Kathy Berdan rode the carousel at Como Park, enjoyed the leafy quiet of Swede Hollow Park, explored Newell Park, one of St. Paul’s oldest public spaces. And that was just the beginning of her travels through our city parks.

“I just got on my bike and went. It was so much fun and a learning experience,” Berdan said of biking or walking through 19 iconic St. Paul parks as she did research for “Parks & People: A Colorful History of Saint Paul Parks” ($12.99). This softcover coloring book for adults is published through the first partnership between Ramsey County Historical Society and St. Paul Parks Conservancy.

Kathy Berdan, author of “Parks & People: A Colorful History of Saint Paul Parks,” a celebration of St. Paul Parks. (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Historical Society and St. Paul Parks Conservancy)

One of the most surprising facts in the book: 99% of people who live in St. Paul are within a 10-minute walk from a park.

“I loved the diversity of the parks, their history and people I met,” said Berdan, retired Pioneer Press entertainment editor  For diversity she cites Frogtown Community Center and General Vang Pao Fields as well as one of the newest parks, Unci Makha, the Dakota name for Grandmother Earth. She says she came to realize the history of our parks is also the history of our city.

“Parks & People,” illustrated with attractive, meticulous line drawings by Jeanne Kosfeld, includes the importance of park visionaries such as Horace Cleveland, whose influence dates to the late 19th century, as well as information about early St. Paul parks including Smith (Mears) Park and Rice Park. (Irvine Park, the oldest, is not in this book because it was the subject of a previous Ramsey County Historical Society coloring book “Irvine Park: St. Paul.”)

Matching Berdan’s enthusiasm for “Parks & People” is C. Michael-jon Pease, first executive director of St. Paul Parks Conservancy, a nonprofit partner of the St. Paul Parks and Recreation Department that raises money and provides expertise to the parks system. Established in 2008, the conservancy has raised about $4 million to improve, expand, renovate and help parks serve changing community needs.

“We are joyful colleagues in this connection with the Historical Society,” says Pease, who lives on St. Paul’s West Side. “Our conservancy staff loves parks and partnering with the society gave us access to their archives, such as the history of Swede Hollow.”

Pease and Berdan intersected often when Pease was executive director of Park Square Theatre and Berdan was covering arts for the Pioneer Press.

Michael-jon Pease, executive director of the St. Paul Parks Conservancy. (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Historical Society and St. Paul Parks Conservancy)

“I knew Kathy was exactly the person we needed to write this book,” recalls Pease, an Illinois native who moved here from Rhode Island in 1992 to earn a master’s degree at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota. He later taught fundraising as an adjunct faculty member in the school’s arts and cultural management program.

Berdan was happy to do the book after turning down an earlier suggestion that she join the conservancy board of directors.

“I told them I don’t do boards of directors but I’d help with communications,” recalled Berdan, a Minnesota native who worked at newspapers in Fergus Falls, St. Cloud, and Des Moines, Iowa, before joining the Pioneer Press in 2000.

Now that the book is published, Pease is looking forward to expanding the scope of the conservancy’s partnership with Ramsey County Historical Society through projects that help visitors enjoy these spaces even more. These might include better signage, more publications, and a website that helps people access information about the parks when they are out and about.

The first of these is The Great Park Walk game. Using the Goosechase app on their phones, people are invited to take selfies at each of the parks featured in the book. Those who visit all the parks are eligible to win a copy. The game is live now through Aug. 3.

Berdan and illustrator Kosfeld will sign books at the launch from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday at Waldmann Brewery, 445 N. Smith Ave., St. Paul, with beer and music. The book will also be available at Parks Giving Day celebration from noon to 1 p.m. May 16 in Irvine Park.

More info at saintpaulparksconservancy.org/2025/04/get-your-parks-people-coloring-book/

Trivia

How much do you know about St. Paul parks? Take this quiz and find out.

Which park is:

on a site that was once a hill?
one of the most popular, drawing 2 million visitors annually?
where a bronze eagle protects her chicks?
the home of a replica of a pavilion in China?
named for a man who organized Black porters on Pullman Company trains?
a former refuge for immigrants with a creek running through it?
an area with remains of kilns left from when bricks were made there?
previously known as Navy island, used as a military base and training facility?
where water diverted to a culvert for more than a century flows as centerpiece?
named for a family known for luggage who had owned the land?

