Patrick Larkin

Added hours, heavy gym use bode well for the city facility
Walk into Conway Recreation Center on a Monday afternoon, and you'll see dozens of teenagers playing basketball, which is more or less what you might have seen a year ago, when it was St. Paul Parks and Recreation managing it, rather than a private company.

With $470,000 earmarked for bike and pedestrian trail improvements along the east side of Interstate 35E, nearby residents are celebrating the success of their efforts to improve pedestrian facilities along the freeway.

With St. Paul’s citywide bike plan in the final draft stages, Ramsey County is looking to draw up a plan of its own to connect existing clumps of bike trails throughout the county’s 19 cities.

Will hold community meeting Nov. 18
Linda Mealey-Lohmann has for years imagined putting in a Chinese garden in a St. Paul park.
Founder of the Minnesota-China Friendship Group, she’s been advocating for introducing Chinese gardens into the Twin Cities for well over a decade.

As fall transitions into colder weather, leaves are falling faster than grounds crews can clear them at Phalen Golf Course.

And that’s about the biggest problem that golfers there could point out.

Added space, more windows, more flexibility
After nearly a year without a library, Conway residents will again be able to check out books in their neighborhood.
The Sun Ray Public Library is now so shiny and new looking, that a photograph of the facility could be easily mistaken for a digital rendering.

Thanks to the diligent work of some St. Paul firefighters, every student at Dayton’s Bluff Elementary School has a new coat to wear this winter.

East Side law firm looks back on 5 decades and three generations
Wendy Kurka, now 79, recalls the first time she met Marie Hitchcock, when she came in for a job interview at Hitchcock’s law firm on Payne Avenue, back in February of 1963.
“When can you start?” were the first words out of the attorney’s mouth, Kurka says.
 

Garage comes to life for Halloween spectacle
Mike Etoll, proprietor of the East Side's own residential butcher-shop-themed haunted house, might be considered by some to be an eccentric, an oddball, or a quirk.
That's probably just fine with the man, who confidently wears a goatee that's dyed green.