“It is the sense of this Board that the practice of tooting Automobile horns, by way of applause, at the concerts given in the parks should be discontinued.”

Motion proposed by park commissioner Charles M. Loring and adopted by the Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners, June 18, 1906.

I was curious about the people who created the park plans I featured in the Catalog of Minneapolis Park Plans, 1906-1935, which was presented in three installments recently (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3). The catalog identifies all the plans and drawings published in Minneapolis park board annual reports during the tenure of Theodore Wirth as Minneapolis’s park superintendent.

I’ve tried to piece together info on the men whose names appear on those plans as engineers or delineators using park board reports, newspaper archives, and miscellaneous documents found through online searches. I’m not aware of any other background information at the park board on the early engineering and planning staff.

The park board engineering staff about 1915 in their 4th floor offices in City Hall. From left: Alfred C. Godward, Charles E. Doell, Clyde Peterson, Herman Olson, Dick Butler, “Spud” Huxtable, “Spike” Miller and Al Berthe. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

The man whose name appears on almost all of the plans, Theodore Wirth, superintendent of parks, is already well-known. Most of the others, much less so – although two of them, Charles Doell and Harold Lathrop, became very well-known nationally as park administrators.

During that time, the park board employed no “landscape architects.” The profession was still relatively new. The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) was founded in 1898 and the first university programs in the field were created at Harvard and MIT around the turn of the century. This was after the first generation of true landscape architects in the United States, led by Frederick Law Olmsted and H W. S. Cleveland, had already passed from the scene. Cleveland had been the Minneapolis park board’s advisor and landscape architect from the creation of the park board in 1883, and had helped define the profession in this country. The park board had also hired landscape architect Warren Manning on a few occasions from 1899-1904 to provide advice and park plans after Cleveland retired.

Theodore Wirth was likely hired as park superintendent in Minneapolis in part because he had some experience designing parks in Hartford, Conn. He is credited with the designs of Colt and Elizabeth parks in Hartford. (Early in Wirth’s time in Hartford, the landscape architect role was filled by the Olmsted Brothers, the firm run by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted. The senior Olmsted was a native of Hartford.) Wirth certainly played the role of landscape architect in Minneapolis, but I’m not aware of him ever calling himself one. He was active in the American Institute of Park Executives, and its predecessor organizations, but never ASLA. For ten years, 1925-1934, Wirth’s name appears on park plans as “Sup’t & Engineer” even though he did not have a formal engineering credential – apart from a brief course at a technical school in his native Switzerland as a young man. That course may have focused more on gardening than engineering. His first jobs were as a gardener. I could only guess at Wirth’s reasons for taking the “Engineer” title on park plans for the first time at age 62.

During his long tenure in Minneapolis, Wirth built a staff of men with Civil Engineering degrees – all from the University of Minnesota – not landscape architecture degrees or training. The first landscape architect hired full-time by the park board was Felix Dhainin in 1938. (If anyone could tell us more about Dhainin, I’d appreciate it.)

Here’s what I learned about the engineers for the park board 1906-1935. I’ll get to the draftsmen and delineators in a later post. Turns out the most interesting of all the park board engineers wasn’t featured in annual report plans at all!

Frank Herbert Nutter. The park board engineer when Wirth was hired in 1906 was Frank Nutter. His name never appeared on an annual report plan because he resigned before Wirth produced his first annual report as park superintendent. Nutter had served as the park board’s engineer and surveyor on a project basis from the time the park board was created in 1883. Nutter worked with park superintendent William Berry and Horace Cleveland on most early park projects. Nutter advertised his services in newspapers and magazines at the time as a landscape architect and engineer. Although he was never a full-time park board employee, beginning with the annual report for 1889, Nutter was listed among the “officers” of the park board as the engineer.

Frank Nutter’s plan for Chute Square, 1905. It’s the only plan I’ve seen attributed to him. This was before the Ard Godfrey House was moved to the square. (Minneapolis Journal)

Nutter appears to be like many other early landscape architects and engineers in that he learned his trade without formal education. A biography of Nutter in Horace Hudson’s Half Century of Minneapolis, claimed that he studied civil and landscape engineering under Joseph H. Curtis and Francis L. Lee in Boston, both notable landscape architects of the time. Despite a lack of formal training, Nutter appears to have been a man of many interests. Shortly after moving from Boston to Minneapolis in 1878 at the age of 25, he wrote an article for the Smithsonian magazine about the 69 American Indian burial mounds he identified on Peter Gideon’s farm near Excelsior on Lake Minnetonka. In 1888, Scientific American credited F. H. Nutter with the invention of a circuit breaker burglar alarm and a precautionary device for bottles of poison. He was a frequent contributor to the publications and meetings of the Minnesota State Horticultural Society, too.

Useful and Beautiful?
My favorite story about Nutter was contained in a report on the 1895 meeting of the Minnesota State Horticultural Society. Speaking on the topic, “Should the Useful Always Be Made Beautiful,” Nutter began, “When my attention was first called to this question I understood, of course, that I was expected to maintain the affirmative side. But as I farther considered the matter, I encountered a dilemma of magnificent proportions. My inner consciousness said to me, “You claim to be useful as occasion may offer, therefore…” So you see the difficulties which ensue when we attempt to carry the simplest proposition to a logical conclusion. Fortunately, however, the question has an impersonal side, which may be pursued with safety.”

Nutter was also a well-known ornithologist, praised by none other than Thomas Sadler Roberts, for whom the present-day bird sanctuary near Lake Harriet is named. Roberts noted in an article in The Auk in 1914 that Nutter had donated his entire collection of bird eggs and nests to the Minnesota Academy of Sciences. He credited Nutter with identifying Brewer’s Blackbirds nesting well outside their known range when he was surveying the swampy meadow that had once been Palmer’s Lake north of Minneapolis. Wrote Roberts, “Credit is due (Nutter) for recognizing at once a bird he had never seen alive before and had no reason to expect to see here.”

More pith from Frank Nutter:

On wetlands. “I believe firmly, though I am probably in the minority, that the present craze for draining lakes and sloughs, which have hitherto served as reservoirs and sources of moisture, will, if persisted in, at least produce results much akin to and only less disastrous than the reckless destruction of our forest areas.” The Minnesota Horticulturist, September, 1896.

On America and the arts. “It is often insinuated that this land of ours extends but a chilling reception to the fine arts, and there, doubtless, is good reason for the charge to a certain extent. But we may plead in defense that in the hurly-burly of building up a new world many things are neglected that when we have time to stop and take breath will probably receive different treatment.” The Minnesota Horticulturist, July, 1895.

On landscape gardeners. “To many minds the landscape gardener let loose in the country is a most dangerous personage, from whom nature shrinks aghast; and if it so be that his ideal is to decorate the landscape with flashy color beds, groups of shrubbery rich in purple barberry and golden spirea, and puerile architectural adornments, there is much reason for such a sentiment.” The Minnesota Horticulturist, September, 1896.

On comparisons of America with Europe. “When we turn to the surroundings of our country homes, we find nothing in the comparison in which we can boast. To be sure we may plead that when the years of our natural life are measured like theirs by the millenium rather than by the century or even decade, as is now the case, things will be different.” The Minnesota Horticulturist, July, 1895.

On the challenges of a harsh climate. “We can also call attention to the severe climatic conditions we have to combat and safely assert that, if ever we should be so situated that three days of rain, three of fog and one of cloudy weather would be styled a pleasant week, we would be able to produce lawns equal to those of ‘Merrie England.’” The Minnesota Horticulturist, July, 1895.

More on landscape architects (following the presentation of papers at the American Park and Outdoor Art Association meeting in Minneapolis in 1898 by O. C. Simonds and Charles N. Lowrie.) “Landscape architects of today are not the blind devotees of the artificial that many of the self-claimed admirers of nature would have us believe, but in reality, doubtless, have a deeper appreciation of the true beauties of nature than many of their detractors.” The Minnesota Horticulturist, July, 1898.

Finally, Nutter was the landscape gardener and promoter of the state park purchased by the legislature in 1895 at the Dalles of the St. Croix near Taylor’s Falls. Due to the purchase by Wisconsin of land on its side of the St.Croix for a park, too, the park was often referred to as the “interstate park.”

Nutter’s value to the early park board was acknowledged in 1899 when the board passed a resolution requesting that Nutter turn over to the park board for safekeeping in its vaults all of his “notebooks, drawings and diagrams appertaining to the parks and parkways.” Later revelations indicate he was not so easily dispossessed of those documents.

Nutter resigned as the park board’s engineer in June 1906, six months into Wirth’s tenure as park superintendent. On the day Nutter was replaced, park commissioner William Folwell, near the end of his 18 years on the park board, offered a resolution thanking Nutter for more than 20 years of service, noting the “faultless and intelligent manner in which he has performed his important service.”

Given Nutter’s accomplishments, credentials, connections and reputation, I wonder if he was considered as a replacement when William Berry resigned as park superintendent at the end of 1905. Nutter was only 52 at the time.

