Minneapolis Park History

At a recent picnic with friends who live south of Lake Harriet (Happy Birthday Kathryn!), they were surprised when I told them that the first park connection between Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet was not William Berry Parkway (which was named Shady Lane until 1968), but Linden Hills Boulevard. The boulevard was conceived as a scenic approach on the ridge overlooking Lake Harriet and the final link from Central (Loring) Park via Kenwood Parkway to Lake of the Isles, around that shoreline and the eastern shore of Lake Calhoun to Lake Harriet.

Freshly paved Linden Hills Boulevard in 1921. (Minnesota Historical Society, MH5.9 MP2.2 p31.)

Given the recent interest expressed in the boulevard, I am posting a brief history of the parkway I had written originally for the Park Board website (minneapolisparks.org).

Location: William Berry Parkway to Queen Avenue at West Lake Harriet Parkway

Size: 5.71 acres

Name: The land was referred to as Park Boulevard in park board documents for about 25 years until it was officially named Linden Hills Boulevard, after the surrounding neighborhood, in 1912.

Acquisition and Development: From the first time that Linden Hills Boulevard was included as a separate item in the park board’s inventory in 1914, it was described as having been donated by Henry Beard in 1888. However in 1888, the board paid $8,342 for “satisfaction of Beard contract” which included two years and three months worth of interest on an original amount of $7,200 that the park board owed him. It is unclear what land is referred to in the “Beard contract.” It could include portions of the Lake Harriet shore as well as Beard Plaisance or Linden Hills Boulevard. Beard was one of the original donors of the land around Lake Harriet for park purposes.

Park Boulevard was created to link Lake Calhoun to Lake Harriet. Using the math from the report on the Beard contract, the original deal to acquire the land dated to 1886. The boulevard was intended to be the primary connection between the two lakes until a more direct route between the lakes, eventually named William Berry Parkway, was acquired in 1889.

The boulevard was graded and planted in 1889. In the park board’s 1889 annual report, Charles Loring describes it as the “high land west of the Motor track, overlooking the lake.” At that time there were no homes between the boulevard and the lake. The Motor track Loring referred to was the street railway track. The initial layout of the boulevard was a 40-foot-wide driveway flanked by 10-foot-wide walkways and 20-foot-wide planting spaces, which were covered with loam and seeded.

The first homes on the boulevard were not built for a few years after initial improvements were made. The oldest existing homes along the boulevard, built in 1894, include the house at the corner of 40^th St. West and 4208 Linden Hills Boulevard according to Hennepin County’s Interactive property map. A house between the Boulevard and Lake Harriet was built at 4236 Queen Avenue in 1897. The rest of the houses on Queen Avenue and the Boulevard were built in 1900 or later. (Additional research in February 2022 by the other David C. Smith and the Linden Hills History Study Group reveals that building permits were taken out in 1894 also for houses at 4200, 4220 and 4228 Linden Hills Boulevard, all on the west side of the boulevard, and for 4224 Queen Avenue South between the boulevard and the lake. Those four houses are listed on the interactive map as built in 1900.)

Original improvements to the Boulevard in 1889 also included a 70-foot viaduct at the end of the boulevard over the street railway tracks at Queen Avenue. The total cost of the improvements was nearly $7,000. The street railway rebuilt the Queen Avenue bridge in 1905 following extensive negotiations with the park board over who was responsible for it. The park board refused to repair the bridge, because it believed the street railway was responsible.

The Linden Hills Boulevard was improved significantly in 1912 at a cost of nearly $5,000 even though it was no longer the main link from Calhoun to Harriet. With the improvements that year came pressure for a more suitable name than Park Boulevard. The board chose the name Linden Hills Boulevard.

The boulevard was paved for the first time in 1921. The entire length of the parkway was repaved in 1993.

Most of the parkways in Minneapolis were officially named “boulevards” until 1968 when they were all renamed “parkways” to indicate more clearly that they were park property. (They were also later paved with a distinctive red-tinted asphalt to further distinguish them from ordinary city streets.) However, Linden Hills Boulevard was overlooked at the time and is, therefore, the only road owned by the park board still officially called a boulevard—even though it, too, is paved red.

David C. Smith