Archive for the ‘Minneapolis Parks: General’ Category
Glenwood Toboggan Slide: 1887
Filed under: Minneapolis Parks: General, Winter Sports | Tags: Glenwood Park, Theodore Wirth Park, toboggan slide
Comments (4) It’s an old, wrinkled photo clipped from an unidentified newspaper, but it’s also the oldest photo I’ve seen of a toboggan slide in Minneapolis.
A privately run toboggan slide on “Glenwood” hill in 1887, years before the park board acquired land in the area.
The newspaper caption calls it the “North Star” chute and puts the date at 1887. That was two years before the first land (64 acres) was acquired for what was then Saratoga Park. The park was renamed Glenwood Park in 1890 and was renamed for Theodore Wirth in 1938. The majority of the land for the park we know today was acquired in 1909. I suspect that this hill was a part of that acquisition. Although I’m not certain, I think this slide was located near where the ski jumps were later built.
At different times the park board operated toboggan slides at Lake Harriet, Lake Calhoun, Glenwood (Wirth) Park, Columbia Park and Minnehaha Park. I don’t believe any of them were operated after the 1940s, but as always its difficult to discern from park board records when such services or programs were stopped.
The only toboggan slide I remember from growing up in the Twin Cities was the long slide erected on the approach to the State Capitol in St. Paul. I remember it being operated as a part of the St. Paul Winter Carnival. It was one of the highlights of winter life as a boy in St. Paul.
David C. Smith
Dr. Martin Luther King Park: The Naming of a Park
Filed under: Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Dr. Martin Luther King Park
Comments (1) The Minneapolis neighborhoods near Dr. Martin Luther King Park have become embroiled in an argument over the name of the park and whether that name confers special meaning on park land. At issue is whether designating a portion of the park as a dog park, where dogs could be off leash, would desecrate the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Here are the facts as recorded from the Proceedings of the Board of Park Commissioners, January 1st to December 31st For Year 1968:
April 17: Under the heading “Petitions and Communications.” Minneapolis NAACP requests Nicollet Field be renamed “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Park.” The board referred the request to the Planning Committee.
June 19: Also under “Petitions and Communications.” The Southside Activities Council expresses unanimous support for renaming Nicollet Field, “Martin Luther King. Jr. Memorial Park.”
October 9: After amending the park board’s Policy Statement to permit parks to be named after “persons of other than local significance” when “appropriate and desirable,” the board voted to change the name of Nicollet Field to “Dr. Martin Luther King Park.”
There is no explanation for the inconsistency of the use of Dr., Jr. or Memorial in the various proposals and the final resolution. But there has been no consistency in the use of Dr. or Jr. in general usage then or now.
I was curious about the origin of the park board’s Policy Statement on the naming of parks. I did find an entry in the Proceedings for May 2, 1934 that I believe established the board’s policy.
A bit of background: The park board had nearly completed the construction of a park across the street from the new post office downtown in 1934. It was a park the park board did not want to build, but was convinced to build by the City Council. The U.S. Postal Service wanted a new post office in Minneapolis, but was reluctant to build one without a proper approach or environment. The USPS wanted a park. The City Council finally persuaded the park board to go along. The park board did so reluctantly, especially given the colossal failure of The Gateway park only a couple blocks west.
So the park board had a new park, with a grand new statue — the Pioneers Statue, which was moved for a second time last summer to B. F. Nelson Park. All the park needed was a name. Everyone had suggestions, but three names seemed to generate the most interest.
Lafayette Park. May 20, 1934 would be the centennial of Lafayette’s death and some thought the park should be named for him and dedicated on that date.
Roald Amundsen Park. This was the choice of the Norwegian community. Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, was the first to reach the South Pole in 1912 and had died in 1928 while on a rescue mission in the Arctic.
General Pulaski Park. The Polish community proposed naming the park for Kazimierz Pulaski the Polish soldier of the Revolutionary War who was credited with creating the first American cavalry unit. An effort to rename Bottineau Field for Pulaski had failed the year before.
