The creepy “No-Person Zone” at the Franklin LRT stop:
Gateway to Greater Phillips

by David Rubenstein
published Oct 6 08

Have you heard of the Venturi effect?

That’s Venturi, not Ventura.

The Venturi effect, named for the Italian physicist who discovered it, refers to the way a moving fluid speeds up when its container narrows—at the neck of a funnel, for example. “Fluid” in the world of physics can mean air as well as water, and the Venturi effect is related to what makes airplanes fly.

If you live in Ventura Village, or in parts of greater Phillips, this winter you can learn about the Venturi effect first hand. All you have to do is walk along Franklin Avenue, from the rail stop west, under the Hiawatha overpass, and up the incline to 16th Avenue. One Minneapolis official, who preferred not be quoted, calls it “the no-person zone.”

The first leg, from the LRT stop to the Hiawatha exit ramp—still nostalgically called “17th Avenue” on a street sign—is OK, although, depending on the hour, there’s probably no human being in sight and you’re not sure if that’s good or bad. Once under the overpass, with its creepy dim lights in their steel cage, no call box and no security camera, you walk as briskly as you can, given that you’re walking on a sheet of solid ice.

When you emerge and start to ascend the gorge, there are no lights at all. The Little Earth sound wall is on your left, and on your right, across divided Franklin Avenue, there’s a shallow embankment. Nothing in nature fits perfectly into a theory, and this stretch isn’t a perfect Venturi wind tunnel. But it’s close enough so that if the wind chill in Minneapolis is minus 10, it’s probably closer to minus 30 as you start up the incline into the prevailing west wind. It’s the kind of numbing cold that gives you an instant headache and makes you walk backwards. The entire route, from the transit stop west to 16th Avenue and the parking lot at the CUHC clinic, is a bit less than two football fields long.

This situation will be improved somewhat if an ambitious project known as “The Franklin Avenue Cedar/Riverside Transit Oriented Development Master Plan” comes to pass. (It addresses a larger area that includes this stretch of Franklin Avenue.) Versions of it have been in the works since the late 1990s, and three federal grants totaling $2.7 million have been garnered—conditionally—to carry it out. One of them is specifically for “transportation enhancements,” which could include things like sidewalk lighting, trees and, who knows, maybe some kind of long skinny curvy art structure along the sidewalk to break the wind and provide some summer shade.

The problem is that the federal money is on hold until it gets matched with at least $800,000 in local funding. That’s widely expected to come from some combination of county money and the City of Minneapolis Capital Long Range Improvement Committee (CLIC) budget. Planning details need to be worked out and persuasively presented first, and there are other projects competing for the money, but proponents of the Transit Oriented Master Plan are optimistic.
The Plan, needless to say, was hammered out when it was still possible to pretend the U.S. economy wasn’t a house of cards. So there may be some question about whether the assumed time line for the Master Plan is realistic. What is that assumed time line?

One well-informed Minneapolis official, who preferred not to be quoted, said it probably will be at least 2011 before the funding is in place. He didn’t want to hazard a guess for “implementation.”

That means that in the best case scenario, hundreds of people in one of the poorest and most transit-dependent neighborhoods in Minneapolis could be looking at years of being buffeted by wind in the winter and baked by the sun on a shadeless hardpan in the summer if they need to walk to and from the train. For some, the Franklin bus may be a solution of sorts during rush hours. But for many others it’s not, especially at night when it’s a toss-up whether it makes more sense to wait for the bus or just head on out “over the rim.”

Can anything be done in the meantime? It’s hard to say. This spring, Park Forestry, part of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, planted eight identical disease-resistant elms along the worst stretch of the no-person zone, between the Hiawatha overpass and 16th Avenue. Unfortunately they were planted in the median, where they won’t provide a windbreak in the winter for many years, or any shade in the summer, ever, for pedestrians. Apparently the pedestrian problem had never been put on Park Forestry’s plate.
Could they have been planted along the sidewalks? “It’s not out of the question,”says Ralph Sievert, Park Forestry director.

Near the end of the long walk, close to 16th Avenue, there is one steel light pole. It’s not the optimum location for a light, but if it worked it would marginally improve the situation. Unfortunately it has two dead wires sticking out near the top and no fixture. It’s been that way for at least three years.

The low point of this walk, literally and figuratively, is the stretch under the Hiawatha overpass. During mid to late winter, under the right conditions of freeze-thaw-freeze, something remarkable happens. The sidewalk turns not just to ice, but what Brother Tim would call good ice. Hockey ice. And sometimes, under the right conditions, even speed-skating ice, almost 80 feet of it.

It is no place for an elderly person whose hips can’t take a fall, no place for anyone pushing a stroller or carrying a child, and certainly no place for someone in a wheel chair, unless he or she happen to be training for the special Olympics. If this were private property, the owner would get nasty letters from inspections and eventually be hauled into municipal court. He could probably be sued by the federal government, as well, for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.

It’s hard to look at something like this in a low-income neighborhood in the inner city and not think about what has happened in the last 30 years: Disinvestment in the public infrastructure became practically the first commandment of the Republican party, in the name of “keeping your own money.” Wealth and amenities became increasingly concentrated in a few prosperous suburbs, unions got clobbered, and income disparities went off the charts. In this state a key event occurred in 2001 when people with homes worth more than a half million dollars got a nice property tax break. Inner cities took another big hit in 2003, under Governor Tim Pawlenty, when state aid to local governments was cut more than 20 percent.

Maybe the bailout will work magic and we aren’t heading into a depression. Maybe Minneapolis will find money for its share of the Master Plan and sometime in 2012 or 2013 this little stretch of Franklin Avenue will start to look like a modern city, a Dubai on the tundra. But in the meantime, it’s ripe for some Band Aids. A couple of solar lights and somebody on retainer to chip the ice would be great.