Walnut Hill Neighborhood

In the last fivew years, one by one, five old bridges over the Soo Line (old Milwaukee Road) RR tracks have been rebuilt. First the 35 St. bridge south of Vliet. Then the bridge at 33rd & Vliet. Next the Walnut Street bridge. Then the Cherry Street Bridge. This past fall, the Galena Street bridge was replaced.

All these bridges have the same all concrete style.

Apparently, the city is going "up the line." What's left? Lisbon Avenue, Brown Street, and North Avenue. Their replacement would complete the job in Walnut Hill.

Lisbon Avenue is the Main Street of our neighborhood, or at least cuts through the center of the area. We'll try to find out if the City has a scheduled replacement date.

If there is enough lead time to have neighbor input on the design of this bridge, perhaps we should get together to consider what simple, inexpensive features might be added to make it something special and help give our neighborhood more "identity".

What do you think?

By Peter Kokh, neighbor

First, will Lisbon be widened?

Before we can discuss a new bridge over the railroad tracks at 30th Street, we need to know if there are any plans to widen W. Lisbon Avenue between W. 30th and W. 35th Street. There are a lot of empty lots, but also a few established occupied properties that would have to be removed to make that happen.

I would guess that the city is going to leave this bridge for last in order to see if more properties along the south side of the avenue razed. If not, the avenue will likely not be widened. And then there would seem to be only minor things we could do or ask for in replacing the present bridge within its present limits.

But it does seem worth looking into. Maybe we should start flushing out ideas of what could be done. How about a school kid design competition? The young ones have more bright ideas than we do.

By Luna Karnes