11 Jan 2026

Double-decker downtown: Cycling Museum of Minnesota brings over a century of two-wheeled history to the skyway

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When Juston Anderson was growing up, the bus stop was right in front of his house. Kids from around the neighborhood would ride their bikes over, and while they waited for the bus, they’d tinker with the mechanics.

“When I learned how to ride a bike, it didn’t take me long to figure out that having a bike equals freedom,” Anderson said. “Later, I was going to school in Winona and I thought, when I graduate and get a job, I’m going to buy a historical bike. And then it just never stopped.”

Anderson amassed a significant enough personal collection that, in 2013, he exhibited some of his antique bikes at the State Fair. It caught the attention of the owners of Recovery Bike Shop in Minneapolis, who invited him to bring the exhibit to the second floor of their shop. Early the next year, the nonprofit Cycling Museum of Minnesota was officially born.

After a couple moves throughout the years, the museum opened an exhibition space in the St. Paul skyways, within Securian Financial’s 401 Building, with support from the Downtown Alliance’s Grow Downtown program. Because the museum is still a small, volunteer-run operation, the skyway exhibition space is currently open by appointment only.

 

A variety of historical bicycles are exhibited in the front window displays of the Cycling Museum of Minnesota in the St. Paul skyways on Nov. 4, 2025. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)

Today, the museum’s collection consists of more than 100 bicycles, including significant designs from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection also places a particular emphasis on Minnesota-made bikes and cycling artifacts, including vintage bike license plates and race medals.

Walking through the museum’s collection with Anderson, both his love of bicycles and his encyclopedic knowledge of cycling history immediately become clear.

The oldest bicycles in the collection are high-wheel bikes, sometimes called penny-farthings, from the 1880s. These bikes have what, to modern riders, appears to be a comically large front wheel, but Anderson explained its practical purpose: Because modern gear-and-chain drivetrain systems had not yet been invented, a larger wheel circumference meant more distance traveled with one pump of the pedal.

However, because of the way the seat was attached directly over the large wheel, it was unsettingly easy to accidentally take a “header,” or spin over the large front wheel and smash into the ground head-first, Anderson said. So when the modern bicycle design came around — with two equally sized wheels and a seat situated between them — it was aptly called a “safety bicycle.”

From there, he explained, various bells and whistles were added, literally and figuratively. Real noise-making devices were a crucial safety feature, so bikes would not spook nearby horses. Other add-ons that can be seen on bikes in the museum’s collection include acetylene gas headlamps, map cases, tool-carrying attachments and, for ladies’ bicycles, a skirt guard so the fabric would not become tangled in the wheel spokes.

The museum’s ethos, Anderson said, is preservation, not restoration. To illustrate this point, he noted some very faint ornate stenciled decoration along the frame of a bike from the early 20th century.

“When you strip it down, take off all the paint, you are getting rid of a lot of the history of the bike,” he said. “Any type of corrosion, we want to get that stopped. But if we were to restore this bike and repaint it, you would lose the original stenciling. I’m not into restoring bikes, because it just eliminates all the history that the bike had.”

“Every bike tells a story as it is,” he said.

Information about the museum, including contact information to set up a group tour of the exhibition space, can be found online at www.cmm.bike.

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11 Jan 2026

Double-Decker Downtown: After 43 years, Paul Hartquist’s personal service keeps skyway jewelry store shining

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When you’ve been in the jewelry business as long as Paul Hartquist has, you end up making a lot of couples’ engagement rings. And then engagement rings for the children of those couples.

And when you’ve been in the jewelry business as long as Paul Hartquist has — which, to be clear, is more than 43 years — you realize it’s not the rings themselves that are important but the people wearing them.

“It’s not so much doing the work, working on rings; I burned out on that long ago,” he said. “I’m helping people with jewelry that I met literally 40-plus years ago. …I’ve met a lot of wonderful people. Many of my customers have become friends.”

After apprenticing for seven years under Robert Moeller at his eponymous jewelry shop in Highland Park, Hartquist opened his own shop in what would become the Alliance Bank Center in 1989. When the building abruptly closed this spring, with tenants initially given just 48 hours to vacate, Hartquist hopped across the skyway to the Town Square building.