Perhaps not wishing to offend any nationality, the Special Committee on Nomenclature offered a new policy for the park board on May 2, 1934. The statement noted that the City Council and the Board of Education had chosen to name streets and schools to perpetuate the names of Presidents, explorers of local and international fame, and artists, writers and scientists of world-wide importance, “all of which your committee believes to be commendable.”
“However, some official body should lay particular emphasis on perpetuating legendary and place names of local significance and the names of those of our own citizens who from time to time have played important parts in the molding of our city — its physical structure, its artistic and spiritual background.
“Our parks are admirably suited for such a purpose, and such a purpose most admirably furthers the work of this Board in instilling in the minds of the youth who frequent our parks the ideals of useful citizenship…Here is something intimate — some one of us has achieved honor — our fathers knew him — we know his descendants. We too might achieve such honor by leading exemplary and highly useful lives.”
So, the committee recommended that “your honorable Board restrict the names to those commemorating men and women of local civic achievement and historical importance and legendary and place names of local significance…”
The statement was adopted and apparently still in place in 1968. At the meeting after the policy was adopted (May 16, 1934), the same committee recommended the name “Pioneers Square” for the new park that until then had been referred to simply as “Post Office Square” or the more Orwellian “Block 20.”
It was this policy that the park board had to amend in October 1968 to be able to rename Nicollet Park, Dr. Martin Luther King Park.
By the way, Nicollet Park was not named directly for the French cartographer Joseph Nicollet. It was named for the avenue named for him, which formed the park’s western border.
David C. Smith
McRae Park: Football Team Photos
Filed under: Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Football, McRae Park
Comments (14) Thanks to Ann Kegley, recreation director at McRae Park, for these photos of youth football teams from McRae. None of the players or coaches in these photos is identified. If you can identify anyone, send me a note. The team wore the jerseys of the Seaman Gilfoy VFW post. I can find little information online about that post. Did the post sponsor teams only at McRae Park or other parks, too?
McRae Park midget football team, 1963 (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)
I love it when people label photos. The next one is not even identified by year, but looking at hair styles, I’m guessing mid-1970s. Could the building in the background be Regina High School?
McRae Park youth football team, year unknown, but judging by hair styles probably mid-1970s. Photo may have been taken at nearby Regina High School. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)
The final older football team photo we found was taken in 1979. The photo was also labelled “light cubs” apparently referring to the weight class in which the team played.
McRae Park youth football team, 1979 (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)
Does anyone know anything about any of the sponsors of the 1979 team: Ken and Norm’s, Cruse Construction, Eddie’s Barber Shop and Benedict?
I’d especially like to know who the coaches in these photos are. Could the coach on the left in the middle photo be Edward Solomon? Solomon was one of the better-known volunteer football coaches in the Minneapolis park system. He was a park commissioner 1996-2002. A new park southwest of Lake Nokomis was named for him in 2004.
McRae Park is unusual because it does not occupy all of the two square blocks on which it is located. The southwest corner of the park at 47th and Chicago is occupied by businesses. I have not found an explanation for why the park board didn’t acquire all of the land on those blocks — as it usually did. Ray N. Welter Heating moved to its present location on Chicago Avenue in the early 1940s not long before the land for the park was acquired in 1946. A person at the heating company told me the land that is now the park was a garbage dump when Welter moved its business to the site from Lake Street. Can anyone tell us the history of the street corner and why the park board didn’t buy all the land on that block? Some of the land for the park was purchased through condemnation; some was tax-forfeited land that the state owned and gave to the city.
David C. Smith
Florence Barton Loring
Filed under: Minneapolis Park Hero, Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Charles M. Loring, Florence Barton Loring, Loring Park, Minneapolis parks
Comments (8) Charles Loring was married to Emily Crossman for 38 years, to Florence Barton for only 27, but he probably knew Florence longer than he knew Emily.
