Kiger's Notebook

Rochester finally lassoes steakhouse chain

Here's a little from today's column. To read the whole enchilada, check out the print edition of the Post-Bulletin:

Cows (other than ones in nursery rhymes) aren't known for their jumping ability.

In a rare move Wednesday, a well-known steakhouse chain sailed quickly over the first hurdle in its run to build its first restaurant in Rochester.

After years of looking and tantalizing its herds of fans in southeastern Minnesota, Texas Roadhouse has finally staked a claim in Rochester.

The Med City's version of the Texas Rangers, the Rochester Planning and Zoning Commission, unanimously approved plans for a 6,995-square-foot freestanding building during a whirlwind six-minute meeting Wednesday.

The restaurant is slated to be built in the parking lot of Rochester's Northwest Plaza shopping center along 55th Street Northwest. The Glimcher Group Inc. owns the center, which is anchored by Walmart and Sam's Club.

RAEDI targets regenerative medicine biz

Here's some from my take on RAEDI's annual meeting yesterday. Lots of info. This is the kind of deal where I can only skim the surface for article.

The medical potential of a regenerative medicine cluster in Rochester dazzled local leaders with words like "magic" and "science fiction," but business growth and jobs were the bottom line at the annual meeting of Rochester Economic Development Inc. on Tuesday.

Representatives of three companies already in operation in Rochester — ReGen Theranostics, Mill Creek Life Sciences and Cardio3 — described how they're making strides toward treating heart disease and other illnesses by injecting cells that regrow damaged tissue.
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Dr. Andre Terzic, the director for Mayo Clinic's new Center for Regenerative Medicine, said the way a person's skin heals from a cut is an example of how the body regenerates to heal itself.

But regenerative medicine aims to go beyond that to use the body's natural ability to repair and protect to create new treatments to combat a variety disease and medical conditions.

"These are very exciting times. This is no longer science fiction," he said. "This is no longer just on paper."
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Several companies focused on regenerative medicine, many with aid from RAEDI and the City of Rochester, have already put down roots in the Minnesota BioBusiness Center in the past few years.

• Cardio3 is a Belgium-based biotech company working on treating cardiac disease by using a patient's own stem cells to repair or regenerate the heart. Its treatment is based on the research of Dr. Terzic and Dr. Atta Behfar, both of Mayo Clinic. It has based its U.S. headquarters in Rochester.

• Mill Creek Life Sciences is a Rochester company that manufactures a protein-enriched fluid to help grow stem cells and primary cells used in regenerative therapy. Cardio3 is a Mill Creek customer.

• ReGen Theranostics is a Rochester firm that re-engineers human skin cell samples to create stem-cell lines to be used for medical research.

• Mayo Medical Ventures is a for-profit arm of Mayo Clinic that licenses its intellectual property to companies as well as launches its own businesses based on the research and technologies.

New recycling center + 2.5 million pounds of steel

Here's an example of real steel.

Remember the Rochester recycling center that expanded at the end of last year?

During the first week of  January, Watson Recycling opened its new $3.5 million location on 81st Street Northeast near 11th Avenue.

I was talking to Jeremiah Watson, the CEO of Watson Recycling, today and he shared an interesting number.

Since it opened, the new site has taken in almost 2.5 million pound of steel. That's a lot of metal. It is particularly significant, because Watson had not accepted steel until then.

The current Watson on North Broadway location remains open and will stay so for at least a year.

At its North Broadway location, Watson buys aluminum, copper, stainless steel and other nonferrous metals. Then it resells the metal to mills.


Watson Recycling is a third generation family business. These days it is run by four brothers - Jeremiah, David, John and Tim Watson. They took it over from their dad, Glen Watson.

It's drive-in weather at Roscoe's Barbeque

A shout out of thanks to the PB's roving local news editor Mike "The D" Dougherty for snapping this pic yesterday as he snagged some lunch. Unfortunately, this pic is all he brought back.

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It may be mid-February, but it's drive-in weather in Rochester.

Roscoe's Barbeque, Root Beer and Ribs on Fourth Street Southeast is now open for the season, with customers eating outside in Wednesday's 40-degree temperatures.

This is the earliest Steve and Barbara Ross have ever re-opened the seasonal drive-in location after spending the winter shuttered up. Usually, they don't fire up the drive-in until March or even April.

Their other location, Roscoe’s Express, remains open all year in the Chateau Center at North Broadway and 37th Street in northeast Rochester.

