Newport residents knew exactly what kinds of parks they wanted when they were surveyed a few years ago: one with playground equipment suitable for younger children and one for their furry friends.

On Tuesday, city officials celebrated the grand re-opening and ribbon cutting for the newly updated Busy Beaver Park. The park, located at 10th Avenue and 17th Street, features accessible playground equipment designed for younger children, ages two to six, said City Administrator Joe Hatch.

Members of the Newport City Council and St. Paul Park Refinery Marathon Petroleum Manager Holly Jackson celebrate the re-opening of Busy Beaver Park in Newport with a ribbon cutting on Tuesday, June 18, 2024. From left: Councilmember Kevin Chapdelaine, Councilmember Tom Ingeman, Mayor Lori Elliott, Marathon Manager Holly Jackson, Councilmember Bill Sumner and Councilmember Marvin Taylor. (Courtesy of Joe Hatch)

Later this summer, the city’s first dog park will open on Marathon Petroleum-owned land between Fifth and Seventh avenues, south of Third Street, he said.

Busy Beaver Park, which had been closed since April 9, now has a climbing wall, balance equipment, multiple slides and play structures as well as an accessible, poured-in-place rubber surface. It also has a swing set.

“It’s designed for younger children to learn balance, gain strength and agility,” Hatch said. “All of the play equipment is designed for the physical development of younger children.”

The makeover of the park was paid for with a $100,000 donation from Marathon Petroleum’s St. Paul Park Refinery and $90,000 from the city.

Newport Mayor Laurie Elliott said the updates to the park “would have been delayed for several years without Marathon’s financial assistance.”

“This was a great partnership between the city and Marathon to update this park,” she said. “We appreciate their generous donation and community support.”

The previous playground equipment at Busy Beaver was installed in 1997 and in need of replacement.

Related Articles

Ramsey County Board chair Trista Martinson stepping down to lead Ramsey, Washington waste-to-energy facility

Oakdale child care center reeling after theft of bounce house

Bayport church OKs sale of property for new Andersen Elementary

Inmate who died at Stillwater prison may have ingested synthetic drugs, officials say

Lake Elmo, Oakdale residents worried about PFAS contamination in private wells lobby for bottled water

The city’s new dog park, as of yet unnamed, is expected to cost the city about $45,000, Hatch said.

Staff and community service personnel are in the process of clearing dead and dying trees from the property – with fencing to follow soon, Hatch said.

Plans include paving a parking lot on Fifth Avenue, south of Third Street, and adding a way to access water.

The park, which will be free to users, will not have lighting and will be closed for use after dark. The city is looking for volunteers to assist with maintenance and operation of the park. Anyone interested is asked to contact the city’s public works department at 651-459-2475.

In the mid-1960s, photojournalist Danny Lyon embedded himself with the Outlaws Motorcycle Club in the suburbs of Chicago, snapping portraits and candid photographs while interviewing members of the Outlaws. The result was a photo book called “The Bikeriders,” published in 1968, that serves as the inspiration for Jeff Nichols’ latest film of the same name, a meditation on midcentury motorcycle life, the birthplace of a certain kind of cool.

Nichols is clearly enchanted by the inimitable style and intoxicating lore that Lyon’s photographs conjure up, and he populates his cinematic Chicago-based motorcycle club — the Vandals — with a coterie of ruggedly handsome stars who can make sideburns and motor oil look good, including Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Norman Reedus, Beau Knapp, Boyd Holbrook, Emory Cohen and Damon Herriman. There are also some unexpected and welcome casting choices like Karl Glusman and young Australian actor Toby Wallace, who is terrific as a young Vandals wannabe.

As the enigmatic Benny, Butler’s supernova star quality is undeniable, and the film opens with a bourbon and a bang — a shovel to the back of his head during a bar brawl that will haunt the rest of the film. In this bit of bravura filmmaking, Nichols demonstrates a slick style and rhythmic musicality that instantly draws us into this world

When we next lay eyes on Benny, he’s hulking over a pool table at a bar, his long, golden arms and tousled blonde coif raked over by the greedy gaze of Kathy (Jodie Comer) who stops in for a drink and leaves with a lifetime lover. Nichols’ camera eats Butler up hungrily, every inch of battered denim and well-worn leather; every soulful pout and blood-spattered grin wordlessly seducing Kathy to the dark side. It’s no wonder Kathy’s boyfriend beats it as soon as Benny turns up on their curb, and it’s no wonder Kathy bends her life around her brooding new boyfriend and his clan of grease-streaked miscreants.

Kathy becomes our narrator, her mile-a-minute Midwestern patter adding a layer of percussion to the rumbling engines and plaintive crooning of ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll on the soundtrack. In a rapid-fire Chicago cadence expertly enunciated by Liverpudlian actor and master of accents Comer, Kathy reels off stories about the boys in the Vandals into the microphone of Danny Lyon (Mike Faist). She’s the observant eyewitness and caretaker of their oral history, though the details are potentially lost, muddled or otherwise exaggerated by our storyteller. We see them though her eyes: sexy, dirty, violent and often tragic.

We also see them through re-creations of Lyon’s photographs, which Nichols and longtime cinematographer Adam Stone painstakingly compose and set to motion. In a montage, we see Lyon snapping portraits of characters like Cockroach (Cohen), Wahoo (Knapp) and Corky (Glusman), or capturing candids of the gang from the back of a bike. We see an image of a relaxed Benny riding over a bridge, one hand lazily gesturing behind him. Nichols improves upon Lyon’s shot by having our subject face the camera, rather than looking away.