It was not ideal timing. Hartquist plans to retire at age 70, in a few years. He wasn’t interested in being forced to shutter his business before that point — especially not on such short notice — but he also doesn’t plan to be working for as many more years as it would take to reestablish himself sustainably elsewhere.

“It was a little chaotic and disturbing at first, but I landed on my feet,” he said. “If I was 10 or 20 years younger, I probably would have moved out into the suburbs.”

In Hartquist’s early days, the flow of people through the skyways was constant. But it’s been a steady decline since then, he said. Among his concerns: Too much street-level parking has been removed to make way for bike paths and the light rail. Some large companies have moved their headquarters out of downtown. Foot traffic is down substantially since the pandemic.

Hartquist is of two minds about the state of the skyway system today. On the one hand, his shop is tucked away at the end of a hallway, the final storefront before a “condemned” sign blocks what would’ve been the bridge to his old stomping grounds in the Alliance Bank building.

“Being here, it’s difficult for customers to access me,” he said. “They have to go out of their way; they have to want to see me.”

On the other hand, his business model is no longer one that relies on passersby. Decades ago, he said, women might stop in during their lunch hour and buy a necklace or a pair of earrings. But gold prices have jumped substantially over the years and people wear less jewelry than they once did, he said.

So now, he relies more on repeat customers and personal referrals than the daily walk-in business that sustains — or is unable to sustain — lunch counters and cafes around the skyways.

“Let’s say someone wants something done for a ring,” he said. “If they only come into work one day a week, well, that’s fine. They’ll come see me that one day. But if you’re in a food court, something like that, they need to sell food every day of the week in order to survive. So a lot of the vendors are suffering.”

More from Double-Decker Downtown

Read our deep dive into the past, present and future lives of the St. Paul skyways, and explore more profiles of skyway businesses:

At Skyway Grill, owner Scott Johnson feeds everyone

Blue Hummingbird Woman brings native culture and wellness to the skyways

Paper is hotter than ever at skyway print shop Cedar Printing

At skyway barbershop, Mr. B aims to empower through haircuts

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Cycling Museum of Minnesota brings over a century of two-wheeled history to the skyway

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11 Jan 2026

Binyamin Appelbaum: Barring investors won’t fix the housing crisis

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President Donald Trump relishes a handy scapegoat and, on Wednesday, he picked one to blame for the nation’s housing crisis: investors that are buying large numbers of single-family homes and operating them as rental properties.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was taking steps to prevent such purchases as part of a broader program to make homes affordable again. He said that “people live in homes, not corporations.” He said he’d provide more details in two weeks, when he visits Davos, a Swiss ski resort not known for its affordable housing.

But there’s no need to wait for the details. Landlords are not the cause of the nation’s housing crisis, and any plan that reduces investment in housing is only going to make matters worse.

The crisis is a simple problem with a complicated solution. The problem is that the United States does not have enough housing. The hard part is building more. It is certainly easier, and perhaps better politics, to talk about barring investors, or imposing rent controls, or kicking immigrants out of the country, but none of that is going to do the trick. The way to make housing more affordable is to build more housing.

Musical chairs and not enough chairs

Construction has never fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, the population has grown faster than the supply of new housing, and the result is a big game of musical chairs with not nearly enough chairs. While estimates vary, experts generally agree that we need millions of new housing units to close the gap. Up for Growth, a think tank focused on the shortage, puts the figure at 3.78 million.

Almost a year after taking office, Trump has yet to put forward any meaningful plans to increase housing construction. Instead he has offered a number of half-baked ideas, as in November, when he suggested on his social media platform that his administration might introduce a 50-year mortgage loan.

His threat to ban institutional investors is the latest example. As is so often the case, Trump isn’t proposing a real policy with actual details. He’s saying things he thinks people want to hear, even if they’re pulled from the policy playbook of the progressives he loves to hate.

Imagine it’s real

It is not even clear that Trump has the power to ban institutional buyers, nor that Congress would agree to pursue the idea. For the sake of this essay, however, let’s treat it as a real idea. Let’s pretend, for instance, that Trump means to endorse a bill introduced in 2022 by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., imposing a 100% tax on purchases of single-family homes by any corporation with assets of $20 million or more.

