neighborhood by the falls- preview
TRANSCRIPT
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ERIC HART
LONGFELLOW HISTORY PROJECT
Minneapolis ˿ Longfellow Community Council ˿ 2009
TheNeighborhoodby the FallsA Look Back at Life in
L O N G F E L L O W
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İ
Longfellow School
Decoration Day parade,
c. 1923
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CONTENTS
Preface vi
Introduction viii
1. Mighty Mississippi 1
2. Early Settlement 17
3. Longfellow in 1900 29
4. Social Life 43
5. Entertainment 61
6. Building Longfellow 77
7. 21st Century 101
References 115
Illustration Credits 121
Index 122
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viii í The Neighborhood by the Falls
Longfellow Neighborhood
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The Falls of St. Anthony on the Mississippi River—and the
geology that made both possible—in turn made possible
the major city that Minneapolis is today. Waterpower pro-
duced by the falls energized the flour-milling and lumber
industries developing in the city. As a result, Minneapolis
became a major center of commerce in the Upper Midwest,
and the growing city eventually reached the Longfellow
area, filling it with modest homes and a scattering of
industry along its western edge.
The Longfellow community has always been a little out
of the way, tucked into the city’s southeast corner and
wedged between Hiawatha Avenue and the Mississippi.
The Midtown Greenway along the 27th Street rail corridor
forms its northern boundary. Minnehaha Park sits at its
southern tip. At the edge of the city and at a distance
from the congestion of downtown Minneapolis and the
prestige of the Chain of Lakes, Longfellow became home
to working-class people who built modest bungalows.
Longfellow gets its name from the 19th-century poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In 1855, Longfellow penned
Song of Hiawatha, an epic poem loosely based on Dakota
and Ojibwe legends. The poem chronicles the story of the
warrior Hiawatha, who in his journeys falls in love with
the maiden Minnehaha, who lives by Minnehaha Falls.
Neither Minnehaha nor Hiawatha are the names of his-
torical persons, but their inclusion in Longfellow’s poem
forever associates them with this part of Minnesota.
Minnehaha was the first of Longfellow’s names to show
up on maps, shortly after the poem was published. Then,
in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the names Hiawatha,Nokomis, and Nawadaha showed up on streets and busi-
ness around south Minneapolis. In 1891 the republished
poem—with Frederic Remington illustrations—sparked
renewed interest in the work. Schoolchildren studied his
poems and celebrated his birthday.
The name Longfellow is relatively new to the neighorhood.
Historically, the area was part of the 12th Ward but without
a real identity of its own. Smaller sections of the area,
like Seven Oaks and the Hiawatha district, had names
that didn’t stick. In the 1930s, south Minneapolis, including
Longfellow, was known as Southtown.
Longfellow is the name of the first school in the neighbor-
hood, and it was the nomer of a smaller neighborhoodwhen the city first defined neighborhoods in the 1950s.
The Minneapolis Planning Department in the mid-1970s
lumped the Seward neighborhood with what is now
Longfellow into one large planning district.
The Longfellow of today dates from 1983, when neighbor-
hood residents decided to split from Seward and form the
Longfellow Community Council. The council represents four
neighborhoods—Longfellow, Cooper, Howe, and Hiawatha—
delimited by 1950s elementary-school boundaries.
Compared with other parts of Minneapolis, Longfellow is
a young neighborhood. Residential development patterns
were such that areas of the city to the north and west were
built up first; Longfellow did not grow appreciably until
the first decade of the 20th century. The extension of street-
car lines into the area was the main driver of residential
development.
As a consequence of its later development, Longfellow
was home to a number of institutions such as orphanagesand large-scale entertainment venues such as amusement
parks. Open and available land also attracted industry to
Introduction í ix
INTRODUCTION
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x í The Neighborhood by the Falls
the northwest corner of the neighborhood in the 1870s,
laying the groundwork for a century of implement manu-
facturing near the intersection of Minnehaha Avenue and
Lake Street.
The same can be said for grain elevators and mills, which
first appeared in the 1880s along the railroad tracks and
Hiawatha Avenue. Finally, from about 1885 to 1905, small-
scale dairy farms filled the unused land as landowners
waited for development to reach the area.
Despite its late residential development, the Longfellow
area was part of Minnesota’s early white settlement. Inthe 1820s, when Fort Snelling was the only appreciable
white settlement in what would be the state of Minnesota,
soldiers traveled the path of today’s Minnehaha Avenue
on the way to their mills at the Falls of St. Anthony.
In the 1800s many passed through the area, but few called
it home. By the 1850s, the land opened to settlement, and
New Englanders staked farmstead claims there. Native
American and settler interaction was common in the 1850s
but ended in 1862 as a result of the Dakota War. Minnehaha
Falls was a popular tourist attraction through the second
half of the 19th century, bringing many people through
the neighborhood on railroad and streetcar lines.
The Mississippi River, while hidden nearly a hundred feet
below street level in a gorge, is a powerful force in
Longfellow. Potential waterpower and steamboat navigation
attracted the first white settlers in the 1850s, but the swift,
rocky river proved too much of an obstacle to these soon
abandoned ambitions. More than a thousand feet wide,
the gorge, a formidable obstacle to crossing, spawned the
creation of three distinctive bridges over the river.
