🏘️ 37th Ave's neverending block party

For the dozen core members who attend, weekly happy hour on the 3500 block of 37th/38th Avenues isn’t just something they try to make it to if nothing better comes up — it’s a permanent mark on their weekly calendar. Through rain, shine, ice, and snow, their weekly gathering has plodded on since it formed at the dawn of COVID four years ago. About the only thing that ever gets in its way is a particularly high-stakes Minnesota United soccer game.

Their group isn’t extraordinary in this respect, if a little more committed than most. It’s a story that’s played out on many blocks the past few years: Under the duress of 2020, neighbors got to know each other quickly, with the advent of block meetings and text threads to coordinate neighborhood watch shifts or examine suspicious alley items. When that threat subsided, the threads lived on as venues to borrow a tool or make an inside joke. At the same time, as the pandemic stifled the usual options for spending time, backyard hangouts became that summer’s de rigueur social style, and neighbors who may have lived in proximity to each other for years without interacting began regularly hanging out. And even as those options have returned, the social traditions established in that period have lived on.