Watching “The Bikeriders” feels like flipping through a photo book, absorbing arresting compositions and snippets of stories, and there’s a sketchy, snapshot quality to Nichols’ screenplay as well. The film is an evocation of character, place and time, the tempo alternating between moody and lively, like our central odd couple, laconic Benny and chatterbox Kathy.

Kathy has plenty to say about Benny, though we rarely see his unique qualities in action. He’s somewhat underwritten, and while Butler has the outsize presence to inhabit the iconic image, Kathy takes up all the air in the script. Benny is reduced to a symbol of sorts, a visual emblem of the Vandals’ dangerous glamour. Their mutual attraction is initially palpable, but we don’t see the glue that keeps them together throughout the years of peril and partying. The mysterious Benny has more chemistry with Johnny (Hardy), the Vandals founder and leader, and so too does Kathy.

Hardy is typically fantastic and fantastically weird, and he emerges as the gravitational center, not just of the Vandals, but of the film itself. Johnny leads by his own specific instinctual code, based on whim and personal values, which gets harder and harder to enforce as the club grows, with veterans returning from Vietnam seeking camaraderie, and bringing back darker vices.

“The Bikeriders” is a great hang, until the party’s over and it’s time to hit the road. Though the dramatic thrust of the narrative never quite coheres, there is plenty of pathos, and the ebb and flow reflects both life itself and the uniquely human nature of the storytelling, as Kathy regales us with tales of these wild ones, who now live with the sound of roaring engines only haunting their memories.

‘The Bikeriders’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language throughout, violence, some drug use and brief sexuality)

Running time: 1:56

How to watch: In theaters June 21

Related Articles

Donald Sutherland, the towering actor whose career spanned ‘M.A.S.H.’ to ‘Hunger Games,’ dies at 88

Review: ‘Tuesday’ is a dark fairy tale led by a staggeringly good Julia Louis-Dreyfus

‘Purple Rain’ at 40: Here are all the ways to celebrate Prince’s once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece

Column: Why aren’t you watching one of the best shows on TV?

‘Inside Out 2’ review: Old emotions make new frenemies in excellent sequel

Everything about Morgan Wallen is oversized, from his two most recent albums (with 66 songs between them) to his chart success (15 of his 16 singles hit the Top 10 on country radio, with most landing at No. 1) to his many controversies that have somehow only made him bigger (uttering a racial epithet on video, tossing a chair six stories off a Nashville rooftop bar that landed mere feet from a police officer).

So it was fitting that he made his local debut as a stadium headliner Thursday, selling out the first of two nights at U.S. Bank Stadium, the biggest stage in town.

The 31-year-old Tennessee native — who has occupied the Top Country Albums chart for 151 weeks total, second only to Garth Brooks’ 173-week record — wasn’t new to the Vikings stadium in Minneapolis, as he performed a 90-minute opening set for Eric Church there in June 2022, which he mentioned early on in the show. But he was much better, and bigger, Thursday night.

He performed on an expansive stage, complete with a phallus-shaped catwalk that extended far onto the stadium floor and Taylor Swift-sized screens that mostly focused on close-ups of Wallen for the cheap seats. He wrapped the first hour of his show playing four semi-acoustic songs — including his cover of Jason Isbell’s “Cover Me Up” and “Lies Lies Lies,” a brand-new song presumably from his impending fourth album — on a second stage at the opposite end of the stadium.

A large part of Wallen’s massive success is his savvy, both as a song co-writer and song chooser, in finding indelible hooks that transcend genre. He often sidles up next to hip-hop and took the stage to a recorded version of Lil Durk’s “Broadway Girls,” a 2021 hit that featured Wallen on vocals. Elsewhere, he dabbles in any number of sounds, from Southern rock to ’80s heartland anthems to sheer pop confections, like his current hit with Post Malone, “I Had Some Help.”

To be sure, Wallen has improved quite a bit as a performer since he opened for Church and showed little in the way of charisma. He’s figured out how to keep a crowd in the palm of his hand, which helps matters given his sometimes flat vocals. Five songs in and he was struggling to hit some of the notes in “You Proof.”

He also flexed his muscles with spendy staging, from the bracelets handed out to audience members that flashed along to the music (a move he borrowed from Swift and Coldplay) to copious amounts of pyro and belching pillars of flame.

For “’98 Braves” — which features some particularly tortured lyrics that liken a disappointing playoff exit from the Atlanta Braves to a romantic relationship gone wrong — he performed in front of some bleachers as an ode to his time playing baseball in high school. He kept the bleachers around for one of his finest songs, the ’70s-style soft rock ballad “7 Summers.” Later, he crooned “Chasin’ You” and “Man Made a Bar” in front of the porch of a mock small-town house.

Given the size of the sheer crowd and the fact some had been drinking since the first of three opening acts (Bryan Martin) took the stage at 5:30 p.m., they treated Wallen with a surprising amount of reverence, occasionally singing along with the chorus in a polite fashion. As unlikely a star Wallen may be to the uninitiated, his fans absolutely adore the guy.

Related Articles

The free Twin Cities Jazz Festival runs Friday and Saturday in and around Mears Park

Concert review: Janet Jackson got lost in the sound and fury at the X

‘Purple Rain’ at 40: Here are all the ways to celebrate Prince’s once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece

Concert review: Who is this Noah Kahan and how did he sell out two nights at Xcel Energy Center?

What’s up with the canceled tours and slow ticket sales for arena concerts?