Answers:

Mears 2. Como 3. Summit Lookout 4. Phalen 5. Boyd 6. Swede Hollow 7. Lilydale 8. Raspberry Island 9. Unci Makha 10.Pedro

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A 400-year-old Shakespeare mystery has gotten a major shake-up.

In a paper published in the journal Shakespeare on April 24 — the day after the Bard’s 461st birthday, if you happened to have candles and an extremely large cake on hand — Professor Matthew Steggle, Chair in Early Modern English Literature at University of Bristol, presented research that finds potential significance in the scraps of a letter first discovered in 1978.

Incredibly, the letter scraps were found by accident inside a nearly 1,000-page religious tome housed in the library of the U.K.’s Hereford Cathedral.

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The letter appears to have been addressed to “Good Mrs Shakspaire” concerning an apprentice named John Butts (or Butte) and the young man’s interactions with her husband. As well, the letter says that the Shakespaires had lived on Trinity Lane, a street that still exists today in London. If this, in fact, turns out to be true about the Shakespeares, it’s a biographical nugget that has never previously been known and places them living together in London during the period when he wrote “Hamlet,” “Twelfth Night,” and other plays.

The life story of William Shakespeare, as it’s usually told, is that he left Stratford-upon-Avon to make his name in the London theaters. It’s been thought that his wife, Anne Hathaway, stayed behind with their children, separated from him for unknown lengths of time until he returned to spend the last few years of his life in retirement. Then, upon his death, he left her “my second best bed with the furniture,” which scholars still puzzle over whether it’s a loving gesture (as it could refer to their shared marriage bed) or a final snub.

Amazingly, the correspondence wasn’t saved for its historical importance; it was essentially used as scrap paper, as Steggle writes in “The Shakspaires Of Trinity Lane: A Possible Shakespeare Life-Record”: “The two strips of the letter were used by the binders as ‘guards’, or padding to prevent the text block from chafing against the binding they were fitting to it, so the binders evidently regarded these strips as waste paper.”

The book’s publisher was Shakespeare’s Stratford neighbor Richard Field, who was also the playwright’s first printer.

Why wasn’t the 1978 discovery by librarian F.C. Morgan taken more seriously at the time? Steggle explains: “That Morgan did not do more with this discovery is understandable. He had recently celebrated his hundredth birthday, and in fact was dead by the time this note appeared in print. It was a late and startling highlight in a long career spent in English history.”

Steggle’s research was done for his forthcoming book, “William Shakespeare and the Early Modern World,” and throughout his piece, he is careful not to overstate the findings and suggest areas where it might be bolstered or challenged. Steggle answered questions via email about the letter and his research.

Q. How did you find the significance of this piece of letter?

I’m writing a Shakespeare biography, and found the document referenced briefly in one or two places, but nobody actually seemed to know anything about it. Then when I obtained photos of the two fragments, I thought, you could do things with this, especially with modern information technology that previous generations of scholars didn’t have access to. 

 Q. If true, what might it mean?

There’s this prevailing narrative that the Shakespeares’ marriage was very much an arms-length affair, with the wife as a distant encumbrance while he lived an exciting life in the city – the kind of thing you see in “Shakespeare in Love.” This suggests an alternative scenario in which they are living together, at least a bit, in London, with Anne involved in William’s social networks and financial affairs. 

Q. Might there be other scraps to search for?

Yes! It shows that new discoveries are still possible in 17th-century manuscript material, particularly in binding waste. In particular, as I say in the article, it makes one passionately curious about other books, printed like this one by Shakespeare’s associate Richard Field, which might still be in their original bindings. 

Q. Is there anything else about this that you’d like to say?

Only that this is part of a number of recent bits of work which are starting to reassess the Shakespeare womenfolk — in particular, the work of Katherine Scheil on other aspects of Anne Hathaway’s life. For a long time it was assumed that they were all illiterate yokels, and maybe that’s a simplification.

 Q. Could this explain why there isn’t much original Shakespeare writing or paperwork?

Funnily enough, I’d argue that actually there’s quite a decent paper trail for Shakespeare, by the standards of his day. There are dozens of, individually perhaps rather dry, documents collected on the fabulous site Shakespeare Documented: tax records, law cases, to say nothing of the numerous documents around his professional career. Those are the kinds of things that survive, by and large, whereas more personal papers almost invariably disappear. I’ve spent 20 years looking in archives for people whose lives are only known from half a dozen grubby bits of paper, and William Shakespeare is actually quite lavishly documented in comparison to many of them.