Frank Herbert Nutter, Jr. One Nutter was replaced by another Nutter. Theodore Wirth made his case to the park board on May 21, 1906 that he needed a full-time engineer rather than one hired project-by-project.

Frank H. Nutter, Jr. was hired as park board engineer in 1906. (Minneapolis Journal)

“I have been greatly handicapped,” Wirth asserted, ”in the working out and preparation of plans which should of necessity be prepared under my direct supervision at my office…It is my endeavor to bring the executive branch of the Department to a high grade of efficiency, but in order to do that it is absolutely essential that I be granted reasonable assistance.”

Wirth recommended hiring the younger Nutter, who, he said, was thoroughly acquainted with the park board’s projects from working with his father for the previous ten years. “He will furnish his own instruments,” Wirth continued, ”and we will have access to all the notes, information and records which Mr. Nutter, Sr. has collected through the many years of his faithful and valuable service.” (He still had ‘em!)

The park board approved hiring Nutter, Jr., at a salary of $125 a month, at its next meeting. Even before the park board approved the appointment, the Minneapolis Journal reported, May 25, 1906, that the new engineer, a graduate of the engineering department at the University of Minnesota, had begun work laying out a new riverside drive from Franklin Avenue to Lake Street.

Like his father, Junior’s name never appeared on any plans published in annual reports. He was listed in the 1906 and 1907 annual reports as an “officer” of the park board, but only Wirth’s name appeared on plans published in those reports.

Nutter, Jr. abruptly resigned from the park board after his second year on the job. He sent a letter to the board on May 4, 1908, announcing his resignation effective that day. I can find no comment on his departure in either park board records or newspapers.

Wirth’s early administration was plagued by turnover, however, at least in some departments. He hired three foresters in his first eight years as superintendent. The first manager of park refectories lasted only two seasons. Nutter and his successor served as engineers for barely five years combined.

Nutter’s employment after leaving the park board included serving as “drainage engineer” for first Hennepin County, then the State of Minnesota.

William Emmet Stoopes. While Nutter was still the park board’s engineer, Stoopes was hired to expand the engineering capabilities of the staff in 1907. Stoopes was a Minnesota native who had attended high school in Minneapolis. He had no university training, but had studied engineering privately, probably on-the-job. Stoopes joined the park board after working for the city engineer, then seven years as deputy to Hennepin County Surveyor George Cooley, and two years as the county surveyor after Cooley left to become the first Minnesota state highway engineer. In Theodore Wirth’s memoir, he writes that Stoopes replaced Nutter as the head of the engineering department, but the park board’s annual report for 1908 claims that the engineering department “was in the charge of A. C. Godward and W. E. Stoopes.” That appears an interesting division of responsibilities given that Godward (more below) had not yet finished college. Stoopes’ primary responsibilities were Lake of the Isles, construction of the parkway north from Glenwood (Wirth) Park, and the construction of the East River Road. Stoopes name is on only three plans as an engineer and delineator in the 1908 and 1909 annual reports. Stoopes resigned in early 1911. No reason was given for his departure. Mr. Stoopes later was employed as an assistant engineer with Minnesota State Parks.

Alfred Calvin Godward. Godward’s employment at the park board began in 1906 when he was still an undergraduate studying engineering at the University of Minnesota.  In the 1908 annual report, Godward was listed as one of two engineers, the other being Stoopes.

In park board proceedings of April 4, 1910, however, Godward is described as the engineer in charge of all projects, except the three mentioned above that were the responsibility of Stoopes. Godward’s city-wide responsibilities are mentioned in the context of him needing a motorcycle to move among various projects. The park board approved transportation for him about the same time that he was awarded his engineering degree from the University of Minnesota in 1910.

In the 1908 and 1909 annual reports, both Stoopes and Godward’s names appear on park plans, but by the 1910 annual report, presented in January 1911, only Godward’s name appears on plans as engineer and, reflecting his graduation from the U of M, he now adds C. E. — for Civil Engineer — after his name. Some plans are even stamped with his signature, surely symbolic of his stature. In the 1911 annual report Wirth incorporated a report on the accomplishments of the engineering staff over Godward’s name. Godward had clearly established himself firmly as Wirth’s colleague. When Stoopes left the park board staff the next year, Godward was put in charge of the growing engineering department.

In the 1916 annual report Wirth writes, “I  cannot speak too highly of Mr. Godward’s efficiency and his faithful and valuable service.” The team was not without its detractors, however. Opponents of park developments dubbed the engineer and superintendent ”Godless and Wirthless.”

Off to War. Wirth wrote in the 1917 annual report that the depletion of the engineering force had made some park work impossible. Four of fifteen employees in the engineering department had entered active military service that year and four others had left for other employment. Even engineer A. C. Godward had volunteered for national service, Wirth wrote, and if he was accepted, he would request a leave of absence. The following year, after the U.S. finally entered the war, and more of the engineering staff enlisted, Wirth wrote that Godward was supervising surveying and map reading courses at the University of Minnesota for Students Army Training Camp leaving the park engineering staff with only one man, a junior draftsman. Wirth also wrote, not coincidentally, that the park board spent less on park improvements in 1918 — about $73,000 — than in any year since 1907. No wonder the 1918 annual report presented only three park plans, by far the fewest of Wirth’s 30-year tenure, except at the depth of the Great Depression. The lack of other projects and plans, and the engineering staff to create and execute them, may also explain Wirth’s focus on the river banks above the falls that year. He had many fewer demands on his time than he was accustomed to. Two park commissioners — Leo Harris and Phelps Wyman — also served their country during WWI. More of their story is told here.

A. C. Godward, standing, with Victor Christgau in 1935. They were engineer and state administrator, respectively, for WPA projects in Minnesota. I love the handwritten sign on the wall over Christgau’s shoulder, “Will It Put People To Work?” (Minnesota Historical Society)

At the beginning of 1920 Godward was elected president of the Engineers Club of Minneapolis. At the same club meeting, members were briefed on the 1919 action of the Minnesota legislature to establish a Planning Commission for Minneapolis. In 1922 Godward was selected as the first engineer for the newly created Minneapolis city planning department, but he continued working for the park board as well, even retaining the title of “Head” of the engineering department. Finally in 1924, Godward relinquished his dual role and left the park board for good. After only another four years in city planning, Godward left the public sector in 1928 to become executive-engineer for the Minneapolis Industrial Committee (MIC), an organization of businessmen formed to recruit business investment in Minneapolis in part by touting the city’s “open shop” standing. (Herman Olson in the park board engineering staff photo at the top of this article succeeded Godward as city planning engineer and remained in that position until 1955.)

Both MIC and Godward became involved with private efforts to spur employment early in the Depression through Organized Unemployed, Inc. His commtiment to finding work for the unemployed may have led to his position as Chief Engineer for the Works Progress Administration in Minnesota in 1935, when the federal work-relief program supplanted ineffective private efforts.

I can find no record of Godward’s employment or activities from his time with WPA until he resurfaced in the early 1950s as executive director of the Minneapolis Housing and Redevelopment Authority.

University of Minnesota records show that Godward was an instructor in the engineering department in 1921, but I find no record beyond that of a connection with the U. Godward was also a contributor to Parks and Recreation magazine while employed by the park board, and for a while served as editor of the Engineering and Construction section of that magazine, but his writing and editing endeavors also seem to end with his departure from the park staff.

Godward served as the park board’s engineer through one of the most productive periods in Minneapolis park board history. He was the engineer when much of the Grand Rounds parkway system was completed and most of the lake shaping occurred through dredging and filling. It is difficult to know the extent of his influence on Minneapolis park designs and development, but it is clear from Theodore Wirth’s comments, at the time and later, that he relied heavily on Godward.

Godward also appears to have been the best bowler on the park board staff. In a bowling report in the Minneapolis Tribune in 1915, Godward’s scores on a park board team in the Courthouse League easily bested the scores posted by Theodore Wirth and Charles Doell.

Albert E. Berthe. Berthe served as assistant engineer under Godward from 1911 to 1924 and assumed the role of the Head of the engineering department in 1925. He held that position until he retired in 1947.

I can’t find a record of Berthe’s education, but he taught civil engineering courses at the University of Minnesota in 1918 as a part of “war training.”

Berthe had the misfortune of serving as the engineer during a time that very little new park land was acquired and very little was built. From the Depression into the WWII years, most park board projects relied on Works Progress Administration participation. It is likely therefore, that Berthe worked with Godward, his former boss at the park board, on those federally assisted projects. It is also likely that he was effective at getting work done with a skeleton staff.

One major addition to park board responsibilities while Berthe headed the engineering department was the Minneapolis Municipal Airport. The park board took control of the airport in 1926 and developed it into a major airport. Without further research, I don’t know to what extent Berthe and the regular park board engineering staff were involved with airport engineering and construction or whether that was managed through the Director of Aviation, L. D. Hammond.

