When she bought her house close to the Crosstown/35W tangle seven years ago, Carol Lawrence knew the state might buy it to make way for its massive reconstruction project. Starting in 2007, her street became a muddy construction zone, trees toppled and neighbors’ houses were knocked into splinters. But Lawrence, a 52-year-old occupational therapist, learned to her disappointment that the state didn’t need her property. Her house on 1st Avenue South in Minneapolis was there to stay.

Then Lawrence heard how the state had abruptly decided to buy the home of her neighbor two doors down. Mary VanSlooten’s home had become an uninhabitable island in the shadow of a new 35W overpass, as Whistleblower reported in February. Lawrence contacted the Minnesota Department of Transportation and said, hey, what about me?

“I want them to buy my house too,” Lawrence told me. “I don’t think I could sell it with that overpass they’re building over our homes.”

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A few days after I blogged about the fearsome fence fragment embedded in a stump in the backyard of Henry and Jeannie Adams, the Minnesota Department of Transportation paid a visit to their home in south Minneapolis. Left untouched for more than a year, the stump was just one of the thorns in the Adams family’s side. When the old chainlink fence was removed and a tall wooden soundwall put up in its place as part of the Crosstown reconstruction, the state left a gap in the fence that’s a safety hazard, because there’s no real barrier for children and dogs to wander onto the highway, or stranded motorists or maybe strangers with malevolent intent to wander from the road into the Adams backyard.

Jeannie Adams told me today that MnDOT cut the stump down to the ground, and will remove the rest of it soon. The agency also pledged to put up a new fence, although it’s not yet clear whether it will be wood or wire. For the first time in a while, Adams feels that MnDOT is listening. “So far, they’re trying to do something about it,” she said.

Whistleblower will let you know if MnDOT follows through.

Meet the latest problem properties in Minneapolis that the city has ordered demolished:
2426 Plymouth Avenue (built in 1921, four dwellings)
2321 Fremont Avenue North (built in 1987, nine unit apartment building)

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There’s a lot that Henry Adams doesn’t like about the traffic on the extension of Lyndale Avenue that feeds into the Crosstown/35W in south Minneapolis. Big trucks sometimes shake the house and sound like they’re coming through his bedroom. Then there are the stranded motorists and other strangers who wander into his backyard, thanks to a gap between the new noisewall put up by MnDOT. Crosstown construction crews took out the old chain-link fence that used to keep those people out, but left a chunk of it that had been encased over the years in the trunk of a tree. The tree is gone, but the stump has remained with its embedded and jagged fragment of fence railing, for more than a year.

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