagement. Through it all, I always felt supported by Mark, Terry and Janis. And I believe our collective work over the years compared most favorably with the Star Tribune, City Pages and the Twin Cities Reader — especially on such issues as airport noise, the erosion of city development funds, the changing business landscape of Uptown, police misconduct and election-year political campaigning. In February 1999, I made the right — but very difficult — decision to leave the Journal for a communications position at the University of Minnesota, where I currently work as communications director for the libraries. I have no regrets, but I’ll always reflect fondly on those days. Let the dreams continue. I’m forever grateful to Mark, Terry and Janis for giving me the opportunity. Best wishes to you, Terry and Janis. Minneapolis has lost an invaluable civic institution.
Debrah Morse-Kahn • Delaney Patterson • Delys Nast • Dennis Schapiro • Denny Schapiro • Dianne Farber • Dick Schwartz • Dietrich Jessen • Don Portwood • Donald Dehn • Donner Humenberger • Doug Toft • Doug Wilhide • Drew Cernick • Drew Kerr • Dustin Hertzog • Dustin Nelson • Dylan Thomas • Ed Dykhuizen • Ed Hazelwood • Ed Roskowinski • Elandra Mikkelson • Eli Hamann • Elissa Cottle • Elizabeth Noll • Elizabeth O’Sullivan • Elizabeth Sias • Elizabeth Weir • Ellen Kane • Ellen Nigon • Ellen Nijon • Ellen Schmidt • Elliot B. Kula • Elliot Kula • Emily Bissen • Emily Kaiser • Emily Lund • Emily Mongan • Emily Schneeberger • Emily Stickler • Emma Cummings-Krueger • Eric Best • Eric Braun • Eric Ekstrand • Eric Johnson •
MARK ENGEBRETSON
council members Kathy O’Brien, Tony Scallon, Walt Dziedzic, Steve Cramer, Joan Niemic, Barbara Carlson and Sharon Sayles-Belton. I had a strong desire to cover City Hall in my town and realized a path via the Southwest Journal. I soon started freelancing for the Journal and met Terry and Janis and other freelancers. In July 1992, I left Lillie to accept Janis’ offer of a half-time gig, covering City Hall and several Southwest Minneapolis neighborhoods. Mark and I held our 1-on-1 meetings in our apartment building and went to Terry and Janis’ house for staff meetings. It was like one big family working together to improve our city by connecting neighbors through smart, tough and thorough journalism — led by Mark and nurtured by Janis — and by offering relevant and important local advertising, led by Terry. Just a year later, however, I was
southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 B7
ILLUSTRATOR/ DESIGNER 1990-1997
M
y time working with the Southwest Journal actually started with another neighborhood newspaper, the Whittier Globe, in 1989. Janis was doing typesetting, Terry was selling ads, and I had moved to Minneapolis from Lincoln, Nebraska. The network of papers like the Alley, the Wedge and others was fascinating to a graphic designer fresh out of school and new to the big city. I called and left a message on the Whittier Globe answering machine offering help with art or layout, got a call back from then-editor Keith Thompson and was quickly sucked into the exciting world of neighborhood newspapers. When Janis and Terry started the Southwest Journal, it was clear that they wanted to take the paper to a different level. They continuously worked to make it the best they could, from the reporting to the design to the photography and art and even to the return on investment for advertisers. I did illustrations, designed some ads and did some special section design. I also helped with the paste-up of the paper, starting in Janis and Terry’s basement in
Artwork by Brian Barber
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SARAH MCKENZIE EDITOR 2006-2016
D
uring my 10-year tenure as editor of the Southwest Journal and the Downtown Journal, I had the honor of helping create more than 500 newspapers with a talented team of colleagues. We poured our hearts and souls into the pages of those newspapers, taking great care to chronicle life in the neighborhoods the newspapers served. I am forever grateful for the chance to meet so many wonderful people who make Minneapolis a better place while working for the Journals — devoted neighbors, creative small business owners, thoughtful teachers, dedicated public servants and inspired artists. The Southwest Journal has been a community builder during its 30-year run and a bright light in local journalism. I was proud to lead special projects examining critical issues in Minneapolis, including in-depth reporting on gun violence and homelessness. One of my favorite traditions at the Southwest Journal— the annual “Thank you, Southwest” feature — was a beautiful way to end the year, giving readers the
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opportunity to spotlight people in the community they were grateful for. In the spirit of that tradition, I want to take the opportunity to thank Southwest Journal publishers Janis Hall and Terry Gahan for launching this publication and giving me and so many others the opportunity to do meaningful journalism in a city that we love. I also extend heartful appreciation for all of my former colleagues at the newspaper who taught me so much and made the work a true labor of love. Finally, thank you to all of the Southwest Journal readers and advertisers who have supported the newspaper over the years. As an editor, I really valued hearing from readers — whether through handwritten letters, emails or phone calls. I took to heart all the feedback — the good and the bad — and did my best to lead a newspaper that celebrated the best of the city and examined what needed to be done to make it a better place. Please keep supporting local journalism. We need it more than ever.
Eric Thiegs • Eric Tichy • Erica Rudy • Erick Marklund • Erik Farseth • Erik Melin • Erin Berg • Ernie Olin • Ethan Confer • Ethan Fawley • Farheen Hakeem • Farrah Mina • Faye Zurn • Felicity Britton • Frank Rahn • Fred Mayer • Gabrielle Martinson •
BRIAN BARBER
a little room off the garage and moving on to the office at 50th & Washburn. That office seemed so spacious, so professional, so luxurious. A defining moment in my graphic design career was when Janis bought a laser printer that would print an entire 11x17 page and a waxer that would apply the adhesive to the whole page in one pass. It seemed the design industry had reached the peak in technological advancement and life was so, so good. How could we possibly want more than that? Working with everyone at the Journal was a great experience. I’m proud of the work we put out. I got to learn a lot and experiment and grow as an illustrator and designer, and I collaborated with great people who really cared about community. Congratulations to Janis and Terry and to everyone who played a part in an important piece of Minneapolis.
12/14/20 1:56 AM
B8 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
POETRY EDITOR 2007-2020
“I
t is difficult/to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/for lack of what is found there,” wrote William Carlos Williams. It’s a claim most newspapers fail to appreciate. The Southwest Journal has been an exception, offering a platform for poetry for most of its 30-year run. In 2004 the Linden Hills council decided the neighborhood needed a poet laureate and named me to the post. I don’t think they meant it to be permanent, but I haven’t been asked to resign, so I’ve kept the honorific. It was a good time for poetry. We gathered (remember that?) at area coffee shops and bookstores (remember them?). We met in people’s homes, so we could enjoy rhyme, rhythm and booze. We had special themed readings: Valentine’s Day Love Poetry — with strawberries, chocolate and champagne; political poetry; poetry by and about women; cowboy poetry; narrative poetry; holiday poetry — with a reading of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” I borrowed money, set up a publishing company (Trolley Car Press) and put out a poetry collection: “Between the Lakes: the Poets of Linden Hills.” The Southwest Journal did a profile on me. Editor Sarah McKenzie, seeking to revive the SWJ’s poetry tradition, asked me to lead the “Southwest Journal Poetry Project.” I’ve been the paper’s poetry editor for 14 years. Hundreds of poets have submitted thousands of poems
Garnette Kuznia • Gary Cunningham • Gemma Rossini Cullen • Glenn Miller • Gregg Bush • Gregory Scott • Gustin Schumacher • Habakkuk Stockstill • Hailey Haferman • Haley Anderson • Hannah Dittberner • Hannah Haugberg • Heather Morley • Heather Renne • Heather Swenson • Heidi Heller • Helen Sabrowsky • Hemang Sherma • Hilary Brueck • Hilary Kapfer Smedsrud
DOUG WILHIDE
and we’ve published about 700 of them. Southwest Minneapolis has an extraordinary number of good writers: journalists, copywriters, editors, novelists and “others.” I’ve been continually surprised and impressed by how many people write poetry — and how good some of it is. I’m expansive about residency. Most of the poets live in the area, but over the years some have moved, or died, or been referred by friends. We get poems from Fargo, San Francisco, Oregon, Italy and other distant places … even St. Paul. We’ve published posthumous pieces. In most issues we have “regulars” and new voices. The poets have ranged in age from 8 to 93. Trolley Car Press published the best of the first three years: “SEASONS: Poems from the Southwest Journal Poetry Project,” with illustrations by SWJ artist WACSO. (Both books are still available. Get in touch!) For each issue I’ve tried to pick the best dozen or so poems that turned up. It’s always been more about the poetry than about where the poets live or who they are. Thanks to all the poets who have submitted poems and to all the readers who have enjoyed them. It’s been an honor and a delight to do this work. At right is a poem, one of mine, that seems vaguely appropriate to the season, from the spring 2014 issue.
Model Trains Doug Wilhide
While we know the world is round sometimes it isn’t, like when the world is flat, a piece of plywood with tacked-down tracks on raised cork berms, plastic crossing signs, paper pine trees, a station missing some pieces, six people, six cows, five trucks, ten railroad cars in various states of repair. one engine that works and two that don’t. Everywhere there are these memory basements handed down from father to son to son with partly landscaped flat worlds unplugged power packs, tunnels without mountains, trestles to nowhere, a conductor missing his flag. The worlds that matter are the ones we make up more biography than geography more idea than realization more plan than actualization: getting there has always been more than half the fun. Meanwhile, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe runs the Super Chief through mesas and canyons as California guys in high-waisted pants drink in sky-domed observation cars heading for sun-kissed misses in orange groves who have whispered “don’t be late.” The City of New Orleans races into the deep South on its way to magnolia aromas, gumbo, history, jazz and the blues. The Empire Builder glides easily up the Mississippi, through the high bluffs of immigrant dreams heading for St. Paul and all points west. And — in the darkening night — the Twentieth Century Limited crosses the Hudson in the moonlight, as people sip martinis in the club car, silhouettes on the windows that flash by like heartbeats in our dreams.