Like Minneapolis as a whole, Longfellow experienced
population and job losses after World War II. Larger-scale
redevelopment projects started in the 1970s and continued
until the early 1990s—mostly in the vicinity of the Lake
Street and Minnehaha Avenue intersection. Revitalization
efforts increased in the late 1990s, focusing on home and
historic commercial building renovation. Interest in the
neighborhood and revitalization efforts have continued into
the 21st century, raising home prices to unprecedented levels.
Major infrastructure projects completed in the first years
of the new century include the rebuilding of Lake Street
and the construction of the Midtown Greenway. New con-
dominium and apartment complexes have started up on
underutilized industrial parcels. The new century’s real-
estate boom has gone bust, but the neighborhood, with
solid housing stock and desirable location, is positionedto weather the storm.
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1/Mighty Mississippi1/Mighty Mississippi
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The Longfellow neighborhood’s predevelop-
ment landscape embodied several ecosystems,
from prairie to dense forest. Along Minnehaha
Avenue and six to ten blocks to the east,
prairie reigned. Within six blocks of the
Mississippi River, the scenery changed to that of oak
savanna—scattered oak trees on prairie. Finally, from the
top of the river bluff to the river’s edge, was a dense forest
with many types of hardwood trees and an understory of
bushes such as hazelnut. Within this forest were different
forest ecosystems, most notably the maple-basswood forest
at the southern end of the neighborhood. The prairie,
having succumbed to the plow and later to residentialdevelopment, is gone now. But most of the scattered oaks
have survived; the river bluff and gorge still support a
dense hardwood forest.
The Mississippi, arguably America’s greatest river, runs
dramatically along and forms the eastern boundary of
the neighborhood. The scenic river gorge guides the river
on its journey south, hiding it from view and disturbance
by urban life.
Minneapolis would not have become a great city and the
milling capital of the world without the Mississippi River
and its geology, prone to the formation of waterfalls. But
recession of the Falls of St. Anthony several thousand
years before had left the riverbed strewn with slabs of
limestone and numerous rapids, islands, and sandbars.
Steamboats, even with their shallow hulls, dared not
steam to the falls except during times of high water.
This and hard economic times thwarted the early efforts
of land speculators and traders to create a new town,
“Falls City,” along the riverside.
As railroads began to dominate transportation after
the Civil War, interest in the river for navigation waned.
For the rest of the 19th century, the Mississippi was mostly
a place to float logs to sawmills and dispose of waste.
Various channel improvement projects, undertaken to
break the railroad monopoly during the late 1800s, failed
to entice commercial traffic back to the river. Not until
the first decade of the 20th century were more serious
attempts made to improve navigation through the use
of locks and dams. Even these improvements failed to
make much difference in commercial traffic.
The Mississippi before white settlement in the area
looked much different from the way it appears today.
Four large islands and several smaller ones dotted the
river as late as 1899 between the what are now the Short
Line rail bridge and Minnehaha Park. In many places,
2 í The Neighborhood by the Falls
MightyMississippiThe Mississippi, arguably America’s greatest river, runs dramatically along and forms the eastern
boundary of the neighborhood. The scenic river gorge guides the river on its journey south,
hiding it from view and disturbance by urban life.
Overleaf—
Looking north from the
Lake Street Bridge, c. 1905.
The Short Line Bridge is at
top left. Meeker Island lies
just beyond the right pier.
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the river did not take up the entire channel (see page 1).
Not until 1917, when Lock and Dam No. 1 was completed,
did the river take on its current width and lakelike
appearance.
As the neighborhood developed, an increasing amount
of untreated waste and sewage flowed into the river at
38th Street and other places. The construction of Lock
and Dam No. 1 exacerbated the pollution problem,
trapping pollutants behind the dam and creating a
dead zone, devoid of f ish. By the 1930s, enough political
will existed in Minneapolis and St. Paul to build a joint
sewage-treatment plant on Pig’s Eye Island in St. Paul.
The Mississippi quickly recovered. Not as clean today as
it could be, the river nevertheless is much less polluted
than it was in the early 1900s.
The last several decades have seen renewed interest
in the ecology of the river gorge and in preserving and
restoring the remnant ecosystems that have survived 150
years of disturbance and development. In recognition of
the river’s significance, Congress designated the 72 miles
of Mississippi River corridor running from Ramsey and
Dayton on the north through the Twin Cities to just below
Hastings a national park in 1988. Since then, local groups
like the Longfellow Community Council and the Minneapolis
Park and Recreation Board have undertaken many projectsto restore and preserve the ecosystems and natural areas
of the gorge. These community-based efforts continue
to improve the gorge while engaging local residents in
stewardship.
Mighty Mississippi í 3
ĨMississippi River from
the Short Line Bridge to
Minnehaha Park, 1899.
Note the island straddled
by the Lake Street Bridge
and the big islands in
the vicinityof 36th and
42nd Streets.
Lake Street
42nd Street. Note the two
large islands in the river.