The “Father of Minneapolis Parks” likely met Florence more than 30 years before he married her, but he may not have noticed her much at first. She was the daughter of his friend and business associate Asa Barton. Barton, like Loring, was an immigrant from Maine. (Barton also has his name on the Minneapolis map: Barton Avenue in Prospect Park.) Continue reading
The Case For Horace Cleveland’s Name on a River Gorge Park
Filed under: Landscape Architects, Minneapolis Park Names, Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: H. W. S. Cleveland, Horace Cleveland, Minneapolis parks, Mississippi River
Comments (8) “A continuous park…of such picturesque character as no art could create and no other city can possess.”
That is how Horace Cleveland described the park he imagined along the boulevard he recommended for the west bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. He went on to write in his Suggestions for a System of Parks and Parkways for the City of Minneapolis, which he presented to the first Minneapolis park board on June 2, 1883:
“The Mississippi River is not only the grand natural feature which gives character to your city and constitutes the main spring of prosperity, but it is the object of vital interest and center of attraction to intelligent visitors from every quarter of the globe, who associate such ideas of grandeur with its name as no human creation can excite. It is due therefore, to the sentiments of the civilized world, and equally in recognition of your own sense of the blessings it confers upon you, that it should be placed in a setting worthy of so priceless a jewel.”
Horace Cleveland had a special passion for the Mississippi River gorge. The banks of the river remain a beautiful and wild place thanks, in part, to his constant encouragement over nearly three decades for Minneapolis (St. Paul, too) to acquire the river banks downstream from St Anthony Falls to preserve them from ruin.
This photo of West River Parkway in about 1910 shows how wild the river banks were. The ruggged, wild banks of the river gorge, the only such place on the entire length of the Mississippi River, remain as beautiful today as during Horace Cleveland’s lifetime. (Hennepin County Public Library, Minneapolis Collection, M0129)
The park board finally acquired all the land along the west side of the gorge downriver from Riverside Park to Minnehaha Creek in 1902, more than a year after Cleveland’s death. Cleveland once said that he would feel that he “had not lived in vain” if the city would preserve the river bank in its natural state.
Cleveland wrote of the river banks:
“No artist who has any appreciation of natural beauty would presume to do more than touch with reverent hands the features whose charms suggest their own development. No plan for such work could be made.”
Cleveland not only appreciated the beauty of the river, but he foresaw that the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis would one day grow together. In his mind that probability made it even more important that the cities preserve some wild, natural places along the river that ran between them.
We should name a river gorge park for Cleveland just as a tribute to his descriptive powers, even if he hadn’t suggested, recommended, planned, cajoled, informed and educated a generation or two of the city’s leaders on land preservation and city building.
I believe the only name ever given to the land along the river was Mississippi Park. A bit plain. Winchell Trail and West River Parkway run through it, and those names can remain. It would cause no one any discomfort to officially name the rest of the west gorge for Cleveland. It’s not like renaming a street, which causes people to have to change their addresses and the city to put up new road signs. It’s just putting a name on a space that essentially has none now.
A marker or two along Winchell Trail and the parkway would suffice to let people know Horace Cleveland’s name. That couldn’t cost much. I’ll put up the first hundred bucks.
Horace Cleveland River Gorge Park. He’s why we have it, so let’s put his name on it. I think we owe him that.
David C. Smith
© David C. Smith
William Watts Folwell: Show them in their best days
Filed under: Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: William Watts Folwell
Leave a comment William Watts Folwell was an accomplished man: Union Army engineer, first president of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis park commissioner for 18 years, author of a four-volume history of Minnesota. The list goes on and on. Not least, he is one of my heroes.