Two other men with long careers in Minneapolis parks, Charles Doell and Harold Lathrop, were engineers and received their degrees from the University of Minnesota. Curiously neither man’s name appeared on any park plan as an engineer, but both were credited with being the delineators of park plans.

Those two and others will be profiled in a coming article on the “Delineators of Minneapolis Park Plans” during the Wirth Era of Minneapolis parks, when elaborate and detailed annual reports painted a very vivid picture of park board actions.

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

Postscript: If you’re interested in finding historical plans or proposals for various parks, I can provide a searchable Word document of the catalog mentioned here. Email me at the above address. The Special Collections department at the Central Minneapolis branch of the Hennepin County Library also has a copy.

When the park board employed its first full-time engineers it’s likely that those engineers also did the drafting or “delineating” of the plans for new parks. The assumption is supported by the attributions on the first plans published in Minneapolis park board annual reports that included someone’s name other than that of Theodore Wirth, who became superintendent of parks in 1906. In the 1908 and 1909 annual reports, the park system’s two engineers, A. C. Godward and W. E. Stoopes, were cited as both engineer and delineator and no other delineators were credited. There may have been none.

Brief biographical sketches of Godward and Stoopes are provided in a previous post on Engineers, so I’ll begin with the first delineator who was never cited as an “engineer” on a park plan. That man was…

I. Kvitrud. I haven’t even discovered his first name. (Note 11/29: Thanks to an anonymous tip, which I’ve confirmed, I learned that Mr. Kvitrud’s first name was Ingwald. Thanks, “T”. For the Google spiders, that’s Ingwald Kvitrud!) Kvitrud was identified as the delineator of three park plans in 1910 and 1912. He was an engineering graduate of the University of Minnesota and served as an officer of the Minnesota Engineering Society in 1910 and 1912. He was hired in 1914 as a full-time instructor in Drawing and Geometry at his alma mater and he was still employed there in 1919, his annual salary having increased in five years from $900 to $1500, according to University records.

The most interesting reference I’ve found to Kvitrud was in an article in the San Francisco Call, July 19, 1913. In a story datelined Minneapolis, Kvitrud was identified as the Minneapolis park board clerk in charge of selling material from the demolition of buildings for a park at The Gateway. The park board had purchased the land and buildings for The Gateway in 1909, but didn’t raze the buildings then because tenants still had leases that had to be honored — and they were profitable to the park board.

This was one of the few instances, I believe, in park history when the park board abused its power to condemn property. Condemning property before it was needed, in part because it produced revenue, seems ethically sketchy to me.

The gist of the Call article was that lumber being removed from the razed buildings was of a size no longer manufactured. One 4 x 14-inch pine beam removed from the building was 26 feet long! The article noted that beams wider than 12 inches were no longer made from pine, only fir. Was that because the huge white pine trees in Minnesota that had once surrendered such enormous beams had all been felled? Or was fir a superior wood?

The significance of the article, however, is that it provides evidence of the wide range of duties performed by those on the engineering staff, even university-educated engineers. Perhaps disposing of razed building materials didn’t suit Kvitrud and that’s why he left to become a university instructor.

Charles E. Doell. Doell’s name appears on three documents in the 1912 annual report. A map of the park system contains the notation that it was “drawn by Chas. E. Doell.” The plans for Sumner and Stewart fields, however, both have the initials “C. E. D.” in the lower right corner. I presume they were put there as Doell’s initials to indicate he drew those plans, too.

His employment by the park board at that time is consistent with the claim upon his retirement from the park board in 1959 — as Superintendent of Parks — that he had worked for the park board for 48 years. What makes the timing more interesting, however, is that in the spring of 1912 Doell was awarded the prize for “manual training” as a senior at Minneapolis South High School. He apparently started working for the park board even before he finished high school. Coincidentally, the man who presented the prize to the high schooler was Alexander A. McRae, a banker who would later serve 18 years as a park commissioner.

Doell earned a degree in engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1916 and went to work full-time for the park board. Like several others on the park staff, he enlisted in the U.S. Army during WWI and saw active duty in France.

In the 1919 annual report — issued after the war had ended — Theodore Wirth noted the “great personal efforts” of engineer A. C. Godward during a “renewed period of active improvement work,” but also noted “the somewhat retarded, but nevertheless timely arrival from military service of [Godward's] former assistant, Mr. C. E. Doell.” I don’t think Wirth intended any insult. It is remarkable that Wirth already valued Doell’s work so highly; he was only three years out of college and had been gone for a year in military service.

Following his return from military service, Doell worked another five years in the engineering department before moving into park administration as secretary to the park board. He held that position until he succeeded Christian Bossen as superintendent of parks in 1945, becoming only the 4th superintendent of Minneapolis parks in the 63rd year of the park board’s existence. He was superintendent until he retired in 1959. Doell is one of three Minneapolis park superintendents to receive the Cornelius Amory Pugsley Award, a prestigious national award that recognizes lifetime contributions to parks in the United States. The other superintendents who won the Pugsley Award were Theodore Wirth and Robert Ruhe.

I wrote more about Doell’s term as superintendent in City of Parks, and much more about him is readily available. Read a brief bio of Doell. Hennepin History Museum has several files of Doell’s papers, including articles he wrote for several publications. Doell was a prolific writer for magazines and published several books under his own name and contributed chapters to others.

Claude F. Gosslee. Gosslee is cited as delineator on almost all park plans in 1923, 1925 and 1926. The 1925 plans for both the Bryant Avenue footbridge over Minnehaha Creek and the “preliminary study” for a concert stadium at Riverside Park also contained notations that they were “designed by” Gosslee.

The Delineator Gap. I am puzzled by the gap in “delineators” on annual report plans from Kvitrud and Doell in 1912 to Gosslee in 1923. Why was no one credited for drawing the 120 or so plans produced for annual reports from 1913-1922? The only exception was a credit to “Magney, Tusler, Arnal” for the plans for the north end of Victory Memorial Drive in 1919. Magney Tusler was an architectural firm that worked often with the park board in later years.

The 1911 annual report was the first that included an engineer’s report, under Godward’s name. He noted that the engineering department employed two draftsmen and five field men. That appears to have been the norm for the era, except during WWI, when the engineering staff practically disappeared to fight or teach. In most years the park board employed 1 or 2 draftsmen full time, with the exception of 1916 and 1922 when four draftsmen worked for the board, which is odd given that the 1922 report also noted, “Compared with former years, a comparatively small amount of drafting work for new plans was required.” Several annual reports do mention, however, that an additional draftsman or two were hired late in the year, presumably to prepare plans for the annual report. If those draftsmen were temporary employees, their names might not have been added to the plans for that reason, although in 1912 the name, or initials, of a part-time draftsman recently graduated from high school, Charles Doell, were included on two plans.

I find it interesting that Gosslee seems such an integral part of the park engineering staff, even getting “designed by” credit in 1925, but never appears again in park records. Or in any other records. Online searches of his name reveal nothing except an address from the 1940 census. But that address got me to thinking…

The house built in 1910 for Theodore Wirth, also to serve as an “administration” building at Lyndale Farmstead. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

The Engineering Staff and the Administration Building at Lyndale Farmstead

Gosslee’s address was 4036 Bryant Avenue South. If you’re familiar with the neighborhood, you know that’s barely a half-block from the house built for Theodore Wirth at Lyndale Farmstead in 1910 that was also ostensibly an administration building. That also made him the neighbor of Christian Bossen, the parks superintendent in 1940, who lived at 4032 Bryant. Bossen came with Wirth to Minneapolis from Hartford, Conn. in 1906 and became assistant superintendent under Wirth and succeeded him as superintendent in 1935. Bossen never lived in the superintendent’s house, however, because Wirth was allowed to remain in the house after he retired. He didn’t leave the house until he moved to San Diego for health reasons in 1945. That was the year Bossen retired as superintendent. Bossen’s successor, Charles Doell, moved into the superintendent’s house when it was vacated by Wirth.

The proximity of Gosslee’s house to the Lyndale Farmstead House, got me wondering if he might have walked a few doors to work. It has often been claimed that the plans for many parks originated in the bright, airy “drafting room” on the west side of the basement of the house. The implication has always been that the basement was a beehive of creative engineering activity, where Minneapolis parks were “created.” That impression certainly would have suited the park board at the time the house was built amid great controversy. To justify the expense of building a house for the private residence of Wirth, he and the board claimed that it would also serve as an administration building for the park system. Beyond providing a home office for Wirth, that is likely an exaggeration. (Read the whole story of the “administration building” subterfuge here.)

My investigations into the engineering staff deepens my suspicion on that score. First, while the house was being built, Wirth wrote in the 1909 annual report, “Through the kindness of the Court House Commission the office formerly occupied by the Municipal Arts Commission has been transferred to the park board for a drafting room, which was very much needed.” So the park board had a new drafting room even before the  new “administration building” was completed.