By DEEPTI HAJELA, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Growing up on the south side of Chicago, the Rev. Dr. Howard-John Wesley was given the message early on: What one wore as a Black man mattered.

Wesley’s pastor father, who migrated from Louisiana after World War II in search of more opportunmetities than those readily available to Black people in the Deep South, “always had an impeccable sense of shirt and tie and suit.”

“In order to move in certain spaces where colored people were not allowed to be, you want to be dressed the right way to be able to fit in,” says Wesley, 53, now a senior pastor in Alexandria, Virginia.

But Wesley also got an early warning: What he wore could be used against him. His father forbade baseball caps because some street gang members wore them in certain ways, and his father was concerned authorities would make stereotypical or racist assumptions about his son if he were seen wearing one.

Clothing as message. Fashion and style as tools, signifiers of culture and identity, whether intentional or assumed. There’s likely no group for whom that’s been more true than Black men. It’s not just what they wear, but also how it’s been perceived by others seeing it on a Black man, sometimes at serious cost.

“It’s always a dialogue, between what you can put on and what you can’t take off,” says Jonathan Square, assistant professor at Parsons School of Design and among the advisers to a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute that kicks off with Monday’s Met Gala.

Clothing matters, and not just at the Met Gala

“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” opening to the public May 10, focuses on Black designers and menswear. It uses the 2009 book, “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” by guest curator and Barnard College professor Monica L. Miller, as a foundational inspiration for the show. The dress code for the celebrity-laden, fashion extravaganza fundraiser that is the Met Gala is “Tailored For You,” with high-profile Black male entertainers like Pharrell Williams, Lewis Hamilton, Colman Domingo and A$AP Rocky joining Vogue editor Anna Wintour as co-chairs.

“When we’re talking about Black men … we are talking about a group, an ethnic and racial group and cultural group that has historically dealt with adversity, oppression, systemic oppression,” says Kimberly Jenkins, fashion studies scholar and founder of the Fashion and Race Database, who contributed an essay for the exhibit’s catalog. “And so clothing matters for them in terms of social mobility, self-expression, agency.”

This combination photo shows various fashion worn by Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton. (AP Photo)

Through the decades, that self-expression has taken many forms and been adopted by others. Take the zoot suit, first popularized in the 1920s in urban centers like New York’s Harlem, with its wide-legged, high-waisted pants and long suit coats with padded shoulders. The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of styles related to hip-hop culture, such as jeans worn sagging off the hips, oversized jerseys and jackets with designer logos. Hoodies, sneakers and other streetwear were popularized by Black men before becoming global fashion staples.

For some, it was about always being dressed “appropriately” or “respectably” to demonstrate to the mainstream that Black men were in fact equal, not lesser beings, criminals or thugs. The Met exhibit, for example, includes material from civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois that showcases how seriously he took the tailoring of his clothes. Gala co-host A$AP Rocky made a point of tailored suits and high fashion earlier this year during his trial on firearms charges for which he was ultimately found not guilty — Yves Saint Laurent even sent out a press release touting his court attire.

Others purposely picked their clothing as a pushback and challenge to white standards of what was acceptable, like the Black Panthers’ berets and black leather jackets, or colorful dashikis that signaled connection to Pan-Africanism.

But it has never been a one-way message. Debates over the clothes Black men wear and how they wear them have at times turned into a form of cultural and literal policing, like when a young Black man sued a New York department store in 2013, saying he was racially profiled and detained by police after buying an expensive belt.

The weaponization of fashion

Elka Stevens, associate professor and fashion design program coordinator at Howard University, describes a gatekeeping weaponization of fashion, where some believe “people don’t have the right to wear the finest designer clothes based upon their skin color, or how they look, or how they’re being classified.”

“But if you don’t dress at a particular standard, or you don’t dress what’s considered to be appropriate for said venue or occasion, that gets weaponized as well,” she adds.

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Zoot suits were condemned in the WWII era as unpatriotic for how much fabric they required during wartime scarcity. When Allen Iverson and other athletes started bringing hip-hop style and sensibility to the NBA, the league pushed back in 2005 with a dress code calling for business attire for players on the sidelines to promote what it considered a “professional” image.