Many photographs of Folwell exist, including some posted on this site, but today I will follow Folwell’s advice. In 1911, when Folwell was 78, he wrote to Minnesota Historical Society President Warren Upham:
“Let me make a suggestion in regard to portraits of men in all your publications. Don’t print “old man pictures,” but show the men as they were in their best days if possible. The likeness of General Sibley in General Baker’s book is atrocious. Sibley was a splendid figure in his prime, and ought so to be remembered.”
(Wiliam Watts Folwell: Autobiography and Letters of a Pioneer of Culture, Ed. Solon J. Buck. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1933)
So here is William Watts Folwell dressed for his wedding to Sarah Heywood when he was 30 in 1863. At the time he was an enlisted engineer in the Union Army. While it appears from his shoulder patch here that he was a captain at the time, he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel, the highest possible for an enlisted man, and commanded an engineering company of 450 men in several important Civil War battles. Folwell was hired as the first president of the University of Minnesota six years after he was married.
William Watts Folwell photographed in his Union Army uniform for his wedding in 1863 to Sarah Heywood. (Powelson, Minnesota Historical Society)
David C. Smith
Horace Cleveland River Gorge Park: We need the man’s name on our map
Filed under: Landscape Architects, Minneapolis Park Names, Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: H.W.S. Cleveland, Horace Cleveland
Comments (4) Folwell Junior High School is no longer, but we still have Folwell Park in north Minneapolis and Folwell Hall at the University of Minnesota. The building at the university won’t last forever, but the park should, so people will have reason to remember William Watts Folwell even if they never see scribblings such as this or City of Parks. Many other heroes of our park development are remembered in park names, too: Loring, Berry, Morrison, King, Beard, Wirth, Gross, Bossen, Armatage.
Not so for Horace William Shaler Cleveland who played such an important role in the creation of the Minneapolis park system. His name is nowhere in this city. While I’m quoting Folwell today, there’s this from the close of his President’s Address in the 1895 annual report of the Minneapois Board of Park Commissioners:
“Although still in the land of the living, no further service can be expected of Mr. H. W. S. Cleveland, disabled as he is by the infirmities incident to his advanced age. Our city may count itself fortunate to have had his assistance in the original development of plark plans, and in the later execution of them in part. In some proper way his name should be perpetuated in connection with our park system.”
That is as true today as it was 115 years ago. We need Horace Cleveland’s name on Minneapolis maps.
My recommendation: everything between West River Parkway and the Mississippi River, from the mouth of Minnehaha Creek to Riverside Park, should become “Horace Cleveland River Gorge Park.” He loved most of all the river gorge and never stopped fighting for its acquisition as parkland, something that wasn’t accomplished until after his death. The west river bank is really known only as that; it doesn’t have a real name anyway. So why not put Cleveland’s name on it? No one has to call it that, I don’t care, just print it on the map so people don’t forget. It seems a little thing to do for a man who did so much for you and me.
I’m looking at you, park commissioners.
Horace Cleveland proposed this system of parks and parkways in 1883. I think it merits his name on a bit of the park system he suggested. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)
David C. Smith
Sibley Field
Filed under: Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Minneapolis parks, Sibley Field
Comments (23) One of the most heavily used playgrounds in Minneapolis for a few decades was Sibley Field at 39th and Longfellow in south Minneapolis. Now, thanks to the efforts of Annie Olson who worked at Sibley Field for several years, we have found some historic photos of activities at Sibley Field.
One of my favorites is this hockey team wearing Cloggy’s sweaters.
Cloggy’s 1952 hockey team at Sibley Field (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board). ** Please see the comments by Ron Jelmo below on this photo.
In more recent times, Cloggy’s was a bar at 34th and 54th, but that’s quite a distance from Sibley Field. Not exactly a neighborhood bar. The photo provides no identification of the players or coaches. Does anyone know the story of this Cloggy’s team or Cloggy’s sponsorship of teams in general?
Sibley Field cub hockey team, 1961 (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)
Another group of unidentified players is this 1961 cub hockey team? Anybody know any of these kids?