Second, as I began to compare park plans and staffing levels, I realized that the one or two draftsmen employed most years by the park board didn’t spend most of their time delineating creative new plans for parks. I’m not a draftsman (although I loved my architectural drawing class in seventh grade at Mounds Park Jr. High, and have wanted a drafting table ever since), but I don’t think it would take an experienced delineator a few weeks or a month to draw one of the park plans featured in annual reports. As lovely as they are… I would imagine most of the work of the draftsmen required fairly close cooperation with the surveyors and engineers — something that would have been difficult if the draftsmen were isolated in the administration building at Lyndale Farmstead. Perhaps it is more realistic that the temporary draftsmen hired at the end of some years, perhaps to assist with plans for the annual report, worked for short periods in the drafting rooms.

Third, the photo of the engineering staff — “the old gang in the engineering rooms” — at the Court House, as the photo was labelled, featured in a recent article on those Engineers, suggests that the engineering staff worked closely together and close together, and that probably means at the park board offices downtown, not at Wirth’s house at Lyndale Farmstead.

I recall seeing a photo of draftsmen in the basement of the superintendents house, but can’t locate it. If anyone know where that I could find that photo, or has other evidence that the engineering staff was permanently located at the superintendents house, Please let me know. Another mystery.

On with delineators, who may or may not have worked under the nose of Theodore Wirth…

George B. Moore. Moore’s name is on all plans in the 1924 annual report as “delineator.” That’s all I’ve been able to find about him — and why he drew the plans that year instead of Gosslee.

Harold Lathrop, an engineer for Minneapolis parks, but later director of Minnesota State Parks and Colorado State Parks. Photo ca. 1940 when he was with Minnesota State Parks. I don’t know who added the crop marks! (Minnesota Historical Society)

Harold W. Lathrop. Lathrop was the delineator of all plans from 1927-1931. We know much more about Lathrop than most of the other park board engineers or draftsmen, in part because he, too, won a Pugsley Award — but not for his work in Minneapolis.

Lathrop enlisted in the U.S. Navy during WWI before he finished high school. After the war, he attended Dunwoody Institute and the University of Minnesota before joining the park board staff in 1924.

Lathrop left Minneapolis parks in 1934 to supervise state participation in some park-related work relief programs during the Great Depression. From that position he was appointed the first director of Minnesota State Parks in 1935. He later became the first director of Colorado State Parks in 1957. He was honored with a Pugsley Award in 1960 for his accomplishments in those positions and his contributions to the National Conference on State Parks, and the National Recreation Association. Colorado further honored Lathrop by naming its first state park in his honor. Lathrop State Park is in southern Colorado in the Spanish Peaks area. (More info about Harold Lathrop .)

J. A. Brunet. Brunet is credited with drawing the Post Office Park (Pioneers Square) plan in 1933. It’s the only reference to him I can find in park board records or elsewhere.

Iver H. Lauttamus. Lauttamus is credited as delineator of park plans in the 1934 and 1935 annual reports. He was another U of M engineering grad who also had served in the military during WWI.

Following Theodore Wirth’s retirement as park superintendent at the end of 1935, the annual reports of the park board gradually became much less detailed. The last two park plans published in annual reports were the 1936 plan for a “System of Lagoons in Glenwood Park“ credited as “Designed by Theodore Wirth, Superintendent Emeritus,” and a “Suggested Preliminary Plan for the Extension Northward of West River Road.” That plan carried the stamp of C. A. Bossen as Superintendent and A.E. Berthe as Park Engineer. The delineator was R. L. Fefferman, an employee who was cited as a “Sr. Civil Engineer” as co-author of several reports for the park board in the 1940s.

In 1939, the park board returned to commercial typesetting and printing of its annual report, after eight years of economizing on production costs, but never again published reports that were nearly 200 typeset pages and contained ten or twenty drawings of planned or possible parks. I’m sure frugality was the primary reason, but I also suspect the reports reflected the personalities of the superintendents. Wirth was a much more aggressive and flamboyant personality than his successor Christian Bossen, and his successor, Charles Doell, with a greater affinity for the spotlight.

Wirth also managed parks at a time when urban parks were still being defined and public opinion may have needed more guidance on what was possible or desirable. Wirth’s many park plans provided that. By the 1940s there was no longer a debate over whether playgrounds and parks were compatible. The primary concern in the design of parks had shifted from injecting a little natural beauty into the city to creating the most efficient — and affordable — play spaces in crowded quarters. Pretty drawings may have been needed for the former, but weren’t so essential to the latter.

If you have any additional information on any of the people profiled here, please let me know.

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

Postscript: If you’re interested in finding historical plans or proposals for various parks, I can provide a searchable Word document of the catalog mentioned here. Email me at the above address. The Special Collections department at the Central Minneapolis branch of the Hennepin County Library also has a copy.

Horace Bushnell, one of America’s most influential theologians in the 19th Century, was among the first people to promote parks in Minneapolis. His ghost may still haunt us.

I don’t know if this is really a six-degrees-of-separation story — Bushnell and Kevin Bacon couldn’t have met — but there are quite a number of coincidences involved. They center on the famous Congregational minister from Hartford, Conn. who was also known for his early advocacy of city planning. And I mean really early. 1860s.

I’ll let you do your own research on Horace Bushnell’s sermons and books on theology, but here’s a sample of what he had to say on cities in his book Work and Play; or Literary Varieties in 1864:

The peoples of the old world have their cities built for times gone by, when railroads and gunpowder were unknown. We can have cities for the new age that has come, adapted to its better conditions of use and ornament. So great an advantage ought not to be thrown away. We want therefore a city-planning profession, as truly as an architectural, house-planning profession. Every new village, town, city, ought to be contrived as a work of art, and prepared for the new age of ornament to come.

Horace Bushnell, famous preacher and theologian, encouraged Minneapolis to acquire parkland in 1859-60.

Bushnell expressed an idea well ahead of his time and also coined a phrase: this was one of the first uses of the term “city-planning.”

Of more parochial interest here is Bushnell’s advocacy for creating a park in Minneapolis. More specifically, he was the first to recommend that the towns of St. Anthony and Minneapolis acquire Nicollet Island to be a park. Only Edward Murphy, with his donation to Minneapolis of Murphy Square in 1857, can claim an earlier promotion of parks for the young city.

I only came across the story of Bushnell in Minnesota recently while investigating another subject. Sifting through old newspaper files, I found this comment from ”Mr. Chute” (likely Richard, instead of Samuel) at a Minneapolis Board of Trade meeting as reported in the Minneapolis Tribune, February 3, 1874:

“Many of you remember Dr. Horace Bushnell, of Hartford, Conn., who spent a year with us in 1858-59 (sic). He was a gentleman of large heart, if not large means, who, seeing the necessity for a park in Hartford to accommodate the laboring man, whose firm friend he always was, procured and donated the ground to the city for a park, which is now the pride of that wealthy place. When Dr. Bushnell was here his constant burden was, you must secure Nicollet Island; it is a shame and a disgrace to neglect your opportunities; buy it at any price.”

I sought corroboration of Chute’s claim and found it in Isaac Atwater’s History of Minneapolis, Vol. 2. In a profile of Andrew Talcott Hale, the author was explaining that Hale came to Minneapolis from Hartford, Connecticut for his pulmonary health, inspired by the experience of Dr. Bushnell, when he provided this digression:

“While yet Minneapolis was a rural settlement, Dr. Horace Bushnell, of Hartford, Conn., visited it for the benefit of his health, impaired by serious inroads of pulmonary disease. After summering and wintering here, with excursions through out the unsettled prairies of the Dakota, during which he freely contributed by his pulpit ministrations, as well as enthusiastic advocacy of park improvements to the improvement of the morals and culture of the community, he returned to his work in Hartford apparently restored to health and vigor.” (Emphasis added.)

In the mid-1800s, Minneapolis was a destination for many people with pulmonary problems. It was thought that the dry air was a tonic for the lungs. Bushnell’s experience seems to substantiate that belief. He wrote of the Minneapolis climate,

“One who is properly dressed finds the climate much more enjoyable than the amphibious, half-fluid, half-solid, sloppy, grave-like chill of the East.”

Bushnell’s letters to his family, published in The Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell, provide some further descriptions of his life in Minnesota from July 1859 to May 1860. Among my favorite passages is this one on Lake Minnetonka:

“Well, I have talked a long yarn, telling you nothing about the Lake, the strangest compound of bays, promontories, islands and straits ever put together—a perfect maze, in which a stranger would be utterly lost.”

The advantages of Minnesota weather aside, two prominent Minneapolitans — Chute and Atwater — remembered Bushnell’s sojourn in Minnesota and they both recalled his commitment to the idea of parks in cities, Minneapolis included. He had already helped Hartford get one.

Hell without the Fire

The Hartford park referred to by Mr. Chute above was created in 1854 when Bushnell helped convince the residents of that city to approve spending more than $100,000 to purchase forty acres in the center of the city for a public park. That must have taken some doing because it was an abused, polluted tract — “tenements, tanneries and garbage dumps,” according to the Bushnell Park Foundation  – that Bushnell himself called, “Hell without the fire.” It is considered the first publicly funded park in the United States.

