Open Door at the Superintendent’s House
Filed under: Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Lyndale Farmstead, Theodore Wirth
Leave a Comment Today and tomorrow, May 13 and 14, the Minneapolis Park Superintendent’s House in Lyndale Farmstead Park will be open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It’s a rare opportunity to see the interior of the home–and office–built for acclaimed Park Superintendent Theodore Wirth in 1910. The house is currently the home of Park Superintendent Al Bangoura and family. They have kindly agreed to open their historic residence to the public this weekend.
I will be at the house to talk about parks, Theodore Wirth, and the house. I hope you will drop by and say hello. We will even have copies of City of Parks for sale. I would be glad to autograph a copy for you–and maybe one for your Mother for a special Mother’s Day gift. No formal presentations are planned, but we’d be happy to try to answer your questions about the house and park. This will be a great chance for you to meet Al Bangoura and his wife, Kendra Lewis, too. We will also be joined part of the weekend by Dana Wirth Sparks, great granddaughter of Theodore Wirth, and by Mark Ruhe, who lived in the house when his father, Robert Ruhe, was park superintendent in the 1960s and ’70s.
I’ve written about the house and some of the controversy surrounding its construction here. You can read much more about the park and house by clicking on the “History” tab on the Lyndale Farmstead Park page at Minneapolisparks.org.
I hope to see you there. I’ll be on the lower level of the house in what was once a drafting room and Theodore Wirth’s office. A word of caution: the staircase to the lower level is steep and there is no elevator.
David C. Smith
Beehive Fireplace on Highway 100
Filed under: Landscape Architects, Minneapolis parks | Tags: Arthur Nichols, Highway 100, Lilac Way
Comments (3) I just received a note from Andrea Weber, former MPRB Landscape Architect, who now works for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. She referred to a post from 2011 about the landscape architect Arthur Nichols and the beehive fireplaces he incorporated into his designs for picnic areas along Highway 100. I thought you might be interested.
Andrea wrote: I am writing this in 2023-the original posts are from 2012-so history lives on. I am the Historic Roadside Property Manager for MnDOT and a former MPRB Landscape Architect. I have been working on Graeser Park on TH 100-the site of the only existing beehive in its original location- since 2020. We completed a rehab of the beehive and picnic area last year and are doing one more phase of work this spring. The beehive “Triple Fireplace Type No 6” was designed by Carl Graeser. I have scans of the signed drawings at MnDOT! If you’re still out there, Richard, I would love to chat, as I work on an lot of sites designed by your grandfather.
David Carpentier Smith
The Park Board that Operated an Airport
Filed under: Minneapolis Airport, Minneapolis parks | Tags: MInneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, Pearl Park, Snelling Racetrack
Comments (7) The Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport was once the site of the Snelling Racetrack, a two-mile concrete race track that was built to hold car races similar to the Indianapolis 500. It failed — and became an airport instead. The airport was developed and operated by the Minneapolis park board for nearly two decades. You can read the story of the Snelling Racetrack here, another of my earlier posts that I have restored to this site.
The Park Board eventually built the runways, hangars, terminal and control tower that were taken over in the 1940s when the Minnesota legislature created the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC). The last major renovation of the airport runways by the park board — before ceding control to MAC — took place as a Works Progress Adminstration (WPA) project. The rubble from the old runways was used as fill in Pearl Lake, now Pearl Park — without a lake.
David C. Smith
Minnehaha Park Zoo
Filed under: Minneapolis parks | Tags: Minnehaha Park, Minnehaha Zoo, Robert "Fish" Jones
Comments (2) One of my favorite Minneapolis park stories is about the zoo in Minnehaha Park over 100 years ago. I’ve restored an old post about that zoo here.
David Carpentier Smith
H.W.S. Cleveland Trivia
Filed under: Landscape Architects, Minneapolis parks | Tags: H.W.S. Cleveland, Horace Cleveland, Landscape Gardening
Leave a Comment I’ve restored a couple more Cleveland-related pages written long ago.