"Why not open the drive-in?" Barbara Ross asks rhetorically. "It has been so warm, we could have been open all winter."

It opened last year on March 24 with a mega-drift of snow in the parking lot that they dubbed "Mount Roscoe."

This week customers are sipping root beer floats where the snow mountain once stood.

Medical journal critical of proton beam therapy

Here's an interesting take on proton beam therapy that originated in the Archives of Internal Medicine journal.

This was spotlighted on Valentine's Day by Gary Schwitzer on the Health News Review blog. Health News Review is a non-profit group focused on keeping an eye on how health  news is reported in the media.

 

While Mayo Clinic's massive proton beam projects in Rochester and in Arizona were not mentioned, this does seem to follow the same lines of thinking from the New York Times editorial. It is worth noting that the NYT editorial was written by doctors whose medical centers already offer proton beam therapy.

It seems this technology, which is surprisingly constroversial, is becoming a competitive issue among hospitals and other "medical destination communities."

Here's some from Schwitzer's post on this topic:

A "research letter" in the Archives of Internal Medicine this week concludes:

“To our knowledge, we show for the first time that the availability of a technology, in this instance a proton beam facility, in one’s HRR (hospital referral region*) is associated with a higher likelihood of receiving proton beam therapy compared with those living in an HRR where this technology is not available.”

* The Dartmouth Atlas defines HRR this way: “Hospital service areas make clear the patterns of use of local hospitals. A significant proportion of care, however, is provided by referral hospitals that serve a larger region. Hospital referral regions were defined in this Atlas by documenting where patients were referred for major cardiovascular surgical procedures and for neurosurgery.

The authors write:

“The number of treatment options for localized prostate cancer continues to expand, amidst growing concern regarding overdiagnosis and overtreatment of low-risk disease.  Treatment patterns, however, may be driven by availability of novel technologies rather than by clinical indications.

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No prostate cancer treatment has been proven superior to the others. There are, however, substantial differences in cost, which are becoming more important to society and are a focus of health care reform in the United States.While there are theoretical advantages to proton beam therapy from a radiation physics standpoint, no study yet has demonstrated its superiority to modern photon-based therapy in terms of either oncologic or quality of life outcomes…

Proton beam therapy has not been shown to be superior to other treatments for prostate cancer and is substantially more expensive.Caution should be taken when considering implementation of this technology in additional regions, which may lead to greater use of this technology.”

New 2nd St. Holiday Inn close to opening

Here's some from today's column about more hotel action on Second Street Southwest.

Special thanks to Josh Banks for the pic. I'm glad you are out there on the the street with your camera.

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Construction crews are busy working on the final stages of Rochester's newest hotel as it gears up for its opening.

The tentative plan is to open the new Holiday Inn Express & Suites by the Miracle Mile shopping center by the end of March.

This 85-room hotel is the centerpiece of the Shoppes on Second development. That project, spearheaded by Rick Penz, of Rochester, includes the hotel and two commercial buildings. Tenants of the other buildings have not been announced, other than a Cousins Sub shop.

Lamont Cos. of South Dakota is building the hotel. They expect to have about 30 employees at the new hotel.

And this Holiday Inn is just the start for Lamont Cos. in Rochester.

"We'll be doing a full-service Holiday Inn shortly after this one,"  said Jeff Lamont, the owner of  Lamont Cos., last fall. The location for that one has not been announced.

Fashionable retailer to try Apache Mall on for size

Here's some from column in today's paper about the latest on the movement underway at Rochester's Apache Mall:

A fashion-forward clothing store that targets a youthful crowd thinks Rochester's Apache Mall is a good fit.

Look for Forever 21 to pop up this year at the mall.

Forever 21, which carries trendy clothes and accessories for women and men, announced last week that it will open a 12,686-square-foot store in the fall.

It will be located in the Macy’s wing of the mall and will encompass the former Disney Store space plus more.

“Adding Forever 21 to our existing unique selection of fashion retailers provides the Rochester community with yet another reason to shop at Apache Mall,” said Kim Bradley, the mall's general manager.

The retailer has a reputation for carrying "fast fashion" at prices that fit the budgets of people ranging from college students to young professionals in their late 20s and 30s.

It is also known for its bright yellow bags with "John 3:16," which refers to a well-known Bible scripture, printed on the bottom.

NASA unplugs last of IBM mainframes

Here's a blast from the past. Many folks in Rochester are familiar, some intimately, with IBM's System 360 mainframe.

It was the precursor to the wildly popular Rochester creation - the AS/400.