When Bushnell returned to Hartford from Minneapolis after regaining his health in 1860, little had been done to convert the land into a useful park. So he turned to a friend and former parishioner, who at that time was considered to know something about parks. But Frederick Law Olmsted was occupied with his own park project; he was still working on his most famous creation, Central Park in New York. Pressed for a recommendation, Olmsted suggested landscape architect Jacob Weidenmann for the job.

Weidenmann was an immigrant from Winterthur, Switzerland. (Remember that.) Olmsted later wrote that the only two landscape architects in the U.S. he knew of who were qualified to advise park commissions, other than himself and his partner Calvert Vaux, were Weidenmann and H. W. S. Cleveland. Weidenmann was hired and spent eight years as superintendent of Hartford’s City Park, creating a much less formal park there than was typical in Europe. After Weidenmann’s work was done, Connecticut began building its state capitol adjacent to the park in 1872. It wasn’t until Horace Bushnell was dying in 1876 that Hartford renamed the park in his honor: Bushnell Park. He died two days later.

Meanwhile Samuel Clemens had taken up residence in Hartford in 1871 and had turned to writing fiction. His first novel, The Gilded Age, was co-written with Charles Dudley Warner, who was a Hartford park commissioner.

The Minneapolis Connection

Theodore Wirth in about 1900 (Picturesque Parks of Hartford, 1900)

How does this all tie back to Minneapolis? Through Theodore Wirth. As many other cities, including Minneapolis, had caught up to and passed Hartford on the park-o-meter in the 1890s, several of Hartford’s winners in the Gilded Age sweepstakes gave land to the city for parks. Albert Pope left 73 acres to the city for a park in 1894. The same year, Charles Pond left 90 acres of his estate for Elizabeth Park — his wife’s name — and threw in his house and half his fortune to maintain them. Henry Keney went Pope and Pond several hundred acres better that year and donated 533 acres for Keney Park. In 1895 the city purchased another 70 acres for Riverside Park and another 200 acres in the southern part of the city for what became Goodwin Park.

That was a lot of new real estate to whip into park shape. Hartford needed a park superintendent to manage its sudden riches. Hartford’s leaders must have had fond recollections of working with Weidenmann thirty years earlier because when they looked through applicants for the job, they picked someone from the same small town in Switzerland — Winterthur — that Weidenmann had called home. That man was Theodore Wirth.

When Wirth began the job in Hartford, his experience was mostly in horticulture, so Hartford hired Olmsted’s sons — Olmsted Sr. had already retired – as landscape architects for some of the first projects. But after a few years on the job working with the Olmsted firm, Wirth himself designed new park layouts for Elizabeth Park and Colt Park, another 100-plus acre park gift, this from the family famous for revolvers. With those park plans, Wirth established himself as a landscape architect as well as a gardener.

The only Hartford park Wirth did not manage was the enormous Keney Park, which was administered by its own Board of Trustees, separate from the Hartford park commission, and had its own park superintendent, George A. Parker. Wirth and Parker knew each other well. I believe that George Parker was likely responsible for Charles Loring meeting Theodore Wirth in 1905 when he was a committee of one of the Minneapolis park board looking for a replacement for retiring Minneapolis park superintendent William Berry. Parker was the likeliest link between Wirth and Loring because Parker was very active in the new national park organization, American Park and Outdoor Art Association, of which Loring was president 1898-1900. When Loring hired Wirth to become park superintendent in Minneapolis, Parker became the superintendent of all Hartford parks.

Theodore Wirth lived in the upper level of the former Pond house in Elizabeth Park in Hartford, Conn. The ground floor was open to the public. (Picturesque Parks of Hartford, 1900)

The home, at right, in Hartford’s Elizabeth Park also features prominently in an important decision in Minneapolis park history. The reason the Minneapolis park board built a residence for Theodore Wirth at Lyndale Farmstead in 1910 was to fulfill a promise made to Wirth by Charles Loring, when Loring was negotiating terms for Wirth to take the superintendent’s job in Minneapolis. Wirth had been provided housing in Elizabeth Park in Hartford and wanted a similar deal in Minneapolis. Wirth and family had lived in the upper level of the former home of Charles Pond on the estate Pond had bequeathed to the city. The ground floor and verandas of the Pond home were open to the public as shelters in the summer. The Hartford Public Library operated a small library in the building as well.

Elizabeth Park was also the site of Wirth’s earliest claim to fame: the first public rose garden in the United States, a feature he replicated at Lyndale Park near Lake Harriet in 1907.

This turn-of-the-century postcard features one portion of the extensive greenhouses of A. N. Pierson, the “Rose King,” of Cromwell, Conn. about ten miles from Hartford. In 1895 Pierson won the gold medal at the New York Flower Show for a new rose, Killarney, that was beautiful and hardy. He also won 17 firsts and two seconds. “Roses became a profit-making flower, Pierson became the Rose King and Cromwell became Rosetown,” wrote Robert Owen Decker in Cromwell, Connecticut, 1650-1990. A profile of Pierson in American Florist in 1903 speculated, “There are so many rose houses in this establishment that it is doubtful the proprietor knows the exact number.” Pierson started a dairy with 65 cows just to supply sufficient manure for his growing houses. Pierson and Wirth were both vice-presidents of the Connecticut Horticultural Society 1899-1904. I would think it quite likely that Wirth’s very successful public rose garden, established in Elizabeth Park in 1903-4, drew on the cultivating research and expertise of Pierson, too. (Postcard photo: connecticuthistory.com)

Another peculiar connection between Horace Bushnell and Minneapolis parks might be appreciated only by people who have searched for information on the “Father of Minneapolis Parks,” Charles Loring. To begin with, Loring came to Minneapolis the same winter Bushnell was here and for the same reason. Loring had an unspecified health condition — likely a pulmonary malady — that caused him to come west from his Maine home. He tried Chicago first, then Milwaukee, and finally arrived in Minneapolis in the winter of 1860. Although he often spent winters in Riverside, California, he remained a resident of Minneapolis until he died here in 1922.

But an odd link to Bushnell goes further. A young Congregational minister from Hartford, a protege of Bushnell’s, became the founder of the Children’s Aid Society of New York. He publicized widely the plight of children in New York’s slums and, finally, in an attempt to improve the lives of those children he organized what came to be known as “Orphan Trains” that sent New York orphans to better lives, supposedly, with settlers in the west. His name was Charles Loring Brace. Perhaps it is only coincidnece that Loring’s rationale for creating parks and playgrounds in Minneapolis was often that children needed places to play and grow.

A final link between Minneapolis and Horace Bushnell’s long visit here. For many years, local historians have turned to a number of late 1800s-early 1900s profiles of Minneapolis that included “vanity” or “subscription” biographies of prominent citizens. One of those, A Half-Century of Minneapolis, was compiled by influential Minneapolis journalist Horace B. Hudson. You’ve probably already guessed the middle name of Mr. Hudson, who was born in 1861, shortly after Dr. Bushnell’s visit here. Yes, his full name is Horace Bushnell Hudson.

More than 150 years have passed since Horace Bushnell implored the people of the little towns on either side of St. Anthony Falls to acquire Nicollet Island as a park. Many attempts have been made, several surveys completed, many speeches delivered in favor and opposed, and part of it acquired, but it’s never become the park Bushnell imagined. Horace Bushnell’s ghost might haunt us until we get it right.

David C Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

This photo illustrates the difficult history of Diamond Lake. It doesn’t look like a lake at all — and it might not have been. The 1938 annual report of the park board refers to “the dry lake bed at present.”

Diamond Lake, center, looking northwest. Pearl Park is upper right and the future Todd Park at center right. Lake Harriet and Lake Calhoun are near horizon. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

I recently received an email from a reader who lives near Diamond Lake who commented on the differences in how Diamond Lake is treated from other Minneapolis lakes in that there is no hiking or bicycle trail all the way around it. Many perceive the west shore to be private property. In fact, the entire lakeshore is park property. The photo above is undated, but I think it was shot in the 1940s. According to Hennepin County property records, the houses on the east side of Pearl Park were built in 1938.

At this time Todd Park — the dark area north of 57th Street at Portland — was referred to simply as the “east swamp.” It was dedicated as a “park” on the plat of the neighborhood, but it was, on average, 12 feet below the grades of surrounding streets.

Filling and grading Pearl Lake. View looking west from near 54th St. and Portland Avenue, likely taken about 1936. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

Pearl Lake was filled in 1936-37, with dirt from extensive runway excavation and construction at Minneapolis Municipal Airport, which the park board owned and operated at the time. The runway construction and lake filling were both WPA projects. About 200 men and 75 trucks were assigned to the project in 1936. About one foot of peat was peeled off the old lake bed, a couple feet of airport fill smoothed over the skinned landscape, and the peat reinstalled as a top coat.

In the 1938 annual report of the park board, superintendent Christian Bossen wrote that Diamond Lake had almost dried up in the 1920s due to development and low rainfall, but, “With the separation of the storm water drainage from the sanitary sewers, the City Engineer is now using and expects to use to a greater extent Diamond Lake as a storm water reservoir.”

