Free Republic

A former club owner in south Minneapolis says the now-fired police officer and the black man who died in his custody this week both worked security for her club up to the end of last year. George Floyd and now-former Officer Derek Chauvin both worked security at the El Nuevo Rodeo club on Lake Street, according to Maya Santamaria. Santamaria owned the building for nearly two decades, but sold the venue within the last few months.

A proposal to build a Cross Downtown Brooklyn Tunnel, an idea studied by the state in 2010, is sparking new interest. As the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway from Atlantic Avenue to Sands Street faces a massive, $3.4 billion reconstruction, a once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity has opened, says longtime Cobble Hill community leader and graphic designer Roy Sloane. Sloane came up with the tunnel concept at a planning session in June 2010. Sloane, former president of the Cobble Hill Association, is the first to admit he is not an engineer. He was, however, a member of the original Brooklyn-Queens Expressway Advisory Committee and...

At a packed town hall meeting in Brooklyn Thursday evening to discuss options for saving a crumbling section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, city officials from the Department of Transportation came up against some not-unexpected pushback against a proposal that would involve closing the Brooklyn Heights promenade for six years. This was the first public meeting since the city unveiled two separate proposals for the project last week. The meeting opened with a presentation of both options—each projected to cost between $3 billion and $4 billion—while Polly Trottenberg, the city’s transportation commissioner, braced herself for the inevitable backlash. “I understand a...