The City Different, and Hudson

Santa Fe is one of the oldest cities in our country, and boasts a thriving artist colony.  It calls itself “The City Different”, discovered during a recent two-day visit to help celebrate a family member’s birthday.  Doing things with an individualistic - some might say quirky - style seems to be almost mandatory, from the requisite adobe building material to the old city streets and sidewalks. The city planners have a distinct eye to Santa Fe’s history, and some of today’s city streets are built on top of old cattle paths, including the Santa Fe Trail, which just skirts the downtown area.  

This vision of their city holds so true to the concept of Old Santa Fe that the streets, and particularly the sidewalks, of today are just as uneven and unpredictable as you might have expected them to be when they were trod by cattle instead of people.  Anyway, that’s the thought that occurred while navigating the sidewalks around the downtown plaza.  Old bricks and pavers, placed sort of in a pattern but mostly resembling the undulating waves on the sea, made for tricky going.  For those of us with vertigo, it was perhaps a little more interesting than you’d like a walk down a city street to be.

An opportunity to talk with a member of their Public Works department revealed that these uneven streets and sidewalks are in fact a deliberate part of the city council’s vision of the city, as they want visitors and residents to have that “old west” feel in Santa Fe.  As he explained it, the PW crews are instructed that any sidewalk repair is to preserve this feel, which includes making sure the pathways are not level.  As he put it, “sometimes we’ll dig a rut before we replace the bricks, or we’ll even put down a small tree branch and cover over that to keep the uneven surface.”  

It’s a dead certainty that, if the Hudson city council instructed our Public Works Director Tom Zeuli and the PW crew here to do something similar, there would be a quick public response.  But Hudson isn’t Santa Fe.  On the plane home there was time to think about this, particularly how Santa Fe has such a clear idea of what it represents as a city “different” that they would bring that devotion to individualism right down to the street level.  This is certainly being true to a vision.

Having a clear vision for your city is a good thing, and may be integral to the quality of life in the city.  We in Hudson will need to have a vision of our own, as area economic and geographic elements will, in the near future, be trying to mold what Hudson will become.  Possessing a clear idea of where we are, and where we want to go, is just as important as taking care of day-to-day business.  We can be pretty sure of one thing, and that is that what worked for Hudson in the recent past - expansion from the Twin Cities, and the attendant residential and business growth - will in the future have new competition from surrounding communities. The previous expansion occurred while Lake Elmo was closed to development, and that situation has been changed by court order after the Met Council brought suit to force that city to let developers in.  Lake Elmo is now open for business, and will compete with Hudson for new residential and business development in the east metro area. 

Add to this the construction of a new St. Croix river bridge, a bridge which would divert some eastbound travelers away from Hudson - which is closer to reality today than ever before - and the challenge becomes even steeper.

To continue to be viable in this new environment we will need a vision of Hudson that will guide us to where we want to go, and to be produced through much open discussion at the city government level.  It’s a safe bet that infrastructure will be part of that discussion.  In the meantime, be thankful for our Public Works crew, and our level sidewalks.