Another picture that I found interesting is this one of unnamed staff or volunteers at Sibley Field. The year is also unknown, although I’m guessing early 1960s.
Sibley Park staff or volunteers, year unknown. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)
I like this photo because of the “BPC” on the t-shirts. BPC was the acronym for Board of Park Commissioners, the official name of the Minneapolis park board until it was changed in 1969 to Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. The new name was intended to emphasize the significant responsibilities of the park board for recreation programs — something that didn’t exist when the BPC was created in 1883. I presume they are standing in front of the recreation center that was built in 1924 and stood until the current rec center was built in 1971. Can anyone identify the people in this picture and whether they were BPC employees or Sibley Field volunteers? Interesting composition in front of the men’s room.
Sibley Field was one of the most active parks in Minneapolis from 1946 when it was one of only five city parks that offered year-round programming. The other four year-round parks were Folwell, Nicollet (King), Logan and Loring; North Commons was added to that group in 1956.
Women’s craft class at Sibley Park in 1961. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)
This series of photos (stapled together) suggests the wide range of activities offered — and groups served — at the park. Two years after this photo was taken Sibley Field became one of nine recreation centers in Minneapolis to offer programs for senior citizens, too. The seniors met one morning a week at the park. The program was modeled after a similar program that had first been tried at Loring Park in 1960.
A search of old Minneapolis Morning Tribunes reveals that the Cedar Avenue Heights neighborhood (the park was originally Cedar Avenue Heights Field) began to be developed in 1909-1910. Newspapers also reveal that petitions for a park in Cedar Avenue Heights, which the park board received in September, 1921, followed the creation of a neighborhood improvement association in March of that year (Minneapolis Morning Tribune, March 28, 1921). The Tribune reported that the neighborhood improvement association was founded primarily to promote the creation of a double track on the street car line on Cedar Avenue from Lake Street to 42nd Street and an extension of the line south of 42nd. (Park commissioners also appeared at the City Council to advocate extending the Cedar Avenue car line to serve the new bath house at Lake Nokomis.) The paper also speculated that day that the association would also support the construction of a new Nokomis High School, which was eventually named Roosevelt High School.
The impetus for the formation of the Cedar Heights Improvement Association in March, 1921 was almost certainly the opening of the new Miles Standish school in January of that year. The school quickly became the center of the community. The Tribune reported that 900 people attended the first meeting of the neighborhood improvement association at the school.
The new Miles Standish School facing what is now Standish Avenue at 40th Street in 1922. The school was significantly enlarged in 1923, just two years after it was built. (Minneapolis Public Schools)
Cedar Avenue Heights Field was not the first playing field in the neighborhood. Tribune articles about amateur baseball in 1909 refer to a baseball field — the home field of the Prince Realty team — at Cedar and 42nd Street. I’ve never seen a picture of that field. If you have, let me know where I can find one.
David C. Smith
Public-private collaborations that work: Sea Salt, Tin Fish and…Bread and Pickle?
Filed under: Lake Calhoun, Lake Harriet, Minneapolis Parks: General, Minnehaha Falls | Tags: Horace Cleveland, Lake Calhoun, Lake Harriet, Minnehaha Falls, Theodore Wirth
Comments (1) The mention of Sea Salt restaurant in Alice Streed’s Minneapolis Park Memory: Treasure (below) is noteworthy. A relatively new development in our parks is mentioned in the same sentences as long-celebrated spaces and activities. The popular restaurant in the Minnehaha Park refectory — run as a private, for-profit business — is a marvelous example of the best of public-private collaboration. It proves that private enterprise can do some things, such as serving delicious sea food, better than a public agency. I believe it also demonstrates the silliness of claims that the sky is falling whenever an agency like the park board considers change.
Lest private enterprise advocates get carried away here, however, let me state quite emphatically that there would be no park system in which to place these wonderful little restaurants if we would have relied on private interests to create parks. Our parks prove that public agencies can do some things, such as creating a park system, that private enterprise will not do.