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B10 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
COLUMNIST 2008-2020
O
uch. I’ve been going through the Southwest Journal archives, ruminating on the notion of a “paper of record” while revisiting random stories about friends, strangers and neighbors, and lingering over various photographs of all sorts of businesses and breaking local news. And all the while sitting on my desk, close enough to pick up and page through, is the latest issue, highlighted by a righteous pandemic winter survival guide on the cover and, inside, a rave Carla Waldemar review of Brasa, the new diner at 46th & Bryant (RIP Jack’s-Java-Jack’s-Studio-2; can’t wait to try the creamed spinach). I’m grateful for the years I had as a columnist at one of the finest and most durable neighborhood newspapers in the world, and as I’ve written many times, it has been an honor to have landed on your doorstep as part of the Journal all these years. But today in farewell I want to unpack exactly why the Journal was important to me as a longtime reader of the paper. For me, everything that was great and powerful about the Journal can be found in how it felt to read Michelle Bruch’s 2017 cover story on Cloud Man (tinyurl.com/ George Catlin. Dakota village, circa 1835.
working,” she said. The decision to try large-scale agriculture became the basis for Cloud Man Village, located east of the lake with boundaries that stretched slightly north of present day 34th Street, east past Fremont and south into Lakewood Cemetery. Beane and other descendants of Cloud Man are working with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board on a public art project to honor the Dakota.
It began: There is a story behind Cloud Man’s decision to plant a permanent village in 1829 next to Bde Maka Ska, or Lake Calhoun. As buffalo became scarce, Cloud Man — Chief Mahpiya Wicasta — traveled on farther flung hunting trips to find food. He became caught in a blizzard near the Missouri River, and he buried himself under the snow for three days to keep warm. While he waited out the storm, he made a pact with God, said Kate Beane, a descendant of Cloud Man. “He would not be afraid to try something new, because what was going on wasn’t
From there I learned the rest of Cloud Man’s story, which ended at the concentration camp that was Fort Snelling after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. I’ve never been prouder to be part of this newspaper than I was that day, but more importantly, I’ve never felt luckier to be a reader of this newspaper than I was that day, and I couldn’t wait to check out the village. I looked at the reporter’s byline (“by Michelle Bruch”) and from there, though I’d read her work before, I became a fan of Bruch’s writing, reporting and curiosity. That was true of other Journal writers who came and went over the years, but that story spoke to me, and so, yet again, I found the Journal to be a smart and trusted news source — no small feat these days. The lasting impact was that it was obvious that real freedom and trust had been given to Journal journalists to cover beats and tackle stories that were important to them and therefore the community. Every time I’ve biked past Cloud Man Village since, I’ve thought about Bruch’s story. Point being, reading the history of Cloud Man and Bde Maka Ska in my neighborhood newspaper was fortifying in a way that nothing else is. That story changed me. It dovetailed with projects and personal interests I’d been following, and it helped set me down a better-late-than-never white man path of learning the history of this state’s and
• Hilary Reeves • Hillary Heinz • Holly Hillstrom • Holly Lewis • Ian Krouth • Ichie Asai • J.P. Cooper • Jack Broz • Jacqueline Mithun • Jahna Peloquin • Jake Weyer • James Lee • James Schlemmer • Jamie Kleiman • Jan Bailey •
JIM WALSH
cloud-man-village). I remember the day like it was yesterday: I picked the Journal up off the sidewalk, took it inside and out of its plastic wrap, and was amazed by the abovethe-fold front page headline, “Here stood CLOUD MAN VILLAGE,” the subhead, “The Park Board plans to commemorate the Dakota village near Lake Calhoun with public art” and a photo of the new Cloud Man plaque. Right then and there I sat down and read it word-for-word, wire-to-wire, shared it and put it in my large “keeper clips” file, right next to another memorable SWJ front page feature, my 2012 profile of legendary Annunciation Grade School music teacher Mary Strickland. As a reader, I was impressed by the editorial decisions that led to the above-the-fold headline and story treatment. This was beyond the “shopper rag” free newspapers too frequently get hung with; this was an important story and short-form journalism and storytelling at its finest.
SEE WALSH / PAGE B11
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southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 B11
REPORTER 2016-2020
W
orking at the Southwest Journal these past four years has been a highlight of my professional career. I am grateful for all of the students, educators, residents and public officials who have generously given me their time and shared their stories and feedback. I feel lucky to have had the chance to serve the community. While there have been plenty of big stories to cover over the past four years,
FROM WALSH / PAGE B10
country’s troubled roots once and for all. It introduced me to the book “Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota,” which landed me in the aisles of Birchbark Books & Native Arts, to which I often return for all sorts of books, music, culture and history. In that way, the Journal served its purpose to me, the reader, on a very basic level. It was both mouthpiece and meeting place where we exchanged ideas, stories, poems, recipes, news and obituaries, and as a result, we were all led to participate in the community, be it keeping up on the chaos of the times; learning about a live music gig,
Walker Methodist SWJ 121720 4.indd 1
overcame so much to get to where he is. There have been too many great stories to count, and I am grateful for the opportunity to tell them and for all of the people in Southwest Minneapolis who have offered feedback and read my work. I am appreciative for my editors during my time at the Southwest Journal — Sarah
McKenzie, Dylan Thomas and Zac Farber — who have been invaluable sources of wisdom and guidance. I’d also like to thank the Southwest Journal publishers, Janis Hall and Terry Gahan, for helping us put out this newspaper every two weeks and for all of their support.
restaurant or pub; buying local products, goods and services; discovering some cool volunteer gig; or learning about hard times, hard news and the kindness of strangers. It’s no stretch to say the Journal has been the sinew of this neighborhood, a light in the darkness and a solid read in good and bad times, and Janis Hall and Terry Gahan and everybody involved deserve much respect and kudos for fighting the good fight and keeping it afloat and relevant for so long. In her Dec. 4 editorial in the Los Angeles Times, “How the death of local news has made political divisions far worse,” Sara-
beth Berman of the American Journalism Project wrote, “Across the country, more than 1,000 websites with the look of local journalism are publishing articles, ordered up by political operatives to cast a favorable or unfavorable light on candidates and issues. These websites, like weeds thriving in vacant lots, have grown to fill the void left by the collapse of local newspapers. Readers, eager for information, often can’t tell the difference because these sites are good at masking their purpose. “In the last 15 years, according to a report by Penelope Abernathy, a scholar at the University of North Carolina who
tracks ‘news deserts,’ more than a quarter of the country’s newspapers have closed and 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 were left without any at the beginning of 2020. Without local newsrooms, the basic work of reporting — gathering accurate information and demanding transparency and accountability from local governments and powerful business interests — vanishes.” Tougher to measure is the impact of a story like the one about Cloud Man, read by one reader on one sunny March day years ago and, like the Journal itself, gone now but never forgotten.
Former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page takes a selfie with students at Justice Page Middle School.
12/15/20 1:24 PM
Ilhan Omar for Congress SWJ 121720 4.indd 1
Janelle Bilewitch • Janelle Nivens • Janine Kemmer • Janis Hall • Jarret Raffety • Jay Kodytek • Jay Schneider • Jay Walljasper • Jayme Halbritter • Jayne Solinger • Jayson Oswald • Jeanne Dunn • Jeanne Massey • Jeff Berg • Jen Guarino • Jen Hass • Jen Larson Roesler • Jen Scott • Jennette Turner • Jennifer Hudson • Jennifer Lentz • Jennifer Price • Jennifer Troolen •
NATE GOTLIEB
some of the smaller ones have been just as memorable for me. I’ll always remember, for example, covering the middle school students in Tangletown who succeeded in getting their school renamed after Justice Alan Page and then watching the relationship develop between him and the school. I have also enjoyed covering the Southwest Minneapolis students who have advocated for causes such as climate action and gun control, and I have always been impressed with their knowledge and passion. Throughout this community, it’s been neat to see the effort that residents and community leaders put into making positive change. I also feel lucky to have had the opportunity to tell stories of individual residents who are making a difference. I’ll never forget telling the story of a Southwest Minneapolis high school student who was advocating for a more equitable way to ensure his times during his cross-country ski races accounted for his disability. Nor will I forget covering the countless Southwest Minneapolis residents trying to make environmental changes or the Linden Hills pastor, the Rev. Lawrence Richardson, who
12/14/20 12:26 PM
B12 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
I
used to live across the street from the Downtown Minneapolis office of Minnesota Premier Publications (the Southwest Journal’s parent company) in an apartment two floors above the Davanni’s. I would drive past the office every morning on my way to work in Roseville. I remember looking at the big sign out front — the one that had the big Minnesota Premier Publications logo — and thinking to myself, “I need to look into that place. How awesome would it be to work across the street from my apartment?” One night, I went on Google and learned all I could about MPP. I found the contact information for the creative director, Lynnae Schrader, and put together a sample folder with my resume and a few design pieces from my portfolio. The next day I stopped at the office on my way to work. I remember Linda, the receptionist, coming to the front door to greet me. I told her my name and that I was there to drop off this folder for Lynnae. She asked if I had filled out a job application. I had not, so she gave me one. I took everything home, filled out the application, and returned the next morning to drop it off.