One pertains to the famous men Horace William Shaler Cleveland knew as his older brother’s best friends, including two men who have Minneapolis parks named for them. It is likely that the views of these soon-to-be famous men influenced Cleveland’s thinking on many issues. But it is also entirely possible that Cleveland’s experiences and observations as a young man — especially from his travels to the “West” — could have influenced them as well.
Another post provides Cleveland’s recommendations for books to read on landscape gardening. The list is taken from a letter he wrote to the secretary of the Minneapolis park board nearly 140 years ago — so some of the views expressed may seem outdated. All of the books Cleveland recommends, once scarce in the United States, are now available free on Google Books.
For a man without much formal education, Cleveland was an intellectual force.
Davd Carpentier Smith
Cleveland’s Property and Olmsted’s Fame
Filed under: Landscape Architects, Minneapolis parks | Tags: Frederick Law Olmsted, H.W.S. Cleveland, Horace Cleveland
Leave a Comment I mentioned a couple weeks ago the friendly relationship between Horace William Shaler Cleveland and Frederick Law Olmsted. While there is so much of note in that relationship, and dozens of letters exchanged between the men attest to it, one of Cleveland’s letters to Frederick Law Olmsted caught my attention because it referred to property Cleveland owned. Later while studying an old plat map of Minneapolis I stumbled across an undivided, 4.7-acre plot of land in South Minneapolis labelled as owned by Cleveland. Like finding a needle in a haystack, I suppose. Another slice of my research into Cleveland’s life which I had previously posted.
Epilogue: Even though he owned some property and worked well into his 80s, Cleveland’s money did run out. His former partner, William Merchant Richardson French, when he was the director of the Chicago Art Institute, sent a letter to Cleveland’s colleagues and friends–including Olmsted–asking for donations to help Cleveland pay his bills as an elderly man.
More to come.
David C. Smith
More Cleveland: Samuel Gale, Oak Lake, Kenwood Parkway
Filed under: Landscape Architects, Minneapolis parks | Tags: Frederick Law Olmsted, H.W.S. Cleveland, Horace Cleveland, Kenwood Parkway, Oak Lake
Leave a Comment After writing about the Oak Lake Addition in North Minneapolis in 2011, I augmented what I knew about H.W.S. Cleveland’s relationship with Samuel Gale and his work at Oak Lake in “Horace Cleveland Hated Rectangles.” I also wrote more about Cleveland’s eventual work for the Minneapolis park board at Oak Lake and his ideas about Kenwood Parkway.
These are another two archived posts pertaining to Cleveland’s life and work that I just reactivated.
David C. Smith
Cleveland’s First Residential Commission in Minneapolis?
Filed under: Landscape Architects, Lost Minneapolis Parks, Minneapolis parks | Tags: H.W.S. Cleveland, Horace Cleveland, Minneapolis Farmers' Market, Oak Lake, Samuel Gale
Comments (4) Today I’m reposting an article on the creation and demise of Oak Lake Park as a pricey residential neighborhood on the near north side of Minneapolis in the 1870s. Oak Lake itself sat exactly on the site of today’s Farmers’ Market on Lyndale Avenue. I wrote it in 2011 when the Minnesota Vikings were thought to prefer the Farmers’ Market site for a new stadium. Of course that new stadium was eventually built on the site of the old Metrodome, so that focus of the article is outdated. But the historical information on the site as one of Minneapolis’s first upscale residential developments is still accurate. Not many people know of the ritzy history of the site where the market now stands.
I had set this post aside originally because I had intended to make the case that Horace William Shaler Cleveland was likely the man who advised Samuel Gale on the layout of the new neighborhood. The curving streets adapted to the topography are certainly hallmarks of Cleveland’s work–as are the parcels of land set aside for parks. It is also clear that Cleveland and Gale knew each other. Cleveland’s participation in the Oak Lake development is informed speculation on my part; I have found no documentary evidence of his hand in the project.