The 1938 annual report contains a detailed description of what the park board hoped to accomplish around Diamond Lake. It  provides the details of an important chapter in the history of the lake and the neighborhood.

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

This bear cage was built in Minnehaha Park in 1899 to house four black bears and one “cinnamon” bear. The 1899 report of the Minneapolis park board describes this bear “pit” built for the bears acquired by the park board over the previous few years. The cost of the construction was about $1200. It was built years before the private Longfellow Zoo was operated by Robert “Fish” Jones upstream from Minnehaha Falls. Many people believe, mistakenly, that the zoo in Minnehaha Park was Jones’s zoo. The park board began exhibiting animals in Minnehaha Park in 1894. Jones didn’t open his Longfellow Zoo until 1907, after the park board decided to get rid of most of the animals in its zoo. Jones spotted a lucrative opportunity to expand and profit from his own menagerie in the vacuum created by the park board’s decision.

“Psyche.” That was the brief caption under this photo in the 1899 annual report of the Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners. I assume it was the bear’s name. Later, the cages held bears named “Mutt,” “Dewey,” and “Chet,” a cub that was a crowd favorite in 1915. Dewey was badly hurt in a fall while trying to catch peanuts thrown from the crowd that year and had to be put down. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

The park board’s 1894 annual report contains the first inkling of what would become a sizable zoo. Superintendent William Berry reported,

“A deer paddock was enclosed, 50 feet square, and shelters built for deer. Two deer were added making a herd of three. Five eagles were presented to the park for which were made a cage covered with heavy wire netting.”

The financial portion of the report noted among maintenance expenditures at Minnehaha Park: Meat for eagles, $15. The next year the park board purchased three elk and accepted gifts of three more deer and three red foxes. For the deer and elk, “a portion of the glen was enclosed with a strong woven wire fence eight feet high, the length of the circuit being 2,950 feet.”

The gifts of animals kept coming and several animals were purchased, too, requiring new accommodations in Minnehaha Park. The 1897 annual report included this information from Berry, “A tank was made and enclosed for the retention of an alligator presented to the Board by the Grand Lodge B. P. O. E.” The alligator had been brought to a national convention of Elks in Minneapolis by the New Orleans delegation and left behind as a gift.

The unusual gift, matched by another free alligator the next year, lead to one of the oddest entries in the financial records of the board over the next few years. Each year the Mendenhall Greenhouse submitted its bill, increasing from $10.50 in 1898 to $14 in 1903, for “Keeping alligators in winter.” A tank in a greenhouse was the only place a warm weather creature could be housed for a Minneapolis winter. Native animals were left outside at Minnehaha, while non-native animals and exotic birds spent the winter in the park board barns at Lyndale Farmstead. Berry noted in 1899 that, “the collection of animals at the barns have proved quite an attraction and a large number of people visit them.”

By then the “collection” had become sizable and the costs had become significant, too. In the 1898 annual report William Folwell wrote,

“A list of animals now owned and kept in the parks is appended. They have been acquired by gift or at slight cost and form an attraction of no small account in the Minnehaha park. The expense of feeding and care has become considerable. A zoological garden is a great ornament to a city and is a most admirable adjunct to school education. The child who can see and study a moose, an eagle, an alligator, or any other strange beast of the field gets what no book can ever teach. It may be proper to continue the present policy, silently developed, of occasional additions to the collections as can be made at slight expense, but the matter ought not to go much further without a definite plan and counting of the cost.”

The list of animals Folwell mentioned shows that it was more than the “petting zoo” that some people think it was:
1 Moose
9 Elk
27 Deer
1 Antelope
4 Black Bears
1 Cinnamon Bear
38 Rabbits
1 Alligator
1 Ape
1 Dwarf Monkey
1 Gray Squirrel
1 Black Squirrel
10 Swans
16 Wild Geese
45 Ducks
1 Mountain Lion
2 Sea Lions
2 Timber Wolves
3 Red Foxes
1 Silver Gray Fox
4 Raccoons
2 Badgers
1 Wild Cat
5 Guinea Pigs
1 Eagle
4 Owls
5 Peacocks
6 Guinea Hens
1 Blue Macaw
1 Red Macaw
2 Cockatoos

It should be noted that not all of the birds lived at Minnehaha park. The swans and some other birds spent their summers at Loring Park. The sea lions and alligator were given new outdoor digs, which included a concrete swimming pool four feet deep, at Minnehaha in the summer of 1899. By then the park board was spending more than $2,000 a year on the care and feeding of its menagerie.

This was all a little too much for landscape architect Warren Manning who was asked to review the entire park system and make his recommendations in 1899. His sensible advice was to get rid of the exotic animals and keep only animals that could live outdoors in “accommodations that will be as nearly like those they find in their native habitat as it is practicable to secure.” Manning was ahead of his time in more than landscape architecture.

It was difficult, however, for the park board to divest a popular attraction. The park board did begin selling excess animals – including several deer to New York’s zoo – but Folwell wrote in the 1901 annual report,

“It is possible that as many people go to Minnehaha park to see the interesting animal collection as to view the historic falls.”

It took the coming of a new park superintendent in 1906 to resolve the issue. Theodore Wirth did not like the animals at Minnehaha, or in his warehouse all winter, and he felt the cramped conditions of some animals was cruel. As was his custom, he minced no words on the subject when he addressed the issue with the park board for the first time on February 5, 1906, barely a month after he took the job as park superintendent. The Minneapolis Tribune quoted Wirth in its February 6, edition:

“The present status of the menagerie is a discredit to the department and the city of Minneapolis…(it is) not only out of place and inharmonious with the surroundings, but to my mind even offensive to the highest degree. I am confident that H. W. S. Cleveland, who through his true artistic love, knowledge and appreciation of nature’s charms and teachings gave such valuable advice and suggestions for the acquirement and preservation of those grounds, would second my opinion in this matter and advise the removal of the menagerie from this spot.”

I’m sure Wirth was right about Cleveland; he would have detested the zoo. Wirth got his wish a little more than a year later when the park board reached agreement with R. F. Jones on his use of land above Minnehaha Falls for his private zoo. Ultimately the park board nearly followed the advice of Warren Manning: it kept the deer and elk in an outdoor enclosure similar to their natural habitat, but it also kept the bears in their pit and cages that didn’t resemble anything natural.

Evicting many of the animals from the zoo did not mean, however, that the park board quit acquiring animals altogether. The next year, 1908, the park board acquired a buffalo, on Wirth’s recommendation, and also acquired more bears. Of course, both animals could survive Minnesota winters outdoors. The hoofed animals remained in the park until 1923. I don’t know when the bear cages were closed or removed. The last information I have on bears in the park comes from the newspaper article in 1915 that reported Dewey’s demise. Theodore Wirth’s plan for the improvement of Minnehaha Glen, published in the park board’s 1918 annual report, still shows the bear pit beside the road to the Falls overlook.

Although the park board sent its exotic animals to R. F. Jones’s zoo in 1907, that was not the last time exotic animals were tenants on park board property. For the winter of 1911 Jones decided not to ship his “oriental and ornamental” animals and birds south for the winter. Instead he kept them in Minneapolis, where he could continue charging admission to see them, I’m sure. He found the perfect spot for such a winter display in the very heart of the city.

Jones rented the Center block at 202 Nicollet on Bridge Square from the park board. The park board had acquired the property for the new Gateway park in 1909-1910, but couldn’t develop the property until  tenants leases expired in the buildings it had purchased. As those leases expired, the park board certainly had ample empty space for which a temporary tenant would have been welcome. Jones needed short-term space in a heavily travelled location, and likely got it cheap. The Minneapolis Tribune reported October 22, 1911 that “Mr. Jones thinks that trouble and money can be saved by keeping (the animals) here throughout the entire year.”

A final thought. Minneapolis Tribune columnist Ralph W. Wheelock was more than a little suspicious of R. F. Jones famous story about a sea lion escaping from his zoo down Minnehaha Creek, over the Falls and out to the Mississippi River. This is what he wrote on July 10, 1907, shortly after Jones established his zoo:

“Prof. R. F. Jones, of the New Longfellow Zoo at Minnehaha Falls, announces through the press in a loud tone of voice that he has lost a sea lion. While we would not doubt the word of so eminent a scientific authority, when we recall the clever devices of the up-to-date press agent we think we sea lion elsewhere than in the river.”

This is probably the first story written about Jones in 100 years that did not mention that he wore a top hat and went everywhere with two wolfhounds. He was a colorful character, eccentric entrepreneur and shrewd showman, but he was not the first or only one to run a zoo near Minnehaha Park. The park board beat him to it by 13 years.

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

My wish was granted.

Last April, in an article about the original Longfellow Field and its sale to a munitions maker during WWI, I wrote,

“Of all the park commissioners in Minneapolis history, Frank Gross is one of the most intriguing to me. If I could find some cache of lost journals of any of the city’s park commissioners since Charles Loring and William Folwell, I would most want to find those of Frank Gross. He’d be a great interview subject.”

