Minneapolis Park History

How did Minneapolis preserve nearly all waterfront in the city as public property? Lakes, creeks, ponds, river, even some bodies of water that no longer exist. Public property! You can walk up to the water and put your toe or your canoe in. Nobody’s permission needed.

That extraordinary distinguishing feature of Minneapolis will be the subject of a bus tour I will lead this summer as part of Preserve Minneapolis’s summer tour schedule. Reserve your seat on the bus for our two-hour tour on Saturday, August 17 from 10 a.m. to noon. All proceeds go to Preserve Minneapolis. I hope you will join me and in the process support the ongoing efforts to preserve the best of Minneapolis’s built and natural environments.

And check out the rest of Preserve Minneapolis’s summer tours. I’m sure you’ll see others you want to sign up for as well. The schedule was just posted and in the past most tours have sold out, so reserve your place early.

Michael Wilson’s Hill and Lake Press Archive

Michael Wilson has been writing about “history, issues and goings-on” in the Lowry Hill and lakes neighborhoods for Hill and Lake Press since 2015 and now he has collected his articles on his own blog at michaelwilsonmpls.com. I’d recommend a visit to Michael’s site for historical perspective on a wide range of issues affecting those neighborhoods as well as the city’s park resources. Bookmark it.

Aerial Treasures

An amazing trove of aerial photos of Minneapolis in the 1920s has been acquired by the Hennepin County Library and is in the process of being digitized for internet access. Michael Wilson has been instrumental in acquiring that collection for the library and wrote about it here. The spectacular collection, which I have viewed, should come with a warning that you will be tempted to spend hours and hours looking through them to find your house, street, neighborhood or landmarks as they once were.

The photographs were taken by early aerial photographer Joe Quigley for the Minneapolis School Board and were discovered in storage only in the last couple years. The photos were commissioned when the city was growing dramatically and the school board was trying to anticipate the exploding demand for classrooms and also planning to absorb the school-age population from the annexation of a large portion of Richfield.

One result of those challenges was increasing cooperation between the school board and park board to stretch their budgets without redundancy. That effort was initiated in the 1920s at the park board by commissioner Maude Armatage. Her efforts on that score continued for the next three decades and were recognized when a joint school and park constructed in southwest Minneapolis—part of the Richfield annexation—was named for her.

David Carpentier Smith