And even as streetwear styles and sneakers have become big business for global fashion, they can still be looked down upon based on the body wearing them, says Stevens.

“That which was previously associated with street culture and particularly Black street culture, now is part of our everyday,” she says. “But again, who’s wearing it makes a huge difference.”

There’s perhaps no starker example than that of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old killed in Florida in 2012. He was shot by a man who found the sight of the hoodie-wearing Black teen suspicious, leading to the confrontation in which Martin died.

Even as hoodies have become essential dressing for everyone from kids to corporate CEOs, it’s “the presence of that person who we’ve identified as being Black or someone identifies as being Black that causes the problem no matter what, no matter what they have on,” Stevens says.

It’s a reality of life in the United States that Wesley has wrestled with. After Martin’s death, he wore a hoodie while behind the pulpit at Alfred Street Baptist Church and spoke of his worries about how his own young sons would be perceived.

Like his father before him and for the same reasons, there were certain styles he never allowed his sons — now 21 and 18 — to wear. Sagging jeans? He “just won’t allow it. I refuse to. Not only because of fear of being stereotyped by the police, but also labeled by society. Maybe I’m wrong for that. I don’t know,” Wesley says.

“To me, it’s a shame that my attire can neither hide my color, it can never elevate me above it in your stereotype, but it can always confirm it,” Wesley says. “So my suit doesn’t get me out of, ‘Oh, he’s still a Black man who’s a threat,’ but the hoodie makes it go, ‘Oh, he’s a Black man who’s the threat.’”

By Kevin Hardy, Stateline.org

Missouri Republicans may take their tax-cutting efforts to new heights this year as lawmakers consider exempting profits from the sale of stocks, bonds and real estate from state income taxes.

Part of a broader push to eliminate the state income tax altogether, legislation making its way through the Capitol would provide an unprecedented benefit to the wealthy by excluding capital gains, the long-term earnings from the sale of assets. If approved, tax experts say, the legislation would mark the first time a state with an income tax has eliminated capital gains tax.

The Republican sponsors say the move would make the state more attractive for businesses and families.

“This bill is intended to energize Missouri’s economy,” Republican Speaker Pro Tem Chad Perkins said upon introducing the measure.

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But state Democrats — and even some of their GOP colleagues— have criticized the measure as being overly favorable to the wealthy. Most states’ tax systems already put a higher tax burden on lower-income households. That trend only accelerated in this year’s legislative sessions, worrying advocates who want to see the rich pay a larger share.

“It is so egregious in just how grossly concentrated the benefits of the [Missouri] proposal would go to the richest people in the state and shift the state’s tax system to really privilege the owners of wealth over people who are earning a regular paycheck,” said David Cooper, an analyst at the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute.

The institute advocates for progressive state taxes — those that put the proportionately largest tax burdens on the highest earners. While Cooper advises against eliminating state income taxes, he said the Missouri move would be more harmful than eliminating the income tax outright.

“If you’re wiping away the income tax altogether, there’s at least some tax benefit going to lower-earning folks who are still paying income taxes,” he said. “If you’re just eliminating capital gains income taxes, you are just giving away money to the wealthiest people in the state, period.”

Some Democratic-led states, including Maryland and Washington, have moved to increase taxes on the wealthy this year. But several states — including Kansas, Kentucky and Mississippi — have made more regressive tax changes.

Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, noted that states still prioritize progressive spending through social service programs aiding the most vulnerable residents.

He said states compete against each other for business and residents in much more immediate ways than the federal government competes against other nations.

“So states are very focused on the competitive advantages associated with a pro-growth tax regime,” he said, “and that has led to less of an emphasis in many states on achieving progressivity through the tax code.”

‘Generational change’ to taxes

While several states have enacted high-profile tax cuts this year, the momentum is actually slowing, Walczak said.

With booming economies and an influx of federal cash in recent years, conservative and liberal states alike passed significant tax cuts. Of the 43 states that have some sort of income tax, 28 have made rate reductions since 2021, Walczak said.

“In many states, lawmakers simply accomplished much of what they had set out to do,” he said.

Economic uncertainty and the prospect of reduced federal aid also have made many lawmakers more cautious this legislative season, he said.

But lawmakers in several states — including Oklahoma, South Carolina and West Virginia — have continued their march to eliminate state income taxes.

