Northfield Downtown Development Corporation

That would be Aaron Anderson, bassist in Northfield’s own Mr. Sticky.

Anderson, along with Jeff Hutchison, Dave Zdenek, and Jeffy Paskell will cause some low-end shaking and/or shaking of some low-ends, at the Upstairs Rueb (503 Division Street) from 7 to 11 pm this Friday night, February 29th, as part of the ArtOrg Concert Series. Mr. Sticky wants to take the world for a ride with the top down and the tunes up. Loaded with rhythm, adrenaline, and instrumental wizardry, Mr. Sticky reinforces rock lessons learned long ago. They’re appearing with Toaster Fork, a band with nothing to prove, but a whole lot of groove.

Also appearing in Downtown Northfield on Friday night will be Last Known Whereabouts, a local band recently featured in the Northfield News. The band will be at the Contented Cow, 302B Division Street, starting at 7:30 pm. The band features newgrass music, an amazing mix of bluegrass and jazz, seasoned with a bit of anything else.

Saturday, March 1st, there’s a dance performance at St. Olaf College. It’s an improvisational work in dance, lighting and music and will not only feature everything from break-dancing to tap dancing, but will encourage audience members to put on their dancing shoes for part of the show as well. The performance is free and open to the public, in Dittman Center, Studio 1 at 7:30 pm.

Also on the 1st, is the Carleton College Choir Concert performance. The program includes works by Orlando Gibbons, Johann Sebastian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Alexandre Gretchaninoff, William Henry Smith, Gerald Finzi, Stephen Paulus, Daniel E. Gawthrop, Alexander Freeman and others. 8 pm in the Carleton Concert Hall, it too is free and open to the public.

Carleton College Director of the Arts Steve Richardson will be the guest speaker at the NDDC’s March Downtown Forum. The Forum is Tuesday, March 4^th, 8 am in the Riverview Conference Room, lower level of the Archer House, 212 Division Street, in downtown Northfield. Steve will talk about his professional background, Carleton’s proposed art center, and the college’s vision of a higher education arts center that earns national recognition.

A graduate of the Carleton Class of 1986, Richardson is the Director of the Arts at the College, a newly-created position designed to provide a leadership role in the conceptualization and development of Carleton’s “Arts Union,” a multi-million dollar facility to be located at the site of the former Northfield middle/high school. The College plans to gear The Arts Union toward creative collaboration by collectively housing its academic departments of studio art, art history, cinema and media
studies, theater and dance, and English. Carleton presented its preliminary ideas to the Northfield Planning Commission in 2005 with a price tag of approximately $40 million; the project has since been divided into two phases with an estimated cost totaling over $90 million.

Carleton is working hard to reach out to the community through the arts and Steve is well qualified for pursuing this goal. Steve has been at the Theatre de la Jeune Lune for the past 17 years, including the last 12 as Producing Director, for which he won the 2005 Tony Award for outstanding regional theater.

The NDDC is a non-partisan, non-profit community organization dedicated to the vitality of downtown Northfield. The event is free and open to the public. As always, coffee and cookies will be served.

“Miami still has some catching up to do”, so claimed the headline of Ronald Bosrock’s “Global Executive” column in Monday’s (February 25th) Strib article. In the competition for global talent, he argued that the Twin Cities was way ahead of Miami.

While recognizing that Miami has attracted multi-national companies and the largest concentration of banks south of New York City, largely due to its location in relation to Latin America, Bosrock said that the city’s current investments reveal that it is trying to catch up with the Twin Cities in at least one area. Miami has not been as successful at “attracting the highly educated, highly trained, and highly paid workers” needed to work for the multi-nationals. Miami’s current capital investment program is focused on positioning the city as a “center of culture and a place that offers a quality of lifestyle”.

Miami has recently built a new symphony hall, a new opera house, and a new museum of modern art. However, it’s not just buildings that create culture, it’s programming to fill those buildings. Miami has had to borrow artists from Cleveland.

The Twin Cities, on the other hand, has launched a public relations campaign called “More to Life”. The goal is to let the world know that the Minneapolis and St. Paul already are a center of culture and a place offering a high quality of life, featuring such offering as the Minnesota Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Minnesota Opera, the Guthrie Theater, the Ordway Center, the Walker Museum, the Science Museum, the History Center, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Bosrock concludes that in the increasing global competition for talent, you have to recognize your assets and promote them vigorously. Perhaps there are some lessons for Northfield in this story.

According to today’s (February 26th) Strib, Oscar-winning actress and Minnesota-native daughter Jessica Lange doesn’t like what she sees happening to Stillwater.

“When we first moved to Stillwater, it still felt like a real place. It had a downtown with a hardware store, a clothing store…Now it’s all gift shops and these terrible condominiums.” “It was a little town with a great deal of character. Everything gets yuppified, I guess”.

It’s hard for real downtowns, symbolized by the presence of a hardware store and clothing store, to survive with the Wal-Marts and Lowe’s out on the highway. The gift shops are intended to serve the desired visitors and the condos are hoped to add population density to support the traditional retail. Towns try to add the promising without sacrificing the valued.

Jessica and her husband Sam Shepard lived in Stillwater for nine years. They raised three children in a house on North 4th Street.

The third in a series of Open Houses to share information and gather input on the 5th Street and Water Street Projects is tomorrow, Tuesday, February 26th, from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm in Council Chambers at City Hall.

The final layout, including drawings, will be presented for review and comment by citizens. For more information, see the City’s website through this link to the projects. The City Council will hold a Public Hearing on the proposed $1,967,000 project at their March 3rd meeting.

The City will also be requesting individual meetings with property owners along the project to go over the project impacts and document existing conditions. There will be an opportunity to sign up for a meeting time at the open house.

For questions contact City Staff members Joel Walinski at 645-3009 or Katy Gehler-Hess at 645-3006.