Scherer Windows SWJ 121720 H2.indd 1
July 25–August 7, 2019 Vol. 30, No. 15 southwestjournal.com
INSIDE TOY STORE
A new place to play in Linden Hills A3
DEDICATED BUS LANES
Apartments filling their available parking spots
A
re cultFu O streett ar
No matter how many spaces they offer, garages are well used
ADDED MURALS LLS TO 20 WA KE IN LYNLA
By Andrew Hazzard
Hennepin Avenue to get lanes just for buses A10
ART CHAT
An interview with the Walker’s new director A12 Story and photo by Nate Gotlieb
WEIRD AND LINE-Y
Minneapolis artist Reggie LeFlore talked to passersby July 13 in front of a newly finished self-portrait on a wall behind The Herkimer in LynLake. About 20 feet away, artist Nell Triggs spraypainted bumblebees and flower petals onto another wall of the building as she wrapped up
a mural she called “Love Me Not.” Meanwhile, four other artists put the finishing touches onto murals further down the alley. The six artists were among 35 participating in the second-annual LynLake Street Art Series, hosted by the LynLake Business Association. SEE LYNLAKE STREET ART / PAGE A19
Minneapolis artist Reggie LeFlore poses in front of a self-portrait he created July 13 as part of the second-annual LynLake Street Art Series.
In July, the Minneapolis Planning Commission approved a 146-unit apartment building with 92 parking spaces at 26th & Blaisdell. These types of developments with low parking-to-unit ratios have become commonplace since the city changed its minimum parking requirements in 2015. Before, each new building had to provide at least one spot. Now projects near high-frequency transit corridors with fewer than 50 units have zero parking requirements and buildings larger than 50 units need to include one spot for every two units. Currently, Minneapolis does not keep data on parking utilization rate at apartment buildings, according to planning manager Jason Wittenberg, who said the city would like to better understand how residential parking spaces are being used. But as the city plans for a future with fewer cars and more density, newer apartment buildings constructed in Southwest before and after the requirements report their parking spaces are still in high demand. Regardless of the amount of parking, newer developments are confident they are offering attractive living situations to residents. Bryan Walters, the co-founder of Yellow Tree Development, said his firm is very comfortable constructing new residential buildings with fewer spots than units. SEE PARKING / PAGE A18
The intricate illustrations of a LynLake artist B1
Flood risk on the rise as rainstorms gain intensity
50 BLOCK PARTIES
Flooding unsurprising at 22nd & Lyndale but rainfall is getting heavier in Twin Cities By Zac Farber
Inside a tight-knit Lynnhurst community B5
FEMALE BUILDER
Ella Pendergast’s prolific early 20th century home construction B8
As motorists drove home from work along Lyndale Avenue on July 16, a summer storm dumped more than 2 inches of rain in a single hour onto a small neighborhood that’s been identified as one of the most flood-prone areas in all of Southwest Minneapolis. With the low-lying corner of 22nd & Lyndale suddenly turned into a thigh-high pond, the staff of Hum’s Liquors ventured out into the street and used their hands to pull wood and other debris from the city’s storm drains. In the shop’s basement, waterlogged cardboard boxes fell apart and two cases of wine dropped and shattered. Across the street, at the Wedge Co-op, at least five employees’ cars were damaged and one was totaled. Meanwhile, at the Red Dragon Restaurant and Lounge, patrons sat at the bar, nursing their drinks and pulling their feet up as the carpet disappeared below a couple inches of water. “It has flooded here for as long as I can remember,” said Pat Chan, who has bartended at the Red SEE FLOOD RISK / PAGE A14
Hum’s Liquors owner Hanh Van donned yellow rain gear and rallied his staff to clear debris from storm drains by hand after the corner of 22nd & Lyndale flooded on July 16. Photo by Jason Grote
This Southwest Journal cover won Valerie second place for page design in the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists’ 2020 Page One Awards contest.
iMacs and heading your way! We’ll finish the issue and upload files from there.” That was an interesting thing to explain to my then-husband right away in the morning! The whole production team came over and set up shop in our living room — Dana, Shannon, Lucas and Dan. I believe most of the reporters and sales reps went and hung out at Espresso Royale until we got the allclear to go back into the building. We finished the issue doing our final page review completely digitally — like how we’ve been publishing since the pandemic hit in March — which was way different from our usual process of printing the final PDFs onto tabloid pages and then sitting in the conference room passing each page around looking for any typos, making sure the ads were all in the right spots and then making those last changes
before uploading the files to the printer. Once we were finished with the paper, we played Super Mario Party on the Wii until we were able to go back to the office. As time passed, my job responsibilities evolved and expanded. I started designing some of the interior pages for Minnesota Parent and Minnesota Good Age. I’ve had the honor of being the lead page designer for each of our four publications at some point over the past five years and have been designing the Southwest Journal for the past three-and-a-half years. I’ve grown and learned so much at MPP. From being hired as a graphic designer at age 27, getting promoted to senior graphic designer in 2012 and then becoming creative director on my 10-year anniversary — June 1, 2017 — the skills I’ve learned and honed over the years will be something I can take with me to future freelance graphic design opportunities. I’m grateful for all of the awards I’ve earned over the years for ad designs, page layouts and typography in addition to helping secure wins for our publications for advertising excellence and typography & design. I realize not everyone has the opportunity to receive these levels of recognition. I appreciate the fact that Terry and Janis were always willing to cover the costs of our entries so all of the designers, reporters and editors could be honored in front of our peers. I’ve worked with so many talented designers, skilled writers and editors, charismatic sales reps and personable client services reps over the years, and I am glad to be able to keep them as friends moving forward. In many ways, MPP has been family for me, complete with some quirky relatives to keep life interesting. Thank you Terry and Janis for inviting me into the Southwest Journal family all those years ago. The memories of my time at MPP will stay with me forever.
Jenny Heck • Jeremy Fischer • Jeremy Hansen • Jeremy Stratton • Jeremy Zoss • Jessica Beitler • Jessica Mount • Jessica Yang • Jill Bachelder • Jill Mithun • Jim Walsh • Jim Watkins • Joa Smeby • Jocelyn Hale • Jodi Brewer • Jodie Tweed • Joe Barisonzi
VALERIE MOE
CREATIVE DIRECTOR 2007-2020
Within a couple of days, Lyn reached out to me. She said she didn’t have any openings in her department at that time, but she was impressed by my work and wanted to meet with me. It was one of the most fun and relaxed interviews I’ve ever had — because there wasn’t a job on the line. We were just two creatives talking about design. I remember when Lyn asked me “Quark or InDesign?” and I think the look on my face must have been pretty telling because she followed it up with, “I know, it’s kind of like asking if you prefer blondes or brunettes.” About six weeks later, she called and asked me to come in and meet with her and Janis to talk about an ad design position. I got the job. I started out as a graphic designer working primarily on ads including quality-checking files submitted by clients. I was also responsible for mapping out ad placements for the Downtown Journal. This was a new skill for me, and I wanted to learn it well and quick. I remember sitting at my coffee table on a Friday night with a blank issue map, watching TV and practicing my mapping skills. “OK, someone just sold a quarter-page and a ninth-page ad; where do I fit those in?” It sounds nerdy, but it helped me a lot and I came back to the office feeling much more confident in that skill. I’ve always been the type of person who puts their heart, soul and passion into what they’re doing, and I’ve been known to work late or extra to continue improving my skills. We added a few more team members to the production department and within six months we were functioning as a welloiled machine. One of the craziest memories I have about working at MPP has to be the morning when I received a text message from Dana Croatt, the page designer for both Journals (who later became creative director), saying, “There’s a gas leak at the office. Everyone is evacuating the building. We’re bringing the
12/14/20 2:03 AM
A8 op-ed
Southwest Journal December 1-14, 2008
southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 B13
Co-Publisher and President Terry Gahan tgahan@mnpubs.com
Happy Thanksgiving (You’re Next) A • Joe Johnson • Joe Mechtenberg • Joe Van Eeckhout • Joey Peters • John Bertram • John Bonnes • John Brewer • John Grimley • John Hartnett • John Schroeder • John Sharpe • John Thompson • Jon Resa • Jon Shelver • Jonathan Rotella • Jono Cowgill • Josh Wolanin • Julie Brophy • Julie Humiston • Julie Jo Severson • Julie Kearns • Julie Kendrick • Julie Regan • Juliet Sokol • June Jobin Kallestad • June Kallestad • Kaitlin Ungs • Kara McGuire • Karen Cooper • Karen Grove • Karen Harris • Karen Ritz • Karen Rosar • Kari Larson • Kari Linder • Kari VanDerVeen • Karin Broecker • Karin Smith • Karlie Weiler • Kate Eekhoff • Kate Manson • Kate Sebring • Katherine Huber • Katherine Rautenberg • Kathie Smith • Kathleen Stoehr • Kathryn G. Nelson • Kathryn Holahan • Kathy Barrett • Kathy D. Graves • Katie Spielberger • Kayla Bryant • Kayla Stearns • Keith Thompson • Kelli Billstein • Kelly Ligday • Kelsey Kudak • Kelsey Schwartz • Kelsey Vetter • Kelsie Klaustermeier • Ken Bradley • Kevin Ehrman-Solberg • Kevin Featherly • Kevin Peck • Kia Farhang • Kim Kaufman • Kim Simmonds • Kim Zangger • Kimberly Kaufman • Kirby Goodman • Kirsten Arbeiter • Kirsten Delegard • Kristen Manhart • Kristen Walker • Kristin Martin • Kristin Tombers • Ksenia Gorinshteyn • Kyle Dahlen • Kyle Pendergast •
Publisher Janis Hall jhall@mnpubs.com
