Archive for the ‘Snelling Racetrack’ Tag

The Park Board that Operated an Airport

Posted January 6, 2023
Filed under: Minneapolis Airport, Minneapolis parks | Tags: , ,
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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 two-mile oval adjacent to Fort Snelling included a grandstand that was built to hold 100,000 fans, although the few races held there never attracted nearly that many people.

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

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