“Taxing people’s wages is bad because it undermines liberty,” Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, a Republican, said this month in support of a proposed income tax cut, the Oklahoma Voice reported. “It undermines people’s freedoms. If government controls income, then it controls your life.”

This session, Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear signed a bill cutting the state income tax rate from 4% to 3.5%. Republican lawmakers have been slashing rates for years with the ultimate aim of eliminating the income tax altogether, despite concerns that more reliance on sales tax would disproportionately burden the poor. To partially offset the income tax reduction, the legislature expanded sales taxes to more services in 2018.

And Republican lawmakers in Kansas overrode a veto from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly to move away from the state’s graduated income tax toward a flat tax of 4% that will mostly benefit the highest earners.

Last month, Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed legislation granting another cut in the state income tax. Officials there aim to phase out the income tax altogether over the coming years with gradual rate reductions, which Reeves characterized as“a generational change” for the state.

The Mississippi law also reduces the sales tax on groceries and increases the gas tax. Though the governor is already celebrating the end of state income tax, the law provides for incremental reductions in the coming years only if the state hits certain revenue targets.

Republican state Rep. Trey Lamar, a legislative sponsor, said income taxes disincentivize work — a particular problem for the state with the nation’s lowest workforce participation rate.

“A tax on work is a tax on productivity,” he said.

The left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says the law will make the state’s tax system more inequitable. Its analysis found that when fully implemented, the top 1% of households, who have average annual incomes of $1.4 million, will receive an average cut of $41,420, or roughly 3% of their annual income. But the bottom 20% of earners, who have average annual incomes of $13,400, would realize a tax cut of just $42 per year.

Lamar noted the legislation did not increase sales taxes across the board. With average sales tax burdens already lower than neighboring states like Alabama, he said the income tax elimination will only help Mississippi workers.

“We need more people working,” he said. “So if helping the working man is somehow seen as regressive, then I’d have to say I don’t fully understand that.”

Walczak, of the Tax Foundation, said the state can afford the initial rate reduction. But it’s unclear whether state revenues will hit the targets needed — and whether lawmakers will reassess the aim of eliminating income taxes.

As one of the nation’s poorest states, Mississippi is heavily reliant on federal funding and would be particularly vulnerable to an economic downturn.

“There’s not a guarantee that the state could afford that in the future, and Mississippi does not have a large budget to begin with, so that would be harder than in most other states if the economy slid,” he said. “It does require a willingness on lawmakers’ parts to be honest with themselves if the economy changes and decide whether a pause might be necessary.”

An uneven tax burden

Economic uncertainty and slowing revenues have put many states into budget holes this year, forcing lawmakers to consider spending cuts or tax increases.

To close budget gaps, some conservative and liberal states have considered new or higher taxes on marijuana, tobacco and soda.

But some liberal-led states are looking to taxes more focused on the wealthy. In Rhode Island, Democratic Gov. Daniel McKee has proposed a 10% tax on digital advertising revenue.

In Washington state, lawmakers approved raising capital gains taxes and business taxes to close a looming deficit, though it’s unclear whether Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson, who has voiced skepticism, will sign off on those measures.

Maryland lawmakers, facing a $3 billion deficit, recently approved$1.6 billion in new taxes and fees. That includes two new high-income tax brackets and a new 3% sales tax on information technology and data services.

Moves like those that ask more of the wealthy could make some state tax systems more progressive, said Aidan Davis, the state policy director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. But most state tax proposals approved this year have primarily benefited the highest earners.

That’s particularly concerning because most state systems already favor the wealthy. In 41 states, the top 1% of earners pay a lower effective tax rate than any other group, according to an institute study.

In Missouri, the fate of the first-of-its-kind capital gains tax elimination remains up in the air.

Though versions of the proposal have passed both chambers, there are differences between the Senate and House legislation. That means the bill could go back to conference committee for further negotiation or go on to Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe, who has identified capital gains among his tax cut priorities this year.

Missouri’s Department of Revenue estimated the exemption could cost $111 million per year. But an Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis of IRS data projects the change could cost $600 million or more.

If approved, the top 5% of Missouri households — those making more than $273,000 per year — will receive more than 80% of the benefit from capital gains exemption, Davis said.

“Doing so would let wealthy people collect tax-free passive income while you’re continuing to tax middle class workers and people with savings,” Davis said. “It’s just a really extreme proposal.”

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.