The debate over allowing businesses to operate in Minneapolis parks is old — and sometimes entertaining. The park board began granting concessions for boat rentals, then food sales, to private businesses at Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet very early in the history of Minneapolis parks. The park board assumed control of the boat rentals at Lake Harriet in the late 1880s when Charles Loring noted that the business could be easily managed by the park board. On other issues, however, the presence of private enterprise on park property was vigorously opposed.
Permit me to quote myself — and Horace Cleveland — from City of Parks:
(Cleveland) had also written (to William Folwell) of his disgust that the park board was considering permitting a structure next to Minnehaha Falls where people could have their photos taken beside the cataract. “If erected,” Cleveland complained, “it will be simply pandering to the tastes of the army of boobies who think to boost themselves into notoriety by connecting their own stupid features with the representation of one of the most beautiful of God’s works.”
You didn’t mess with Cleveland’s favorite natural landscapes — one of the things that made him one of the first great landscape architects. Fortunately, William Folwell, who was president of the park board at the time, agreed with his friend.
Another early private business on park property was a service to pump up deflated bicycle tires on the new bicycle paths created by the park board during the bicycle craze of the 1880s-1890s. The park board did exercise some control over the business, however, by stipulating that the business could not charge more than a penny for filling a tire.
The park board began to take over food service in park buildings after Theodore Wirth became park superintendent in 1906. Wirth, like many park executives of the day, believed that no private concessions should be operated in parks — although he seemed to make an exception for pony rides and probably would have for the polo fields and barns he proposed for Bryn Mawr Meadows. (And, of course, the sheep he brought in to graze at Glenwood Park in 1921 were not owned by the park board. Wirth wrote that he thought sheep grazing in a park was a cool visual effect and that the sheep would earn their keep by cutting grass, keeping weeds down, which reduced fire risk, and fertilizing. Unfortunately they didn’t mow evenly and ate other plants too, so the borrowed sheep were evicted in 1922. ) One of the few other historical examples of a private venture operating on park property was the Minneapolis Tennis Club, which operated first at The Parade and then moved to Nicollet (Martin Luther King) Park in the early 1950s when Parade Stadium was built.
Do you remember concession stands in parks? What about treats at the Calhoun, Nokomis or Wirth beach houses? As good as fish tacos?
I have high hopes for Bread & Pickle, the new food service contracted for Lake Harriet next summer. I hope the Citizens Advisory Council that worked so hard on the recommendations wasn’t too conservative in forcing a new service into old space.
David C. Smith
The Smack and Tang of Elemental Things
Filed under: Minneapolis Park Hero, Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Charles M. Loring, Edwin Markham, Florence Barton Loring, Henrietta Jewett Keith
Comments (10) One of the coolest things I’ve ever purchased online was a book of poetry about trees published in 1923 or 1924. Not your ordinary, run-of-the-paper-mill tree poetry book. It was published by Florence Barton Loring as a remembrance from her husband, Charles M. Loring, “The Father of Minneapolis Parks.” (Do not accept imitation “creators” of the Minneapolis park system. More to come on that subject.) Only forty-eight pages with a hard cover. The little book was explained this way in a brief foreword by Mrs. Loring:
In explanation of this booklet’s publication, it may be stated that my beloved husband requested me, when circumstances favored, to compile a collection of verses from which we had derived much pleasure, on the subject of trees, for distribution as a parting souvenir of himself, among those who knew him well, and share his tastes and enthusiasm…It does not require this parting remembrance from Charles M. Loring to keep his memory alive in the hearts of his friends, but that may render it none the less acceptable to the recipients; while, to the compiler, it has been not only a means of redeeming a promise, but, also, has provided a labor of love.
Poets included range from Byron, Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant (Bryant Avenue) to Minnesota poets Henrietta Jewett Keith and May Stanley.