Here's some from a piece written by Stephen Shankman for CNET's news site about the end of an era.

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There was a time when IBM's mainframes were cutting-edge machines for scientific and engineering calculations.

Those days began in the 1960s, when IBM's System 360 rewrote the rules of computing and before humans walked on the moon. Big Blue long since has moved its high performance commupting effoprt toward its high-end Blue Gene systems and more conventional Linux servers using Intel and AMD x86 chips and Unix servers with its own Power processor. 

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Now NASA has followed suit, switching off its last mainframe, Chief Information Officer Linda Cureton said in a blog post Saturday.

"This month marks the end of an era in NASA computing. Marshall Space Flight Center powered down NASA's last mainframe, the IBM Z9 Mainframe," Cureton said.

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Cureton, who once programmed a System 360 mainframe in assembly language at the Goddard Space Flight Center, came to their defense:

They're really not so bad honestly, and they have their place. Things like virtual machines, hypervisors, thin clients, and swapping are all old hat to the mainframe generation though they are new to the current generation of cyber youths...

Today, they are the size of a refrigerator but in the old days, they were the size of a Cape Cod. Even though NASA has shut down its last one, there is still a requirement for mainframe capability in many other organizations.

More than four decades ago, when NASA acquired two "super-speed System 360 Model 95 machines in 1968, IBM touted the machines' mathematical abilities.

"Both of NASA's Model 95s are handling space exploration problems which require unusually high computation speeds," IBM said. "The Model 95s are capable of computing 14-digit multiplications at a rate of over 330 million in a minute."

New eatery on menu for Roch. skyway

Here's a little more about the deli that is in the works for the DoubleTree Hotel skyway:

The DoubleTree Hotel on South Broadway is cooking up plans for a new deli to be called The Urban Stack at its skyway entrance next to the Blu H2O Salon & Spa.

"Basically, it's an another amenity for the lunch and the business skyway traffic, and it's another amenity for our guests," says Michael Smith, the hotel's general manager. "I think it will be a really nice touch."

He anticipates that it could open as early as April, depending on the construction and permitting process.

While the DoubleTree's chefs are still crafting the sandwich, soup and salad menu, Smiths expects prices will be competitive with downtown's lunch options.

To make room for the new deli, the DoubleTree's Starbucks coffee shop will lose its living room-styled seating area near the DoubleTree's entrance. A slimmer Starbucks's will continue to perk along beside The Urban Stack.

The Rochester City Council OK'd a deal this week to allow the hotel's deli to reach into the skyway with a lunch counter and seating for about 12 along the passageway's north wall.

Starbucks already has tables in the skyway.

The Urban Stack will be the latest in a series of bars and restaurants in that area. When the hotel was still under the Radisson brand, a restaurant called McCormick’s had a dining area where the salon now stands and a bar in the Starbucks spot.

When McCormick's closed in in 2005 it was replaced by the neon and chrome of the Metro Bar and Grill. Starbucks soon started brewing in the former bar space. Metro closed in 2009 and it was soon replaced by BluH2O.

Will Canadian Pacific sell DM&E?

It has been long time since DM&E - the one-time nemesis of Mayo Clinic and the City of Rochester - has been in the news.

So I couldn't resist posting this. Evidently, a guy trying to engineer the future of Canadian Pacific railroad thinks buying DM&E was a "blunder" and CP should dump the pathway into the Powder River Basin's treasure chest of coal.

Here's is some from a Bloomberg News article by Frederic Tomesco and Natalie Doss:

William Ackman, the investor seeking a management change at Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd., said his proposed chief would consider selling a rail carrier acquired for $1.48 billion in 2008.

Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad Corp. cost more than it was worth, Ackman said yesterday in an interview after urging Canadian Pacific shareholders to back Hunter Harrison, his choice to be chief executive officer. Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management LP is Canadian Pacific's biggest investor.

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Ackman cited the DM&E deal as an example of poor decision making that he said would be remedied by ousting CEO Fred Green and hiring Harrison, the retired chief of Canadian National Railway Co.

Calgary-based Canadian Pacific targeted the DM&E to expand access to U.S. Midwest ethanol and coal markets.

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The railroad agreed to buy Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based DM&E in 2007 and won U.S. approval for the transaction the following year. Before the purchase, closely held DM&E had planned to spend $6 billion on a new line into Wyoming's Powder River Basin, where U.S. carriers Union Pacific Corp. and Burlington Northern Santa Fe load coal from the area's mines.