A year ago, I watched as two excavators knocked down a 116-year-old house in north Minneapolis in the name of urban redevelopment. I had written an eight-stanza blog series that culminated with the demolition of 2717 Penn Avenue North. Acquired by speculators, struck by arson, caught up in a foreclosure and condemned by the city, 2717 Penn had transformed in a few short years from a comfortable old wooden three-bedroom home to a blight on the city landscape. A cheerful sign on the lot of 2717 and the house next door, which was also demolished last summer, promised that new housing would spring up.

So far, nothing is growing there but grass.

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The demolition of the fire-gutted Lee’s Cleaners took months, rather than the one week promised by the property owner back in April. But gone are the charred and hazardous remains at 1st Avenue South and 26th Street in south Minneapolis. In its place Friday, a vacant lot with a single black sedan parked in it. If you know any other eyesores, please let Whistleblower know about it.

The Metropolitan Airports Commission is getting ready to spend another $127 million on noise-muffling home improvements for people who live under the flight path of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Here’s one resident’s story about how he learned the limits of the airport’s responsibility:

Paul Kelly lives on a leafy street in south Minneapolis’s Field neighborhood, a block from Minnehaha Creek. Nearly eight years ago, his 1928-era stucco home got what he called the “full shebang” of soundproofing: insulation, central air conditioning and new windows. It was all to block out the rumble and roar of takeoffs and landings at nearby MSP. Kelly thinks it cost about $60,000, and all of it was paid for with the MAC’s airport noise mitigation money.

Kelly is happy with most of the work. But this spring, he noticed the wooden frames outside his new windows were starting to get cracked and spongy. Water has been seeping into the frames and rotting them out.

“We’ve repainted twice” and not noticed a problem, he said. “Now, all of a sudden, it’s falling apart.”

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For 90 years, the Minneapolis Gas Works on the Mississippi River did the grimy work of extracting a form of gas from coal. The gaslights of the burgeoning city and the stoves that cooked its steaks and potatoes were all fueled by the operations of the coal gasification plant at 19th Avenue and Bluff Street.

The replacement of coal gas with natural gas made these gasification plants obsolete after World War II. The tanks, conveyor belts, smokestacks and walls of the Minneapolis Gas Works were demolished by the early 1960s, and by 1966 the site became the southern approach for the doomed 35W bridge.

But the gas works won’t go away. It lives on, invisible beneath the dirt and limestone of the river bank, in a brew of noxious chemicals. For more than a decade, CenterPoint Energy, the heir to the gas works, has spent millions to clean up the mess. But the company’s manager of environmental programs, Glenn Miller, doesn’t know when it will be cleaned up.

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