The most intriguing part of this post is my surmise that what killed the upscale Oak Lake neighborhood was the creation of the Minneapolis park board. With the acquisition of shores on larger lakes as public park land, wealthy Minneapolitans suddenly had even more attractive sites for their new homes. Without buyers for the larger homes built at Oak Lake, they were eventually divided into rooming houses in a neighborhood that gradually became inhabited by arriving immigrants.
Oak Lake itself was eventually filled in by the park board after it became an unsightly and odiferous hazard.
David C. Smith
Cleveland’s Connections
Filed under: Minneapolis parks | Tags: H.W.S. Cleveland, Horace Cleveland, William Merchant Richardson French
Comments (2) What brought H.W.S. Cleveland to Minneapolis as a guest lecturer in 1872 may have been his connection to a famous family.
Find the complete story here, an article originally posted in 2011. Since that article was posted, I learned that William’s father, Henry, and Cleveland almost certainly knew each other before Cleveland took on the young engineer as a partner in Chicago. Henry and Horace had both written on the subject of irrigation and were both active in Massachusetts horticultural societies. Their paths would have crossed.
Cleveland later proposed a collaboration in a Minneapolis park with French’s older brother, the famous sculptor Daniel Chester French.
David C. Smith
Minnehaha Creek Mystery Solved!
Park board archivist Angela Salisbury writes:
I believe we’ve solved our mystery. In The Story of the W.P.A. in the Minneapolis Parks, Parkways and Playgrounds volume for 1940 (dated Jan 1, 1941), page 24, regarding the Minnehaha Parkway:
“A small limestone shelter was built north of Minnehaha Creek and west of Xerxes Avenue to house the meter for measuring the amount of sewage entering the city sewer system from the Village of Edina. The village supplied the material for this construction and the work was done by a Park Board W.P.A. crew.”
There is an image of the structure on page 25.
These W.P.A. books are really wonderful, and I’m happy to report they are digitized and available online via the Minnesota Digital Library. This volume is here: https://collection.mndigital.org/catalog/p16022coll55:910#?c=&m=&s=&cv=&xywh=-1177%2C0%2C5267%2C3692
Many wonderful images in these volumes!
Thanks, Angela!
David Carpentier Smith
Cleveland and Olmsted Revisited
Filed under: Landscape Architects, Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Frederick Law Olmsted, H.W.S. Cleveland, Horace Cleveland, Washburn Fair Oaks
Leave a Comment In my continuing effort to restore previously mothballed posts about Horace William Shaler Cleveland, I have reposted three articles from several years ago about the relationship of Cleveland and Frederick Law Olmsted. The question is often raised whether Olmsted designed any parks in Minneapolis. My answer is no — especially Washburn Fair Oaks. See why in these posts from Part 1 in 2010, Part 2, and Part 3.
David Carpentier Smith
Minnehaha Creek Shed Mystery
Filed under: Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Minneapolis parks, Minnehaha Creek, Minnehaha Parkway
Comments (12) Here’s your new mystery. (Sorry for filling up your inbox today, but this issue was just raised by a reader as I was posting other things!)
The structure pictured below is on park land just north of Minnehaha Creek and west of Xerxes Avenue. That’s just after the creek enters Minneapolis from Edina. I’ve seen it before and assumed it was on private land. I’m told it’s not.
Was it built as a lift station, pump building, or clandestine meeting place for rogue park commissioners? Any Phryne Fishers or Endeavour Morses out there? Or just humble historians?
If you know anything, please share. We haven’t found mention of the structure in park records.
David Carpentier Smith
P.S. I think we should have a televised Geraldo-Rivera-style reveal of the inside of the structure. I suspect it was haunted or there were some enormous (yeti?) footprints discovered in the vicinity. Any record of unexplained pulsating blue lights in neighborhood lore? Or perhaps tiny notes left beside tree stumps as elves are wont to leave ala mr. little guy. TPT?
Minneapolis Park History 