Historypin and a Get to NoMi Challenge

Post and photos below by the Hawthorne Hawkman, photos above from the Get to NoMi Facebook page.

In the summer of last year, I found a nifty new smartphone app called Historypin.  I tried it out on West Broadway and Friedman's, with varying degrees of success.  In essence, here's how the application works:  You take an old photograph, like the one shown above, and upload it onto the Historypin website.  Once uploaded, the photograph can be positioned using Google Street View, like so:

Step 1: find the house on Street View.

Then line up the old photograph; it can be adjusted to be translucent or opaque.

Now the picture is lined up directly over the current map.  We're good to go.

And now anyone who downloads the historypin app onto their phone can go to 2806 James and see the exact same thing, in the palm of their hands.

I have wanted to gather a large number of old pictures to do a historypin walking tour of part of NoMi.  But many older pictures are copyrighted or otherwise can't be used without permission or paying fees.  I've asked around about funding opportunities, but I'd rather get this done myself sooner rather than get funding later.  So when I saw this picture on the Get to NoMi page, I had an idea.  I'm asking neighbors on the page to send me old photographs.  I will pin the first twenty I receive on the application, and we can do a small tour from that initial collection.

Here are the rules for the NoMi Historypin Challenge...

"Get to NoMi" Gets Real on Facebook

Post and photo by the Hawthorne Hawkman.

Today is "New Member Monday" over on the Get to NoMi Facebook page, so if you haven't yet joined in, now's your chance to see what the buzz is all about.  And the page has been buzzing quite a bit lately.  Shortly after the tragic shooting death of Terrell Mayes Jr, a community brainstorming session was organized by several NoMi residents and announced on the eponymous page.  The event went quite well overall, with everyone treating each other with civility and respect while we came up with as many ideas as possible to combat the problems that led to an innocent child losing his life to gun violence.

Up until the event was posted, Get to NoMi had primarily been used as a forum to promote real estate sales, local businesses, and an overall feel-good sentiment of north Minneapolis.  In other words, at least from my perspective, it was boring milquetoast.  I rarely checked the page, and usually when I did it was to reset a huge number of Facebook notifications.  Maybe the page had its uses, but I didn't find much value there.

Since the brainstorming session, subscribers to the page have increased by several hundred and now over 1,400 "like" this part of Facebook.  We started to talk about why it was that there was a much higher representation of people of color and renters at the vigil, but the brainstorming session was made up mostly of white homeowners.  That kind of question is essential to tackle if we're going to do a better job of engaging everyone, but too often when we try to discuss it somebody says something that offends someone else and before you know it...