few years ago when kinds of calls to about double Northwest Airlines in the next year.” mechanics were striking, That is a hell of a thing to Editor the unemployment rate in the leave you with this Thanksgiving Sarah McKenzie Twin Cities was in the respectseason, at a time when there’s so 612-436-4371 able single-digits. At the time, much to be grateful for. I make smckenzie@mnpubs.com motorists traveling W. Highway myself remember as much these Assistant Editor 62 near the airport were treated days and nights, specifically last Jake Weyer JIM WALSH nightly to the klieg-lit sight of night, as I sat in the bleachers CHRIS DAMLO 612-436-4367 a lone mechanic standing on a with my wife and a bunch of jweyer@mnpubs.com GENERAL MANAGER bridge embankment with a sign other parents, watching our At the head of the table 2006-2016 Staff Writers proclaiming, “You’re Next.” 10-year-old girls play volleyball. was my father, whose profesDylan Thomas The gainfully employed Our daughter, playing in her sion before he retired was as 612-436-4391 hen I look back at everything Janis and Terry provided to the dthomas@mnpubs.com averted their eyes from the open first volleyball game, was a an employment counselor, Southwest Minneapolis community with their commitment wound on the side of the road, revelation. She looked happy, but who fully admits that the Michelle Bruch to local journalism, I also think about the opportunities they dismissing the mechanic as one excited, athletic — like she was times we’re living through are 612-436-4372 provided to hundreds of employees. mbruch@mnpubs.com more disgruntled “End Is Near” having the time of her life. Her beyond the ken of most counsel. I was one of those lucky employees who applied to a simple job ad and prophet of doom, while the ununiform shimmered on her like Still, I called my boy Stephen found myself launched into a much bigger career. My story wasTraudes I had just Cristof and under-employed shuddered a superhero costume, her knee Anderson Smith, a partner in 612-436-5088 left the aviation industry and didn’t have a lot of experience or options at ctraudes@mnpubs.com in solidarity: If the powers that pads gave her stop-drop-pop Nicols Kaster who has reprethe time. I was looking for anything “interesting” to do next and the job be can do it to me, they can and confidence, and to not acknowlsented employees in all sorts posting said they worked with Apple computers — so I Brian thought, “Why Voerding will do it to you, unions and the edge that moment would be the of situations for the past 13 not take a look?” I applied to be their bookkeeper and 612-436-5082 Janis hired me on bvoerding@mnpubs.com enduring entrails of the Amerdefinition of sin, for as long as years, to get some advice for the spot. ican dream be damned. I spent the next 10 years with Minnesota Premier Publications (the I live I will testify that images the legions of folks who will be Contributing Writers parent company of the Southwest Journal), starting as that entry-level Happy days are here again. like that are as significant as any canned in the coming year. Carla Waldemar, Britt Aamodt bookkeeper and eventually becoming general manager. As with many As the unemployment rate now pending pink slip or Dow report, “I tell people there’s no shame Interns small businesses, you have to wear many hats to get the job done, and hovers around double digits and it reminded me of somein [getting fired], that it happens Tim Connor, Ethan Confer, like many of the employees they hired, I gained Andrew a ton of Newman experience and as the Wall Street tsunami thing I’ve wanted to pass along to a lot of people,” he says. andover those 10 years by filling in where needed. Emily Stickler hits Lake Street, I think about since it happened this summer. “It’s a private thing, and people The top of my list was the experience gained from building software and that man and his family and Now’s as good a time as any. don’t like to talk about it. But Photo Editor database applications. Something as simple as migrating spreadsheets to all the rest of the cutback In late August, she and I were especially in this climate, people Robb Long a database turned into a much bigger project of designing and building a 612-436-4374 casualties, from Minneapolis swimming at a friend’s pool. We fear resumé damage from being full enterprise software application, which we then custom-built to manage rlong@mnpubs.com to Detroit to sea to shining were alone in the water, the late fired, but telling your next their entire business workflow. This opportunity, and the confidence from sea. I think about the psychic afternoon sun silhouetting her potential employer you were Janis and Terry to allow me to work on these projects, is whyProofreader I feel I now Sid Korpi damage that the act of firing tan body as she jumped up and laid off because of the economy have a successful career in IT. and of being fi red does to the down, head in and out of the is a very common thing. What I Sales Manager Thinking back to those 10 years, I also recall all the macro events occurcollective human condition, water. She was the picture of try to tell people is, ‘Give me a Melissa Ungerman Levy ring in our world. While they may not compare with what we’re currently 612-436-4382 and I wonder if a wounded carefree. call in six months when you’ve experiencing in 2020, we still had our share of big events. A housing boom mungermanlevy@mnpubs.com workforce ever truly recovers. “Hey. Dad,” she bobbed. landed at your new job, which and its resulting recession, the internet becoming more than a fad, new To wit: “Guess. What. I’m. Doing.” turns out to be a much better fi t Sales Lead sport stadiums, numerous election cycles ... the list is extensive when you Kyle Dahlen Gathered around my ThanksWhat, sweetie? for you because you’re out from work at a company covering those same events. 612-436-4387 giving table last week sat two “I’m. Thinking. About. All. My. underneath that boss or situaMore importantly, I still think back to all the people we worked with. kdahlen@mnpubs.com Southwest of Journal December 2008 the finest workers1-14, you could Friends. And. Family. And. How. tion that’s causing you trouble. Everyone was there as an employee, but Janis and Terry still made sure we Ad Client Services ever hope to hire, both of Handsome. My. Dad. Is. And. “‘Mourn the loss of the job, could show up for something Kate Eekhoff whom were laid off this month; How. Awesome. My. Life. Is.” but get up in the morning and more than just a paycheck by 612-436-5085 another who is under-employed Grateful? hosting weekly outdoor cooktreat the job search like a job keekhoff@mnpubs.com outs and numerous community and fighting for the scraps of his Thankful? itself. It helps you not stay ProductionPublisher Manager events and forming strong profession; two who work two Try gobble-gobble in bed all day.’ Again, there’s Kathleen Stoehr Janis Hall teams with our departments. jobs to make ends meet; and gobsmacked. no shame in it, but I get calls 612-436-4385 jhall@mnpubs.com I’m still friends with many of the rest, who go to sleep many every day from people saying, kstoehr@mnpubs.com my coworkers I met Co-Publisher and President nights worried about hand‘I can’t believe this happened Jim and few years ago the when kinds of calls to Walsh about lives double Creative Team Terry Gahan at the Journal. grew up in East Harriet. to-mouthness of it Airlines all. to me,’ and I expect those Northwest in the next year.” Shannon tgahan@mnpubs.com Schaub, Valerie Moe, I know the Southwest Journal mechanics were striking, That is a hell of a thing to Lucas Beck, Dan Marfield has been an important part and Dana Editor Croatt the unemployment rate in the leave you with this Thanksgiving of the Southwest Minneapolis Sarah McKenzie Twin Cities was in the respectseason, at a time when there’s so Classifi ed Advertising 612-436-4371 community for many years, and able single-digits. At the time, much to be grateful for. I make 612-825-9205 smckenzie@mnpubs.com I feel it’s been just as important classifieds@mnpubs.com motorists traveling W. Highway myself remember as much these for many of the employees’ lives Assistant Editor Washburn McReavy SWJ 121720 6.indd 1 12/14/20 2:22 AM 62 near the airport were treated days and nights, specifi cally last Circulation as well. I don’t believe I would Jake Weyer JIM WALSH nightly to the klieg-lit sight of night, as I sat in the bleachers Marlo Johnson 612-436-4367 have the same opportunities a lone mechanic standing on a 612-436-4388 with my wife and a bunch of jweyer@mnpubs.com that I have now without getting reported the orchestra orchestra inof itsthe very first season other mjohnson@mnpubs.com Fond memories of bridge embankment with a sign parents,that watching our At the head table to live through this experience High-quality (1972–73), progressive education right in your neighborhood! Staff Writers has not programmed complete and have remained a proclaiming, “You’re Next.” 10-year-old girls play volleyball. was my father, whose profesthe Minnesota Youth Financial Whizbang at the Journal. I can’t thank Dylan Thomas symphonies until this friend andhefinancial contributor The gainfully employed Our daughter, playing in season. her Chris Damlo sion before retired was as 612-436-4391 Janis and Terry enough for that Symphonies Not so. Back in 1972, for the to the orchestra ever since. It 612-436-4376 dthomas@mnpubs.com averted their eyes from the open fi rst volleyball game, was a an employment counselor, opportunity. Although I haven’t lived in cdamlo@mnpubs.com very second concert program is who an organization coaxes revelation. wound on the side of the for road, She looked happy, but fully admits that that the While this chapter closes for Michelle Bruch Southwest Minneapolis of the orchestra, we performed singularly great music-making dismissing the mechanic as one excited, athletic — like she was Printing times we’re living through are the paper, many chapters are still 612-436-4372 nearly 20 years, I am a regular the the complete out ofthe its ken musicians —counsel. and they having ECM, Inc. mbruch@mnpubs.com more disgruntled “End Is Near” time ofTchaikovsky her life. Her being written for the hundreds of beyond of most reader of the Southwest Journal. Symphony No. 4.onAnd do it better than any other youth employees who got the opportuprophet of doom, while the ununiform shimmered herjust like Still, I called my boy Stephen Cristof Traudes I read with interest your recent a couple years later, MYS orchestra I’ve ever heard. The Southwest Journal masthead nity to work for Janis and Terry and under-employed shuddered NEXT ISSUE DATE DEC. 15 a superhero costume, her knee Anderson Smith, a partner in 612-436-5088 article on the Minnesota Youth as it looked in 2008. (and recorded) MahlI would tohas clear up one News deadline December 3 at the Southwest Journal. ctraudes@mnpubs.com in solidarity: If(MYS). the powers that padsperformed gave her stop-drop-pop Nicols Kasterlike who repreSymphonies As a high Ad deadline December 3 er’s Symphony #1 at Orchestra inaccurate statement in the be can do it to me, they can and confidence, and to not acknowlsented employees in all sorts 35,000 copies of the Southwest Journal Brian Voerding school senior, I played in this Hall. I know, because I have article, however, where it was are distributed