Run Minneapolis: Follow the Crosstown
On Friday afternoon, I followed the Crosstown from the Eastern corner near the VA hospital heading West. That put me in the Morris Park neighborhood to start.
For less than $5, I could more than counter the calories lost over my 7 mile run:
At 34th Ave S I crossed into the Wenonah neighborhood and looped through Sander Drive just to the West of 34th Ave S. This is one of the stranger public housing areas of Minneapolis with very high density low-income housing. Based on the condition of the neighborhood, it doesn’t seem to be working as well as planned:
Further West, I saw this thing on the MSP airport. Is this some sort of radar thing?
At Cedar Ave S I crossed into the Diamond Lake Neighborhood and passed Home Lutheran Church:
And the 5-8 Club, which is the Home of the Juicy Lucy:
West of the 5-8 Club, I followed the Crosstown’s slope South and ended up on 61st St E. This is the also the Southern border to Edward C Solomon Park, which was pretty quiet outside of one guy throwing a tennis ball to his dog. Here’s a shot from the North side of the park.
Apparently, someone is trying a dilution strategy by getting rid of their Dex Yellow Pages one page at a time:
I turned North on Portland Ave S and pass this cool retro Dairy Queen:
Know Name’s inclusion of “and stuff” among their offerings makes we want to check this place out:
And Diamond Lake Lutheran Church:
I turned back East along 57th St E, and grabbed this shot of homes along this stretch. Overall, the neighborhoods I passed through during this run were very well maintained with 1 to 1 1/2 story homes. The challenge around here is the proximity of airport runways. Plane traffic was low during the time I was running, but when a plane passed over, I couldn’t hear my iPod.
Further East, I passed the Providence Reformed Baptist Church:
I cut through Hope Lutheran Church’s yard to get back to Cedar Ave and noticed the North wall of the church has become home to gang tags:
The Lake Nokomis Community School Wenonah Campus must have some great cell reception for those K-3 kids:
Near the end of my run, I crossed through Bossen Field, which had a lot going on, including a young baseball team where one dad was pitching batting practice while another was lobbing balls to a player crushing them into a net:
While another group of kids played basketball. Dude, that was one off-balance low-percentage shot:
The Crosstown Education Center is a special ed elementary school:
April 12th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
That big white thing you saw is the MSP VOR. It’s for navigation. It transmits two signals at the same time — one is a reference phase, the other sends out signals that are a bit different for each radial from it (aka each degree of the compass). This way, equipment in the air can tell at which direction from the VOR it is receiving its signal from. Pretty nifty stuff and more-or-less the most valuable piece of navigational equipment in a plane without GPS. You can see it on this chart as the hexagon in a box with the dot in the middle. The box to the lower left shows the frequency you can pick it up on (115.3) and the morse code you’ll hear off of it to verify you’re tuned into the right VOR.
VORs also create the basis of the “air highways” in the sky as they’re generally defined by radials from VORs across the world.
If you fly over a VOR, you enter what the FAA literally calls the “cone of confusion” — your navigation equipment has really gets “confused” as it receives signals from multiple radials.
April 12th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
@Aaron
very cool info. thank you.
I remember buying pipe screens from know-names when I was in high school.
Daniel
April 14th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
I was ready to write “VOR/DME” nav aid — and Aaron spelled it out exactly!