Francis Gross was first elected to the park board in 1910 by other commissioners to fill out the term of a commisioner who had resigned. From then until 1948 Gross served 32 years as a park commissioner, also serving as president of the board 1917-1919 and again 1936-1948.

A couple months after I wrote about my interest in Gross, I received a comment on that post from Francis A. Gross III, the great-grandson of the man once known as “Mr. Park Board.”

Francis Gross was the starter for the Pushmobile Derby in 1936, two years before he wrote his autobiography. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

The great-grandson, who goes by “Tony” and is not from Minneapolis, informed me that he had many documents from his great-grandfather, including a handwritten autobiography.

Thanks to Tony and his wife, Joy, who scanned the documents, I have now had the good fortune to read the autobiography of Francis A. Gross, Glimpses into Happy Lives, which he wrote in 1938.

With Tony Gross’s permission, I will write about a couple topics of particular interest to me that Francis Gross addressed in his autobiography, especially his work on Minneapolis parks and anti-German sentiment during World War I. But I’d like to begin with Gross’s description of North Minneapolis during his childhood.

Gross was born in Medina Township in 1870, but his parents opened a hotel and boarding house just off Bridge Square a year later. He lived at the center of city life only until he was five, when the family moved — for the benefit of an impressionable child — to a quieter part of the city on Plymouth Avenue (then still called 13th Avenue North). According to city directories, the address, 210 13th Avenue North, was between Washington and 2nd Street North, or very near the busy commercial intersection at Plymouth and Washington.

Francis Gross, 1919 (Lee Brothers, Minnesota Historical Society)

His family ran a grocery store there for most of his childhood. Gross writes about his family’s grocery business, but city directories of the time also list his father, Mathias Gross, as the owner of both a hotel and a saloon at the same address at various times. (The hotel was listed in the directory as “Minneapolis House,” then “North Minneapolis House” in the early 1880s before reverting to a listing as only grocery store and saloon. The business was listed separately under both “Grocery” and “Saloon” in the business sections of the directories — think yellow pages before there were telephones. The family lived at the same address as the business until 1886, when the residence of Mathias Gross was listed as 1517 N. 5th St. In looking back on his own life, it appears that Gross preferred to think of his father’s business as grocery store, rather than saloon.

Gross provides these descriptions of the north side when he was a child:

“South of Plymouth Avenue and west of Washington Avenue was largely occupied by homes extending to Lyndale Ave. and thence southward. North of Plymouth Avenue and west of Washington Avenue, other than some business at what is now called lower W. Broadway, the north side was sparsely settled and was covered by fine oak trees…”

“On both sides of Plymouth Avenue between 5th and 6th streets there were ponds. My father shot ducks there the first years we resided on Plymouth Avenue and the pond on the north side of Plymouth Avenue was a favorite skating place…”

“Bassett’s Creek, now covered by a concrete tunnel part of the way to the river, was a beautiful winding stream and the land adjoining was covered with fine trees and shrubs. From Lyndale avenue to the river, to a width of five or more hundred feet, the land laid low, making a shallow valley. Viewing this beautiful stream valley and the vegetation in it made a landscape a delight to see. It was one of nature’s beauties within the confines of Minneapolis that its park board was not able to preserve. Bassett’s Creek was also a favorite fishing and skating place. At near the point of 7th Street and Lyndale Avenue was the “7th Street swimming hole” patronized by the boys residing in center town, north side and some from the north-east side of the river. Many Minneapolitans have fond recollections of this fun-giving place during their childhood.”

This image of north Minneapolis is from the 1892 plat book. Plymouth Avenue is at the top, Lyndale is at far left and Washington angles in from lower right. The Mississippi River is in the top right corner. As a child, Gross lived at 210 Plymouth, between Washington and 2nd at the top of this map. As an adult he worked at the German-American Bank near the corner of Plymouth and Washington. So he spent a lot of his life near that street corner. (Click, then click again to enlarge. For the full map go to the John R. Borchert Map Library, University of Minnesota)

Gross’s autobiography also provides a nugget of park history apart from his writing about the park board. He made this remark when remembering his role in the creation of an influential neighborhood business group in 1904:

“The northside’s leading citizens came together and organized the North Side Commercial Club and I became its first president…It induced the Board of Park Commissioners to establish a park which is now North Commons; I was the first to propose this.”

Park board documents reveal very little background information on the creation of North Commons in 1907, so Gross’s comment is informative.

North Commons about 1910. Have you ever seen a taller slide? And are you impressed by the little girl in the dress climbing the pole? (Minnesota Historical Society)

Gross may have proposed to the commercial club the site of a second north side park — the first was Farview — but the possibility of such a park had been kicked around for many years.

As early as 1889 the park board had designated the land around Todd’s Pond for a park. But residents near the pond, which was just south of 20th, now Broadway, at about Emerson, near where North High School was later built, were divided on the need for a park there. Opposition came from those who didn’t want to be assessed for the cost of acquiring the land. They argued that Farview Park was not far away and provided enough of a park for north Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Tribune reported February 9, 1890 that the park board was likely to abandon efforts to acquire Todd’s Pond, “for one reason — because there are no funds.” This was after reports in the Tribune two days earlier that the asking price for the nine acres that contained Todd’s Pond – referred to as a ”mud hole” – was $120,000. One person who opposed the transaction called that figure “extravagant.”

The major park issue on the north side in those early years of the park board was not how to acquire another neighborhood park, but how to create a parkway from North Minneapolis to the lakes in the southwestern part of the city and to Loring Park. Lyndale Avenue North was not considered an adequate parkway connection from Loring Park to Farview Park — although that was attempted.

The St. Paul Daily Globe captured the issue in its June 6, 1885 edition:

Hon. W. W. McNair, who has just returned from the East, where he spent the winter recuperating his health, brings up the subject of the land he wished to donate for a boulevard from Central [Loring] to Prospect [Farview] parks. He proposed to donate a 100-foot boulevard through his ground by way of Cedar lake, which would make about four miles in length the whole route, with the exception of a few pieces, being on his land. He made this proposition some time ago, but the park commission halted on it because a portion was beyond the city limits, but this disability was removed by act of the last legislature. There was a difference of opinion as to whether such a boulevard should not be 200-feet wide; the difference would be about forty acres of land, but there is no doubt Mr. McNair would donate that amount if altogether desirable. It is probable this matter will be brought before the park commission today.

Unfortunately, the unspecified illness to which the article refers took McNair’s life three months later, before the park board and McNair could work out his donation of land in North Minneapolis. He owned part of the shore of Cedar Lake and a large swath of land across North Minneapolis. (See more on the McNair estate in a post about the naming of Brownie Lake.)

The park board did maintain a skating rink and warming house at Todd’s Pond as early as 1890, and continued operating it every winter (except 1897) through 1900, apparently with permission from the landowners. The park board paid for the rink at Todd’s Pond, the first year at least, by transferring funds that had been earmarked for a toboggan slide at Farview Park. The Tribune reported that spring (5/9/1890) that a drain installed near Todd’s Pond was lowering the water level in the pond and that plans for a new three-story brick building at 20th and Emerson would cover a portion of the “mud puddle.”

Although the park board reports maintaining a skating rink at the pond until 1900, there is no mention of the pond again in park board reports or the press until the Minneapolis Journal reported on December 3, 1905 that the North Side Commercial Club wanted skating rinks in the community and recommended Todd’s Pond as a good location. I can find no evidence on maps that a pond still existed in that vicinity.

The reference in the Journal, however, does establish that the North Side Commercial Club was advocating more park services — even if not more parks — early in its history.

The catalyst for establishing another park in north Minneapolis appears to have been the push by residents farther south for a neighborhood park. On March 4, 1907 the park board designated for purchase the land that became Kenwood Park at the northern tip of Lake of the Isles. The same day the board noted receipt of petitions from the North Side Commercial Club and other organizations requesting a parkway connection from North Minneapolis to the lakes via Cedar Lake and for the establishment of another park in the “Third Ward.” Immediately after voting to acquire the land for Kenwood Park, the board directed Theodore Wirth to make preliminary surveys of lands for a parkway around Cedar Lake to Glenwood (Wirth) Park and an expansion of Glenwood Park to encompass Keegan’s (Wirth) Lake.

At its meeting on June 3, 1907 – without additional discussion, explanation, negotiation, or appraisal – the board voted to pay $48,750 for the land known as McNair Field that would become North Commons. The acquisition was most unusual in that the deal came to the park board with a price and payment terms already agreed upon. Clearly negotiations had been conducted behind the scenes. Perhaps the price — only 40 percent of what had been asked for a smaller parcel of land around Todd’s Pond 17 years earlier — was too good to let slip away.

The rapid progress on the deal for a major new park on the north side reflected the growing influence of the North Side Commercial Club, Frank Gross and associates. The Tribune had already noted the significant clout of the club when it wrote on November 25, 1906, “It is getting to be a well-known fact that when the commercial interests of the North side speak up and say “We want so and so,” that they generally are heard, and very often they get what they want.”