free of612-436-5082 charge to homes and will do it to you, unions and the edge that moment would be the the of situations for the past 13 businessesbvoerding@mnpubs.com in Southwest Minneapolis. enduring entrails of the Amerdefinition of sin, for as long as years, to get some advice for ican dream be damned. The Southwest Journal, I live I will testify that images the legions of folks who will be Contributing Writers 1115 Hennepin Ave S Mpls, MN 55403 Happy days are here again. like that are as significant as any canned in the coming year. Carla Waldemar, Britt Aamodt phone: 612-825-9205 New pending for 2021-22 As the unemployment rate now pink slip or Dow report, “I tell people there’s no shame facsimile: 612-825-0929 Interns © 2008 Minnesota Premier Publications, Inc Kindergarten-5th grade hovers around double digits and it reminded me of somein [getting fi red], that it happens Tim Connor, Ethan Subscriptions are $32 per year Confer, New neighborhood boundary and as the Wall Street tsunami thing I’ve wanted to pass along to a lot of people,” he says. Andrew Newman and Emily Stickler hits Lake Street, I think about since happened summer. In Fall 2021, ClaraitBarton Schoolthis will become “It’s a private thing, and people a kindergarten toas 5th-grade community that man and his family and Now’s good a time as any. don’t like to talk about it. But Photo Editor school serving nearby students and families. S A of T the U Rcutback D A Y all the rest In late August, she and I were especially in this climate, people Robb Long th S’MORE CHOICES FOR YOUR KID’S FREE TIME. at a friend’s pool. We 612-436-4374 casualties, from Minneapolis swimming fear resumé damage from being MINNESOTA PARENT CAMP FAIR HAS IT ALL. rlong@mnpubs.com to Detroit to10am–2pm sea to shining were alone in the water, the late fired, but telling your next www.southwestjournal.com sea. I think about the psychic afternoon sun silhouetting her potential employer you were Proofreader COMO PARKLearn more and see a virtual tour at barton.mpls.k12.mn.us Sid Korpi damage that the act of firing tan body as she jumped up and laid off because of the economy sponsoredAve. by S, Minneapolis, MN 55409 ZOO and CONSERVATORY 4327 Colfax • head 612-668-3580 and of being fired does to the down, in and out of the is a very common thing. What I The FileMaker software application Chris Damlo designed to manage Sales Manager the Southwest Journal’s business workflow. Melissa Ungerman Levy collective human condition, water. She was the picture of try to tell people is, ‘Give me a 612-436-4382 and I wonder if a wounded carefree. call in121720 six months Clara Barton Open School SWJ 6.indd 1 when you’ve 12/14/20 4:34 PM WWW.MNPARENT.COM PRINTED WITH SOY INK ON RECYCLED PAPER mungermanlevy@mnpubs.com workforce612•825•9205 ever truly recovers. “Hey. 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A8 op-ed
Happy Thanksgiving (You’re Next) A
lettersClara to the editor Barton Community School
l l u f ! k n c u o F e Ch v i t a m r o f n i f o
February 28
• free admission •
Camp Fair SWJ 120108 MASTHEAD BANNER.indd 1
B14 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
Please keep door
CLOSED! ...dog on the loose.
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The newspaper was thriving, but we were experiencing growing pains. I was a tech person who had become a manager, a job I wasn’t especially good at. We experienced a nearly complete turnover of our staff and Terry and I just had to hang on and keep going. In September 2001, David Brauer came on as the editor of our newly purchased Skyway News. The Star Tribune ran a story about our expansion in the Sept. 10 edition. The next day, the world changed, and we were all reminded of the importance of newspapers. David brought a fine ear for news and a network of contacts from his days at the Twin Cities Reader. David became editor of both publications and assembled his own team of outstanding writers, whom he led to win numerous awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. David was editor during the Downtown condo boom, when buyers lined up for the chance to purchase condominiums at opening prices, then quickly flipped them for thousands more. Advertisers were running in the door with money and we tried to keep up, hiring more people for customer service and graphic design. Those were heady times for our company. In 2003, we purchased a building at 11th & Hennepin in Downtown Minneapolis. We bought two magazines — Minnesota Parent in 2004 and Minnesota Good Age in 2005. With a staff of 30-plus and an annual budget approaching $5 million, we boomed along with the rest of the country. But by the end of 2008, the condo bubble burst and our sales began a long, steady decline. In 2006, we hired Chris Damlo, who quickly took over tech duties and went on to build a database system for our company that runs to this day, tracking ad sales, distribution, editorial, production and billing. It’s an amazing achievement and has allowed us to streamline every aspect of running our business. Sarah McKenzie stepped into the role of editor after David Brauer left, and she led her team of reporters through the most stable period of our 31-year history. We all loved Sarah and her quiet competence. Sarah led her team on to win numerous awards and was
in the editor’s chair when the Intestate 35W bridge fell blocks from our Downtown office, and every staff reporter went running toward the story. After completing college and taking a dream trip, Zoe called from South America and said she wanted to come back and take over newspaper operations. But newspaper advertising and readership were already on the decline. The three of us worked together for the next several years, but sales were falling and Zoe’s dream of growing the paper didn’t happen. She left dayto-day operations in May 2020, after COVID-19 hit and sales fell even further. She’s in Alaska these days, working on fishing boats and waking up to a view of the mountains. One of the joys of owning the Southwest Journal has been watching talented writers come through. It used to be that we’d hire a hotshot reporter, who would do outstanding work for a year or so, then get hired away by one of the many great Twin Cities publications. It was sad to lose great reporters, but we were always happy to see them further their careers. Now, almost all local publications are gone and there are few places for reporters to earn a living. Like every other business, our 2020 sales have been impacted by the pandemic. We considered continuing to publish, but the sales just aren’t there. Times have changed and fewer people rely on print for their news. There’s so much competition for every ad dollar and we can’t compete with Google and Facebook. In October of this year, we made the wrenching decision to cut our last two reporters, Nate Gotlieb and Andrew Hazzard. For the first time in our 31-year history, we do not employ full-time reporters in our newsroom. As the owner, I could not be more proud of my life’s work. Terry and I have been behind the scenes of the Southwest Journal for all these years, doing whatever needed to be done. Now it’s time for us to rest. Thank you to everyone who has created and celebrated the Southwest Journal. We hope that a new leader steps forward to cheer on the salespeople, designers, editors, reporters and delivery folks who make community journalism happen.
Kyrshanbor Hynniewta • Laine Bergeson • Lana Walker • Larry Felitto • Laura Cogswell • Laura Demarest • Laura Prosser • Lauren Cutshall • Lauren Parkos • Lauren Peck • Lauren Walker • Laurence Farah • Layne Kennedy • LeAnn Crowe • Liane Sparrow • Lianna Matt • Lila Bolke • Linda Koutsky • Linda Picone • Lindsey Thomas • Lisa Beaudry • Lisa Clark • Lisa Morse • Liz Anderson • Liz Busa • Loren Green • Louis Hoffman • Lucas Beck • Lynda McDonnell • Lynnae Schrader • Lynne Schultz • Lynnell Mickelsen • Lyon Keasler • Mackenzie Peterson • Madison Bloomquist • Madison Rude • Mag McDermott • Maggie Chan • Maggie Kane • Maggie Krantz • Mallory Franklin • Marcia Holmberg • Margaret Olson • Margie O’Loughlin • Mark Anderson • Mark Engebretson • Mark Hinds • Mark Johanson • Mark Plenke • Marlo Johnson • Martha Sawyer Allen • Martiga Lohn • Martin W. Walter • Mary Balfour • Mary Berger • Mary E. Hirsch • Mary Firestone • Mary Groe • Mary Hirsch • Mary Jean Port • Mary Martin Mason • Mary Mason • Mary O’Regan •
FROM HALL / PAGE B1
southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 B15
Southwest Journal readers remember As we gathered the news this month, most of our conversations started the same way. Before we could pepper you with questions, you wanted to take a minute to share your sadness over the Southwest Journal’s closure and tell us what the paper has meant over the years. Your expressions of grief have been moving but not surprising. When we launched the first donation drive in the Southwest Journal’s three-decade history this April, you showed us how much you value our work, not just through financial support but through dozens of handwritten letters and messages of encouragement. Since
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Don’t disappear, I look forward to every issue! The Ask the Vet column is wonderful. Much love. _____________
For over 20 years I have enjoyed reading your community newspaper. Incredibly, you have been able to collect information, print the story and deliver it to the neighborhoods without charging a subscription. The free distribution is a great public service because it informs anyone, irrespective of means, of what is happening in their community. I share your belief that an informed citizenry is vital if we hope to keep our democratic way of life. _____________
I am so grateful to have had my poetry published in the Southwest Journal. I will miss it. _____________
Thank you for publishing Southwest Journal. I have been a resident of Southwest Minneapolis for over 40 years. I look forward to each issue. It gives me a sense of community even though I live in a large city. _____________ Your voice will be missed. I have lived in the Cedar Lake area for 53 years as a transplant to the city and you have made me feel welcome, informed and knowledgeable. _____________ I’M 81 YRS. OLD & HAVE BEEN A “SOUTHSIDER” ALL MY LIFE & A READER OF YOUR PAPER SINCE ’90. I ENJOY YOUR JOURNAL & LOOK FORWARD TO EACH EDITION. I ESPECIALLY LIKE THE “MOMENTS IN MINNEAPOLIS” FEATURE. _____________ What I will miss most is what’s going on in the community for things to do. That was my go-to for weekend plans. I also loved the Biz Buzz for word on new restaurants and ideas from the Weekend Tourist. I’m a big gardener and enjoyed those tips as well. I liked the “give thanks to your neighbors” feature during the holidays. I have fantastic neighbors who have looked out for me for many years. My creative way to recycle your paper is to use it for washing windows. Works every time for no streaks!