The first thing to know is that such a proposal wouldn’t prevent most purchases of single-family homes for use as rental properties. In 2022, the Urban Institute estimated that institutional investors owned 574,000 single-family homes. That was less than 1% of the nation’s single-family homes — and less than 5% of single-family rentals. In other words, most rental houses are owned by small landlords.

A ban might have some benefits. Less competition from investors could push sellers to accept lower prices; buyers might be more likely to reside in the houses, rather than renting out the properties.

But it would punish renters. The rise of institutional investment in single-family houses is best understood as a postcrisis replacement for subprime mortgage lending. Tighter credit standards mean that millions of Americans can no longer obtain loans to purchase homes. Institutional landlords allow people to live in the same places but as renters.

Would it be better to expand lending? There may be an instinct to say yes. Americans generally regard homeownership as an end in itself, as a means of building wealth and as the basic building block of stable communities. But the housing crisis showed that homes purchased with subprime loans provided only the illusion of ownership. Borrowers did not build equity, nor did they establish enduring communities.

Fresh capital for homebuilders

The deep pockets of institutional investors aren’t just providing more options for renters. They’re also providing a fresh source of capital for homebuilders. Companies can sell excess inventory to rental companies, which allows them to build more aggressively. And, in some cases, they are building homes for rental companies. Last year, the homebuilder D.R. Horton completed a subdivision of 72 single-family houses outside Tallahassee, Florida, named the Cypress at Wesley Park. It rented the homes and then sold the whole thing to an investment firm called Topaz Capital Group.

Nobody would even blink if it was a 72-unit apartment building called the Cypress at Wesley Park.

Indeed, it’s important to remember that institutional ownership of homes is nothing new. Institutional landlords are a much larger and older presence in the apartment market. The nation’s largest owner of single-family rental houses, Invitation Homes, owned or managed about 110,000 properties as of September, which is a lot of houses. It’s also about one-tenth of the number of apartments owned or managed by the nation’s largest landlord, Greystar.

The apartment market does offer a cautionary tale. The Justice Department recently broke up an arrangement in which, it claimed, several of the largest apartment landlords, including Greystar, were collaborating through a third-party pricing service, RealPage, to raise rents. In a few metro areas, mostly in the Sun Belt, institutional investors have purchased enough single-family houses to potentially engage in similar shenanigans. It’s something for regulators to keep an eye on.

The question

But let’s get back to the big picture. Here’s a litmus test that you can use any time politicians say they have an idea to make housing more affordable: Will it result in more housing construction?

It only helps if the answer is yes.

Binyamin Appelbaum writes a column for the New York Times.

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11 Jan 2026

Today in History: January 11, Mark McGwire admits to steroids use

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Today is Sunday, Jan. 11, the 11th day of 2026. There are 354 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Jan. 11, 2010, Mark McGwire admitted to The Associated Press that he’d used steroids and human growth hormone when he broke baseball’s home run record in 1998.

Also on this date:

In 1861, Alabama became the fourth state to declare its secession from the Union.

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In 1908, the Grand Canyon was established as a national monument by President Theodore Roosevelt. The move protected it from mining and other activities until it became a national park in 1919.

In 1935, aviator Amelia Earhart began what would be the first solo flight from Hawaii to California, completing the 2,400-mile flight across the Pacific to Oakland in just under 19 hours.

In 1964, U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry issued “Smoking and Health,” a report that concluded that “cigarette smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate.”

In 2002, the first al-Qaida prisoners from Afghanistan arrived at the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.

In 2021, House Democrats introduced an article of impeachment against President Donald Trump, charging him with “incitement of insurrection” after the attack on the U.S. Capitol building five days earlier.

In 2024, U.S. and British forces bombed more than dozen sites used by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, in a massive retaliatory strike for the militant group’s attacks on international cargo ships and other targets in the Red Sea.

Today’s birthdays:

Filmmaker Alfonso Arau is 94.
Golf Hall of Famer Ben Crenshaw is 74.
Jazz guitarist Lee Ritenour is 74.
Olympic swimming gold medalist Tracy Caulkins is 63.
Filmmaker Malcolm D. Lee is 56.
Singer Mary J. Blige is 55.
Actor Amanda Peet is 54.
Actor Devin Ratray is 49.
Actor Aja Naomi King is 41.
Singer and former competitive swimmer Cody Simpson is 29.