The poem excerpt that caught my attention though was a few lines from “Lincoln: The Man of the People,” by Edwin Markham. Loring cites only six lines of the poem including the closing four lines:
And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky
That was perhaps Mrs. Loring’s tribute to Lincoln as well as her husband, who had been a stalwart of Lincoln’s party. But she left out Markham’s great description of Lincoln including the fabulous line used as a title here:
The color of the ground was in him, the red earth;
The smack and tang of elemental things;
A reading of Markham’s poem was part of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in May, 1922. Markham, who had published the poem in 1901, read it himself. The dedication took place a little more than a month after Charles Loring died at the age of 88.
Florence Barton Loring and Charles Loring, about 1915, likely in Riverside, California where they often spent the winter. (Minnesota Historical Society, por 16225 r3)
I first saw the book at the Minnesota Historical Society Library in St. Paul (there is also a copy in Special Collections at the Hennepin Country Central Library downtown Minneapolis). Because relatively few copies were printed for gifts to Loring’s friends I was surprised to find one for sale online from a Los Angeles rare book dealer. It is one of only a few souvenirs I have collected from my research of Minneapolis parks.
More on Florence Barton Loring soon.
David C. Smith
© David C. Smith
Minneapolis Park Memory: Treasure
Filed under: Minneapolis Golf Courses, Minneapolis Park Memory, Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Hiawatha Golf Course, Lake Harriet, Minnehaha Park, Powderhorn Park
Comments (1) How I have enjoyed the Minneapolis parks: watching fireworks at Powderhorn Park; concerts at Lake Harriet, with picnics on the hill; swimming and canoeing at Calhoun; walking in Minnehaha Park and eating crab cakes at Sea Salt; walking and biking at Nokomis; watching my children play hockey at various parks, and baseball at McRae and Diamond Lake; teaching the children to skate at Diamond Lake; my sons in their early teens taking the bus from our home at 48th and Clinton all the way to Theodore Wirth Park to play golf; my boys golfing at Hiawatha and telling us that they played with two really nice “old guys.” (These “old guys” happened to be friends of ours from church and were our age, in their 40s.)
My son Glen would leave the house in the summer early in the morning, bike to Lake Harriet with his fishing equipment, climb on a tree branch overhanging the lake and stay until suppertime. He enjoyed being outdoors even if he didn’t catch fish.
But here is my most treasured memory: In 1945, my future husband took me canoeing at Calhoun and then into Lake of the Isles, and gave me my engagement ring.
Alice Streed
The Romantic Route (from City of Parks, Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)
Minneapolis Park Memory: A Hike Down Memory Lane
Filed under: Minneapolis Park Memory, Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Minneapolis parks, Minnehikers
Leave a comment The Minneapolis Municipal Hiking Club celebrated its 90th anniversary this year. On the first Saturday of January every year, we do an anniversary hike, starting at Rarig Center on the West Campus and continuing on West River Parkway all the way to Minnehaha Falls. The hiking club was started by Theodore Wirth in 1920, and they hiked from Minnehaha Falls to Riverside Park, where they cooked coffee over an open fire and enjoyed donuts. The club has done this hike every year, but in reverse. I have hiked this route many times, even in bitter cold weather, as cold as minus 16 degrees. We end up with dinner at one of the churches. I believe the hiking club has hiked in every park in Minneapolis over the years. The club has also donated over $21,000 for flowering crabapple trees and other tree varieties, also benches by the rose and peace gardens. I recently helped edit a history booklet highlighting some of the activities and trips taken by members.
Edith Johnson
Editor’s note: For more information on the history of the Minneapolis Municipal Hiking Club, or Minnehikers, visit the Special Collections department of the Central Library in Minneapolis. The collection includes hiking club yearbooks for almost every year 1924-1999. The Minnesota Historical Society Library has a more limited collection featuring the earlier years.
We would enjoy reading more memories of club hikes in these pages.
Minneapolis Park History 