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we announced our closure in October, many more of you have taken the time to send notes and emails letting us know how much we will be missed. Below is a small sampling of your outpouring of support. It’s been an honor to serve you, and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
Ever since 2006, as residents of Linden Hills, we have read the Southwest Journal. What a gem! _____________
I have been a resident of Southwest Minneapolis for over 40 years & I CAN’T THANK YOU ENOUGH. I like to keep informed as to what is happening in the surrounding neighborhoods & you have done an excellent job of keeping us informed! _____________
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I want to thank you for one of Jim Walsh’s columns. It was written during the Iraq War and was about a woman who meets a returning soldier on a flight home to Minneapolis. The woman shows her appreciation for the man’s service by inviting him back to her Kenwood apartment, but, instead of the expected romantic evening, the soldier reveals he’s been shattered by the war. Thanks for publishing such an honest, human, heartfelt story. It’s never left me. _____________ I’ve always had great respect for the Southwest Journal. As a writer who’s been published in small papers across the country, I’ve commented to people on this remarkable free paper that was delivered in my neighborhood weekly. _____________ So many publications closing ... so sad, just when we need to have more outlets, more information and resources, even more varied opinions among us. _____________ Keep up the good work! We need more, not less, honest accurate reporting. We need the Fourth Estate to be alive, healthy & active to preserve democracy! _____________
en on e s s A V’s HGT ppeal A Curb
Many thanks for years of free & first-rate neighborhood journalism. _____________ The SW Journal is a cherished, important part of the community. We’ve enjoyed and looked forward to the issues of SWJ delivered to our front stoop. _____________ I have always read and enjoyed the S’west Journal and appreciate having it delivered to my home. _____________ You pull together a great publication that collects and conveys valuable, interesting and unique stories and information about the community. Despite the overwhelming amount of online content pouring out of my computer, I make the time to read your hard copy cover to cover.
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B16 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
EDITOR 2001-2005
M
y first day as Skyway News editor was Sept. 10, 2001. The next morning, after dropping my kids at daycare, I watched the World Trade Center burn on my tiny black-and-white office TV. One day, you’re thrilled to finally edit your own newspaper; the next day, you’re in fear, with a staff looking to you for guidance. As it turned out, Skyway News would be fine; Terry and Janis had cleverly bought a worn-out brand just as the Downtown residential community was exploding. The condo market roared and kept roaring as Downtown passed 20,000, then 30,000 people. We published a condo map because I couldn’t keep all the new buildings straight; the rechristened Downtown Journal was packed with developer ads. Even 20 years later, people compliment me on my tenure at “the Journals,” as they came to be known. (I soon edited the Southwest Journal as well.) But I was lucky; the acquisition meant the Journals had their biggest reporting staff during my time — experienced pros like Scott Russell and Rich Ryan and barely-out-of-college
Anyone who knows Terry knows he’s a super-salesman and not one to let the business aspect of an editorial decision go uncommented upon — especially after we left our cozy single-story LynLake building for swank Downtown digs. But when a longtime advertiser pulled his ads during the same-sex marriage debate because we put kissing local lesbians on the cover, I got 100% backing from him and Janis. I cut my teeth on the alt-weeklies, and I appreciated the freedom to push the Journals even further into investigations and controversies (minus the swear words). I left at the end of 2005, burned out
Mary Van Beusekom • Mary Vanderford • Matt Perry • Mattie Eslinger • Mavis A. Voigt • May Tobar • Megan Cavanaugh • Megan Devine • Megan Latham • Meleah Maynard • Melinda Ludwiczak • Melissa Melohn • Melissa Rappaport Schifman • Melissa Ungerman Levy • Merav Silverman • Merle Minda • Mesa Johnson • Micah Edel • Michael Bethke • Michael Krieger • Michael Metzger • Michael Mischke • Michele Gillman • Michele Manske • Michelle Bruch • Michelle Foster • Michelle Napral •
DAVID BRAUER
go-getters like Sarah McKenzie and Robyn Repya. Together with managing editor Sue Rich and veteran reporters Michael Metzger, Kevin Featherly and others, we could cover the neighborhoods and City Hall full time. It was a dream for a Minneapolis geek like me and for the Journals’ civic-minded readers. Small-town newspapering — and that’s really what this was — meant showing up, especially before blogging quotas and page views were much of a thing. It was such a pleasure to give Russell, an affable but indefatigable bulldog, time to detail campaign-donor links between the Park Board’s attorney and the board members who hired him. That story won a statewide public service award against Minnesota’s biggest dailies (not the Journal’s first, by the way!). I was tickled to see McKenzie and Repya come back with development scoops gleaned from endless neighborhood association evening meetings. Featherly and Metzger could craft amazing people stories just walking out the door and applying their writerly styles; Ryan did the same with his photos. Sue Rich was such a bubbly, insistent underboss, always finding unique angles and pushing us to be less conventional. Did we get yelled at? We got yelled at. By elected officials, who thought they could put one over on the kids yet ended up caught like Scooby Doo villains. By developers, who assumed the chummy Skyway News ways were still operative, not quite realizing that they needed us at that moment more than we needed them. Occasionally by readers, including some fooled by our “Slyway News” April Fools issues. (The Park Board was not happy with the several calls it got about our story announcing toll gates on lake paths. #SorryNotSorry.)
by something relatively new in Journal World: budget cuts. What I now call the “first” condo boom had crested, and though we didn’t quite realize it on 9/11, the ensuing recession was the beginning of an inexorable weakening of local independent retail, our advertising lifeblood. Throw in the general move from print to digital advertising, and every editor after me had to deal with fewer resources. For 15 years, I’ve been amazed at their creativity in keeping you informed. I hope readers realize just how hard everyone has worked to make the Southwest Journal a paper you’re sad to lose.
CROSSWORD PUZZLE ACROSS
The Broder Family celebrates the Southwest Journal for 31 years of unmatched community journalism. Optimizing what a localized community publication should be, you kept us informed and connected to the community we cherish. To Janis, Terry and the whole SW Journal team, we thank you!
