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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



İ

Longfellow School

Decoration Day parade,

c. 1923



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



viii í The Neighborhood by the Falls

Longfellow Neighborhood



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



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.



1/Mighty Mississippi1/Mighty Mississippi



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.



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.

neighborhood by the falls- preview

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