The Met Council has a major stormwater project underway in Uptown that could forever change Uptown and East Isles.
The park board is taking the opportunity to leverage the construction to implement changes to a quiet part of Uptown that is resulting in major pushback from the local community.
Very few people have ever heard of The Mall Park, even as they may have walked from end to end the one weekend a year it comes to life, during the Uptown Art Fair.
Today the park functions as a quiet place to walk or sit and offers treelined passage from Hennepin Avenue to the Chain of Lakes. It is bordered by rental apartments on the south side and single-family and multi-family homes to the north.
Traffic on the roadway is light, and the street offers parking for those visiting the Walker Library, also located on the park, and for the renters who make up most of the area population and have no off-street parking.
Eliminating Parkway and Adding a Woonerf
The park board’s plan would close the two westernmost sections of the westbound road, which now connects to the lakes. Users of the road would be able to enter from East Bde Maka Ska Parkway but no longer exit back onto the parkway. Instead, they would be detoured onto Lagoon Avenue, which has blind intersections and high-speed traffic.
The plan also has the park board allocating the bulk of $479,000 to install a "woonerf." A woonerf is a roadway designed to foster traffic calming. The community criticism has been that while there are areas of the city that might benefit from a woonerf, The Mall Park has no real traffic as it is a dead-end loop.
Community Skepticism
“Much of the confusion in the neighborhood has come from misconceptions around the park board's plans for The Mall Park,” said Mark Sloo, who has been actively involved with the community response to the plans. “The plans have changed many times and park board communication has obscured the actual plans for the park all along. For example, the architect-designed plaza adjacent to the Walker Library is still featured on the park board website, however, that plan has been replaced by the woonerf. The elimination of entire sections of the roadway and parking was also not clearly communicated,” added Sloo.
Over 450 neighbors have signed a petition with a link eastisles.org “to have the Park Board reconsider their plan for The Mall Park.” The East Isles Neighborhood Association has taken a position against both the woonerf and the closing of a portion of the street.
The community consensus comes from the general belief that The Mall Park could be better for the community with a few enhancements, but the woonerf and road closure add nothing to the area while making it less safe for walkers, bikers and roadway users. Park board surveys were not accessible to many people due to a glitch in the survey system, which prevented the community from being able to express their concerns even though the community is the top decision maker on the organizational chart that governs the park board.
Neighborhood Opposition
A letter to the park board from the East Isles Neighborhood Association states, “We believe the master plan should be changed to keep the current street infrastructure as it is today. While expanding this park might make sense, this plan adds no new usable park space to The Mall but does create unsafe traffic patterns and in particular hurts the rental community who live directly on The Mall Park and represent 50% of our neighborhood.”
On February 20, Park Board Commissioner Elizabeth Shaffer and Board Chair Meg Forney heard from a large group of neighbors who attended the East Isles Board Meeting. Commissioner Shaffer observed, “To keep the road open the Master Plan would have to be amended and that would require more community input.” It’s worth noting this is something neighbors believe should happen.
Commissioner Forney, who had voted against the closure of the roadway and the woonerf initially, reversed her position after a park historian said the park’s “symmetry” had already been breached. The breach took place when the connection to Hennepin Avenue was eliminated years ago. Neighbors were quick to point out that it remains symmetrical today with a complete loop — a loop that will be eliminated when a section of the northwest roadway is closed.