broders.com Broders SWJ 121720 4.indd 1
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1 Play for time 6 Soup aisle array 10 Murder mystery staple 14 Apex predators of the sea 15 “I __ my wit’s end!” 16 Sacred Nile bird 17 Many a Mumbai resident 18 Triangle ratio 19 Hand over 20 Do as told 21 Comfy clothing 23 Dog walker’s need 25 “Little ol’ me?” 26 Supernatural 29 Appetizer platter items 33 Fowl fencing material 36 Morse “T” 37 Gas container 38 Abu Dhabi’s fed. 39 Nativity scene threesome 40 Red Cross offering 41 Forecast that calls for a scarf and gloves 45 Plasterboard 47 Separate by type 48 LAX : Los Angeles :: __ : Chicago 49 Like extreme 41-Across 51 Circle with primary and secondary hues 55 Variety show lineup 59 Apple gadget with playlists 60 Sinuous swimmers 61 Letter-shaped opening 62 Column before ones 63 Pudding starch
64 Prefix for Rome’s country 65 Jittery 66 Spiderweb, e.g. 67 Grand Ole Opry genre, briefly, that’s also a hint to 21-, 33-, 41- and 51-Across
DOWN 1 Artsy Manhattan area 2 Chicago daily, for short 3 Proactiv+ target 4 Female symbol of good fortune 5 The SEC’s Tigers 6 Acapulco abodes 7 Pennsylvania sect 8 Half a Mork-to-Orson farewell 9 Soft-shell clam
Crossword Puzzle SWJ 121720 4.indd 1
10 Kingpin 11 NYC drama award 12 Female opera star 13 Belgian river 21 Blanchett of “Ocean’s 8” 22 Theater tier 24 Deer in a lodge logo 26 Set of eight 27 Committee head 28 Williams of “Laverne & Shirley” 29 Beach house selling point 30 Boise’s state 31 All fired up 32 T-__: 21-Across item 34 Void partner 35 Fistful of dollars 39 Calif. Cascades peak 41 Author Caleb
42 OK Corral setting 43 British noble 44 Donkey 46 Like a forest 49 Hgar’s comics wife 50 Writer of tales with talking animals 51 Name in a footnote 52 Page with opinions 53 Time-consuming 54 Catch wind of 56 Tartan-sporting family 57 Broke the news to 58 Store securely 61 Personal quirk Crossword answers on page B21
12/15/20 4:12 PM
southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 B17
ADVERTISING ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE 2016-2020
I
answered a Craigslist ad. I had just moved to Minnesota, I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t have a full-time job and I was looking for something to occupy my time. I’m a musician, and I saw a posting for a position in a band that seemed like a good fit. My guiding philosophy has always been “Dive in, then figure it out,” so I called. After a short phone conversation, I agreed to come Downtown to talk in person. That’s how I met Terry Gahan, found out about the Southwest Journal and first saw the operation. The audition went great, and as far as I knew I was in a band. I didn’t think for a second that a couple years later, a whole new career would come from it. I had never done anything in sales in my life and never even considered it, but after two years of playing together and becoming friends, I’d learned enough about Terry to take him seriously when he told me he had an opening in his sales department and thought I might be good at it if I wanted to try. I thought what the heck, I’d been working minimum
wage too long, might as well give it a shot — dive in, then figure it out. I honestly guessed that after a couple weeks, we’d both agree it didn’t make a lot of sense and drop the idea, no harm no foul. Two weeks passed, and I was getting the hang of the process and getting more interested. A month, and I was actually having some real success. After three months, it turned out Terry was right — I was good at it. What’s more, I liked it. I didn’t just like the process, I liked all of it. My coworkers
were smart, creative, likeable folks who welcomed me even though I had zero idea what I was doing. What’s more, I got to meet the various characters of the Southwest Minneapolis community. The variety that comes with selling for a paper meant I got to know the people at establishments as diverse as Isles Bun and Coffee, Revolutionary Sports, Washburn McReavy – and so many more! I didn’t just learn sales; I learned things about all the businesses I worked with.
We at Siwek Lumber and Millwork have enjoyed a great partnership with the Southwest Journal and salute you for 31 years of community journalism with integrity.
We know YOUR home!
Michelle Singer • Mike Anderson • Mike Barr • Mike Munzenrider • Mike Novak • Mikki Morrissette • Mira Klein • Moira Kenny • Monica Madson • Monica Nilsson • Monica Wright • Morgan Holle • Morgan Luzier • Moriah Maternoski • Nancie Nelson • Nancy Crotti • Nancy DeMatteo Nelson • Nate Gotlieb • Nate Lansing • Nate Reiter • Nathan Potts • Nee Lougiu • Nichole Norby • Nick Halter • Nicki Brabbit • Nicole Aufderhar • Nicole Navratil • Nik Krawczyk • Nissa Rost-Rothman • Nora Wilmot • Norton Bower • O.C. Sanders • Olivia Mirodone • Olivia Volkman-Johnson • Oona-Gaarder-Juntti • Owen Davis • Palani Pozzani •
OWEN DAVIS
I even learned about everything that goes into a community event. One of the big losses of this past year was the need to cancel our 2020 Home Improvement Fair. I’d worked this event every year since starting with the paper and getting to spend that face-to-face time with readers and advertisers was incredibly rewarding. I can remember driving around town with my colleague Nik, trying to wait just long enough for the ground to thaw enough to put out the signs for the event, but not so long that we missed the window for them to be seen. We would always spend the first couple days frustratedly trying to jam these signs into the frosty Minnesota earth, hard as a rock. Yet somehow, this just became another enjoyable part of the tradition. Five years later, and this has been the ultimate validation of the idea of “Dive in, then figure it out.” I’ve done things I never thought myself capable of and seen real journalism at work. I’ve seen what it means to stand behind a story. When one of our reporters wrote a piece that bothered one of my clients, they threatened not to work with us if we ran it. Well, we all agreed that Nate Gotlieb had delivered a brilliantly written, thoroughly researched article and that was that. The publishers stood behind his work, and never asked him not to tell the truth. They stood behind me and made sure I didn’t take a financial hit from the loss of business. In a word, I saw integrity. The responses I’ve heard to the news of the Southwest Journal closing have only served to underscore how true that is, and how much this community knows it. Across the board, people have recognized just how valuable this paper has been as a voice for the area and expressed their gratitude for it. It has been a pleasure and an honor to be associated with an organization of such integrity. I will miss it, and I know the community will as well!
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B18 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
By Brian Martucci
S
outhwest Journal publisher Terry Gahan knows full well the power of advertising, and not only because ad revenue was the paper’s sole source of revenue during its 30-year run. A classified ad quite literally changed the course of his family’s life. The ad appeared in Minnesota Parent before Gahan and Janis Hall, his spouse and co-publisher, purchased the monthly magazine in 2004. It was a modestly sized spot for the Minnesota Waldorf School in Maplewood. Taken with the preschool’s mold-breaking approach to education, Gahan and Hall enrolled their daughter, Zoe — a decision that “ended up changing the trajectory of her education,” said Gahan. Years later, Zoe would become the Southwest Journal’s become general manager, repaying the family’s investment in her early education several times over. The experience was an epiphany of sorts for Gahan. “If that one little ad that we answered changed our lives, how many times has that happened with ads in the Southwest Journal?” he asked. Given the paper’s 30,000 circulation and biweekly printing schedule, the true count is unknowable, but Gahan is willing to bet it’s big. “We know from our experience as a community publication that [our ads help] connect people in positive ways,” he said. By encouraging readers to spend locally rather than at big-box stores in the suburbs or with online retailers based out of state, the paper’s ads “keep people employed and generate revenue for businesses in the neighborhood.” Those businesses include neighborhood fixtures that employ thousands in the Southwest Journal’s coverage area: hardware stores and appliance retailers, restaurants and food markets, professional and home services providers, tradespeople, real estate brokers. Choose a random Southwest Minneapolis business on Google Maps and there’s a good chance it’ll have an advertising record with the paper. One of those longtime advertisers is Judy Shields, a veteran local agent with Coldwell Banker Realty who has spent about $1,000 per month with the paper in recent years. The investment — a significant fraction of her total print ad spend
Molly Broder, who advertised her Southwest Minneapolis Italian eateries in the paper, says she sees no obvious replacement for the Southwest Journal. Photo by Isaiah Rustad
— produces an impressive return on investment, especially amid a pandemic that makes in-person networking all but impossible and blunts the effect of in-person display ads in formerly hightraffic public places. Shields’ Southwest Journal ads generated nearly $1 million in listing activity this year alone, she said, paying for themselves multiple times over. “I’m a businesswoman,” Shields said. “If the relationship” — between Shields’ office and the Southwest Journal — “wasn’t good, it wouldn’t have lasted.” Matt Loskota, an Edina real estate agent who has advertised with Gahan for years, never sat down and quantified his return on investment. But he said he didn’t really need to. Loskota opened and ran a new Edina realty office in Downtown Minneapolis during the mid-2000s condo boom, advertising in the Southwest Journal’s sister publication, the Downtown Journal. Loskota’s office ran a back-page ad in every issue touting its condo-selling chops, likely earning dozens of listings in the process. “That page really helped us establish the Downtown office,” he said. Unlike some early competitors, Gahan and Hall resisted temptation, and sometimes outright pressure, to install back doors in the Southwest Journal’s editorial wall. When a Chicago-based property developer showed up at the paper’s offices with an ultimatum — kill a pending
story about water damage in a newly built Minneapolis condo building or we’ll cancel our $70,000 ad contract — the staff didn’t budge. But the years saw plenty of benign synergy between the Southwest Journal’s editorial and sales departments. Jonna Kosalko, who handles advertising for Coldwell Banker Realty agents Fran and Barb Davis, remembers a high-profile Lake Harriet listing promoted by the pair. The house was memorable, and some time after it sold, the office wanted to know what became of it. Sure enough, the next Southwest Journal had a feature story about the house being physically relocated off its original lot. Other “synergies” directly impacted advertisers’ bottom lines. HouseLift co-owner Randy Korn is grateful for the paper’s Remodeler’s Spotlight, a rotating showcase of home service providers serving Southwest Minneapolis. Twice each year, featured contractors got a quarter- or half-page ad and a little blurb about their services. Korn can’t quantify the value of this exposure, but like Shields, he recognized a good investment when he saw one. The paper’s high-touch sales model also helped keep longtime advertisers like Korn and Shields aboard. According to Gahan, that model owes a big debt of gratitude to longtime advertiser and now-retired Warners’ Stellian president Jeff Warner. After a few years of “winging it,”
Gahan finally got a meeting with Warner, who was in the middle of turning a small family-owned shop into Minnesota’s largest independent appliance retailer. “Every salesperson in five states was trying to talk to Jeff, but he let me pitch him,” Gahan recalled. Impressed with the emerging strength of the paper’s brand, Warner bought some ad space. More importantly, he became a mentor of sorts to Gahan, dispensing unvarnished advice born of countless sales meetings. “Jeff taught me more about what I do than anybody,” Gahan said. “Now I consider him a great friend.” Warner’s early guidance matured into a sales process that endured for a quarter century. The key, according to longtime advertisers, was above-and-beyond service that only improved when Gahan’s daughter Zoe — the Waldorf school a distant memory — took over as general manager. “They were not just sitting back and letting the contract go,” Shields said. Someone on the sales team would call Shields multiple times throughout the year to make sure she remained satisfied with the ads and suggest tweaks. For a busy real estate agent “up to my eyeballs in deals and paperwork,” that was no small thing. “They were my creative department,” Shields said. And the model was reciprocal. A hallmark of Korn’s relationship with Southwest Journal was the ad team’s receptiveness to change requests, which for Korn was a welcome contrast with the more corporate, transactional “shopper” magazines that dominated Minneapolis newsstands for years. “I’d call my rep and they’d say, ‘Tell me what you want to change.’ I’d tell them, and they’d approve it, basically,” he said. The past few years have been devastating for print media in general and independently run local papers in particular. For many publications, the pandemic was the coup de grace. Weeks after the Southwest Journal announced it was closing, City Pages followed suit. Longtime Southwest Journal advertisers aren’t sure what to make of the void. “It was nice to have that signifier in print,” said Molly Broder, who co-owns four Italian eateries in Southwest Minneapolis, referring to her restaurant group’s SEE ADVERTISERS / PAGE B20
Pam Nettleton • Pamela Hill Nettleton • Pat Hansen • Patricia Hoolihan • Patricia Johnson • Patrick Mulligan • Patrick Roche • Paul Burnstein • Paul Hansen • Paul Keller • Paul Nolan • Paul Schersten • Paula Keller • Penny Meyers • Penny Petersen • Rachel Allyn • Rachel Drewelow • Rachel Jeffers • Ralph Remington • Raya Zimmerman •
Bottom line: Advertisers will miss the Southwest Journal
B20 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com FROM ADVERTISERS / PAGE B18
regular ads in the paper. Though Broder is “inundated with opportunities to advertise digitally,” she sees no obvious
online stand-in for the Southwest Journal. For his part, Korn’s print ad spend has dwindled nearly to nothing; Lavender will be the only print publication he’ll keep patronizing. These days, he gets what he needs from local ad blocks on cable channels like HGTV and CNN, reaching about 70,000
households in parts of Southwest Minneapolis and the inner western suburbs. He’s planning a significant push into digital advertising as well. The paper’s loyal real estate professionals aren’t worried about going out of business without the paper. Still, they openly mourn the loss of a reliable outreach partner that they believe had a stake in their success. Loskota expects to reallocate some advertising funds to still-existing community publications like Edina magazine but doesn’t view it as a one-to-one replacement for the Southwest Journal. Shields, who said the Southwest Journal was among her office’s biggest advertising contracts, sees nowhere
else offering the same return on investment. “Losing [the Southwest Journal] is a really big deal,” she said. “I knew I’d never get lost in its pages. There just are not too many replacements.” Even as the ranks of community newspapers dwindle in Minneapolis and around the country, demand for hyperlocal coverage remains lively as ever. The paper, meanwhile, remains up for sale. Perhaps a partial answer to the reallocation question lies with a future owner’s commitment to leveraging the goodwill Gahan and Hall built over the years — with both advertisers and the Southwest Minneapolis community.
SOUTHWEST JOURNAL CONTRIBUTORS
Rebecca Lee • Rebecca Noble • Rebecca Wainscott • Regina Cass • Reid Strait • Renee Griffith • Rich Ryan • Robb Burnham • Robb Long • Robert Gerloff • Robert Meany • Robin Sorenson • Robyn Repya • Roger E. Linehan • Romy Ackerberg • Rongini Mukherjee • Rose Caron • Rusty Meyer • Ruth Rasmussen • Ruth Weleczki • Ryan Stopera • Ryan Swedlund • Samantha Ducas • Sami Foust • Samuel Stewart • Sandye Wilson • Sara O’Donnell • Sarah Brownson • Sarah Harris • Sarah Karnas • Sarah Kirchner • Sarah McKenzie • Sarah Primus • Sarah Stoesz • Sarah Tellijohn • Sarah Tschida • Sarah Woutat • Sasha Jensen • Scott Benson • Scott DeRudder • Scott Fultz • Scott Holter • Scott Maida • Scott Russell • Shannon Brady • Shannon Cooper • Shannon Keough • Shannon Schaub • Sharon Parker • Sheila Regan • Sherry Walters • Sid Korpi • Sonya Chechik • Stacie Nielsen Bortel • Stacy Jones • Steffen Ryan • Steph Glaros • Stephanie Fox • Stephanie Johnson • Stephen Schueller • Steve Brandt • Steve Compton • Steve Cramer • Steve Guy • Steve Kotvis • Steve Pease • Steve Schueller • Steven Mosborg • Stewart Huntington • Sue LeBreton • Sue Rich • Susan Du • Susan Eyestone • Susan Freehan • Susan Hawthorne • Susan Nelson • Susan Schaefer • Susan Stan • Suzane Kramer • Suzie Marty • Suzy Cohen • Taiya Brown • Tammy Sproule Kaplan • Tara Bannow • Taylor Olson • Taylor Severson • Teresa Hershey • Terre Thomas • Terry Gahan • Thatcher Imboden • Tim Connor • Todd King • Tom Clark • Tom Hoch • Tom Mattox • Tony Baisley • Tony Harvath • Tony Nicholls • Tracy Walsh • Travis Reed • Tricia Cornell • Troy Stenstrom • Tyler McKean • Valerie Aliano • Valerie Moe • Valerie Wilking • Vanessa El-Hakeem • Victoria Hein • Victoria Hoffman • Victoria Sung • Wade Muhlhauser • Welcome Jerde • Wendy Fassett • Whitney A. Stewart • William Green • Winton Pitcoff • Wynne Yelland • Yvonne Hunter • Zac Farber • Zachary Flategraff • Zoe Gahan • Zoë Peterson • Zoie Glass
Transforming homes and lives for over 45 years.
Thank you for your service and dedication to covering our community over the last few decades. Your presence has been one of consistency and integrity, and you will be missed!
Sylvestre SWJ 121720 H2.indd 1
12/15/20 4:10 PM
southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 B21
SOUTHWEST JOURNAL’S FIRST-PLACE AWARDS 1990
2002
NPA, Best Continuing Column NPA, Best Story Layout NPA, Best News Photo NPA, Best Advertisement
Premack, Public Affairs Reporting, Weekly
2004
Premack, Public Affairs Reporting, Weekly
1991
NPA, Best Continuing Design NPA, Best Continuing Editorial Coverage
1992
NPA, Best Continuing Editorial Coverage
1994
NPA, Best Continuing Design
1996
2005
MNA, Typography and Design
2006
MNA, Honorable Mention, General Excellence MNA, Advertising Excellence MNA, Best Use of Color in Advertising MNA, Best Local News Story MNA, Best Multimedia Special Project
1998
MNA, General Reporting MNA, Arts/Entertainment Reporting
Premack, Public Affairs Reporting, Weekly MNA, General Reporting MNA, Best Social Issues Feature Story MNA, Best Use of Photography as a Whole
2000
2013
2014
2009
MNA, General Excellence MNA, Typography and Design MNA, Advertising Excellence MNA, Use of Color in Advertising
MNA, General Excellence SPJ, Layout SPJ, Best News Portrait
Premack, Public Affairs Reporting, Weekly
KEY
MNA,, Typography & Design MNA, Local Breaking News Coverage MNA, Best Use of Social Media MNA, General Excellence SPJ,, General Column
2008
2010
MNA, General Excellence MNA, Advertising Excellence
2012
MNA, Honorable Mention, General Excellence
MNA, Advertising Excellence MNA, Typography & Design MNA, General Reporting
1999
MNA, General Reporting MNA, Use of Information Graphics & Graphic Illustrations MNA, Best Use of Social Media MNA, General Excellence
MNA, Use of Color in Advertising MNA, Design Portfolio MNA, Best Use of Multimedia SPJ, Page Design SPJ, Arts & Entertainment
2007
NPA, General Excellence NPA, Best Special Project
2001
2011
MNA, Social Issues Story MNA, Advertising Excellence MNA, Government/Public Affairs Reporting MNA, Website SPJ, Best Feature SPJ, Page Design
2015
MNA, Advertising Excellence MNA, Business Story SPJ, Arts & Entertainment
2016
MNA, General Excellence MNA, Human Interest Story MNA, Business Story
MNA, Social Issues Story MNA, Typography & Design SPJ, Best Feature SPJ, Arts & Entertainment Story
2017
MNA, Typography & Design MNA, Advertising Excellence MNA, Best Advertisement MNA, Business Story MNA, Arts & Entertainment Story
2018
MNA, Advertising Excellence MNA, Arts & Entertainment Story SPJ, Meeting/Planned News Event SPJ, Arts Criticism/Reviews
2019
SPJ, Best Feature SPJ, Arts Criticism & Reviews
2020
SPJ, Business News Coverage SPJ, Arts & Entertainment Coverage
MNA = Minnesota Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Award NPA = Neighborhood Press Association Award Premack = Minnesota Journalism Center Frank Premack Public Affairs Journalism Award SPJ = Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists Page One Award
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B22 December 17–31, 2020 / southwestjournal.com
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1
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Classifieds
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12/16/20 12:27 AM 5/17/16 2:37 PM
southwestjournal.com / December 17–31, 2020 B23
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3:01 PM
The NARI logo is a registered trademark of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry. ©2015 NARI of Minnesota. 12/16/20 12:30 AM
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12/28/17 12:31 PM