Shortly after the acquisition, the club announced a contest for naming the new park – with a $5 prize for the best suggestion. On August 19, 1907 the park board noted that it had received a letter from the North Side Commercial Club suggesting a name: North Commons, which was promptly approved. There is no record of who claimed the five bucks.

I’ll write more about the remarkable public service of Francis A. Gross in the near future. Until then, thanks to Tony Gross for sharing some of his great-grandfather’s papers with us. And he tells me there may be more to come.

Not many people have a lifetime membership in a golf club named for them. This card was among the memorabilia of Francis A. Gross in the possession of his great-grandson, Tony Gross. The former Armour Golf Course was renamed to honor Gross in 1947, an action by the park board that came as a complete surprise to Gross, who was then president of the board. (Francis A. Gross III)

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

So many people have commented on my article posted nearly two years ago about the history of ski jumping in Minneapolis that I thought I should provide an update. I was prompted by an exchange of emails this week with Greg Fangel who is the owner of woodenskis.com, where he buys and sells wooden cross-country skis and provides a great deal of ski information and links to other skiing sites. I’ve edited together some of Greg’s emailed comments below, with thanks.

I’ve been an avid cross-country skier since 1974 and currently live in White Bear Lake. I’ve been researching ski history for the past 5 years or so, mostly from a Mpls/St. Paul/Minnesota point of view. In my research, ski jumping comes into play, since it’s Nordic and one of the early forms of competition. I personally know Norm Oakvik, who is mentioned in your blog.  He organized many events and coached USSA teams in Minneapolis. Norm is a legend in the cross-country ski community in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. I interviewed Norm in November of 1995 for a story in the Løype, a newsletter of the North Star Ski Touring Club.

Norm’s parents were from Norway and Norm started skiing in Minneapolis in the 1930-40s. He competed with the Minneapolis Ski Club in 1940-70s, specializing in Nordic combined in the early years. Nordic combined is ski jumping and cross-country skiing combined into one event. He was a driving force behind the National Nordic ski competition, which was held in Bloomington in 1976. Bill Koch came to ski that event.

In May of 2005 a few of the ‘movers and shakers’ in the Minneapolis ski community wanted to name a trail or system after Norm Oakvik at Theodore Wirth Park. We held a special meeting at Wirth with supporters and Norm present. Norm was so humble, that he didn’t want his name on the trails, even though he spent countless hours trail clearing, grooming, and coaching at Wirth. I don’t know how Norm is doing now, but he was recently in the hospital.

I’ve interviewed ski jumper Adrian Watt from Duluth who participated in the 1968 Winter Olympics and competed at the Glenwood jump in Minneapolis. He has some fascinating stories.

Minneapolis has a rich ski history and that should not be overlooked. We need to preserve that history for generations to come.

Greg Fangel

The ski jump at Glenwood (Wirth) Park in 1923. (Charles J. Hibbard, Minnesota Historical Society)

Greg mentioned that he’s interested in putting together an exhibit on local skiing history for a possible new project at Wirth Park.

Over the past couple years, several veterans of the Minneapolis skiing scene have commented on my original post on Minneapolis ski history. If you haven’t looked at those comments in a while, check them out. Add your own stories either here or on the original post. Thanks!

If you haven’t kept track of what’s going on with cross-country skiing in Minneapolis parks you might be surprised to find out about current trails, especially at Wirth Park. Get more skiing info at minneapolisparks.org.

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

A tantalizing paragraph.

“Professor Cleveland submitted a plan of the improvement of the 2nd Ward Park, whereupon Commissioner Folwell moved that that part of the park designated as a play ground be changed to a pond and that so changed the plan be approved.”

“2nd Ward Park” was later named Van Cleve Park.  It was the first park in southeast Minneapolis, not far from the University of Minnesota. I find it odd that the park board would create a pond in a city full of lakes, streams and rivers, but more significant, and unexpected, is what the pond replaced in the plan. A playground. Huh! Horace William Shaler Cleveland, often referred to in Minneapolis by the honorific “Professor,” never seemed a playground sort of guy.

The paragraph appeared in the proceedings of the Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners from its meeting of May 19, 1890. That date is important because at that time few playgrounds existed. Anywhere.

Before Van Cleve Park was named, it was referred to as 2nd Ward Park as seen here in the 1892 Plat Book for Minneapolis. The man-made pond took the place of what would have been the first “playground” in a Minneapolis park. (C.M. Foote & Co., John R. Borchert Map Library, University of Minnesota)

Unfortunately Cleveland’s drawings for Van Cleve Park didn’t survive. Six of his other park designs — large-scale drawings — are owned by Hennepin History Museum, but the Van Cleve plan is not among them. Neither was it ever published in an annual report, as several other of his plans were. No documents explaining Cleveland’s intent with his plan have been found either, so we really don’t know what type of playground he imagined for the center of the new park. We can only guess.

The Infancy of Playgrounds

The idea of public space devoted to play was still quite new at the time — to Cleveland and to everyone else. In his most famous book, Landscape Architecture as Applied to the Wants of the West, published in 1873, Cleveland mentioned “play ground” only as something that might be desired in the back yard of a home. In his famous 1883 blueprint for Minneapolis’s park system, Suggestions for a System of Parks and Parkways for the City of Minneapolis, he doesn’t mention play or playgrounds at all. Even in the notes that accompanied his first six individual park designs in Minneapolis (unpublished) in 1883 and 1885, he never mentioned play spaces. Yet, in 1890, when he was 76 years old, Cleveland proposed to put a playground in a new park.

The idea was just being explored elsewhere then. In 1886 Boston had placed sand piles for kids play in some parks. The next year San Francisco created a formal children’s play area in Golden Gate Park. In New York, reform mayor Abram Hewitt supported a movement in 1887 to create small, city-sponsored combination parks and playgrounds, but that effort bore little fruit until a decade later. In 1889, Boston created a playstead at Franklin Park and an outdoor gymnasium on the bank of the Charles River, a collaboration of a Harvard professor and Cleveland’s friend Frederick Law Olmsted. Historian Steven A. Riess calls it the “first American effort to provide active play space for slum residents.” (See Riess’s City Games for a fascinating account of the growth of sports in American cities.)

The social reform movement, which later helped create playgrounds in many cities, was gaining steam with the publication in 1890 of Jacob Riis’s, How the Other Half Lives, a glimpse of grinding poverty in the slums of New York. That movement would have an enormous impact on cities in the early 1900s, especially Chicago, which became the playground capital of the United States, led in part by Jane Addams of Hull House settlement fame.

Even though Cleveland addressed many of his efforts in civic improvement to providing fresh air, green spaces and access to nature’s beauty for the urban poor, especially children, he seems an unlikely proponent of playgrounds in parks. Based on the bitter complaint in a letter to William Folwell, July 29, 1884, I had taken Cleveland to be opposed to any manufactured entertainments at the cost of natural beauty. He wrote from Chicago,

“There’s no controlling the objects of men’s worship or the means by which they attain them. A beautiful oak grove was sacrificed just before I left Minneapolis to make room for a baseball club.” (Folwell Papers, Minnesota Historical Society)

Yet, we have proof that Cleveland had a much more positive view of play areas for children in parks than he had of ball fields. A playground at Van Cleve Park, would have been a first in Minneapolis parks.

The Pond Instead

With the revised plan of the park approved, construction of the pond began immediately in the summer of 1890. A pond of 1.5 acres was created in the southern half of the park. The earth removed to create the pond was used to grade the rest of the park. That winter the park board had the pond cleared of snow so it could serve as a skating rink, too.

The artificial pond at Van Cleve was a popular skating rink. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

There must have been problems keeping water in the pond, because the next summer it was drained and the pond basin was lined with puddled clay. An artist’s rendering of the park in the 1891 annual report shows a fountain spraying a geyser of water in the middle of the pond. I’ve never seen a photo of such a fountain at Van Cleve, or read an account of it, but a similar fountain was built into the pond at Elliot Park, the only other pond created in a Minneapolis park, so it is possible a fountain existed. The park board erected a temporary warming house and toilet rooms for skaters on the pond beginning in the winter of 1905.

When Theodore Wirth arrived in Minneapolis as park superintendent in 1906, he placed a priority on improving Van Cleve Park as “half playground, half show park.” He recommended creating a sand bottom for the pond so it could be used as a wading pool and building a small shelter beside it that could double as a warming house for skaters.

Van Cleve pond, 1905. (Sweet, Minnesota Historical Society)

The first playground equipment was installed in Van Cleve Park in 1907, following the huge popularity of the first playground equipment installed at Riverside and Logan parks in 1906.

The shelter was finally built in 1910, along with shelters at North Commons and Jackson Square. The Van Cleve shelter was designed by Minneapolis architect Cecil Bayless Chapman and was built at a total cost of just over $6,000. It included a boiler room, toilets and a large central room. The Van Cleve shelter was considerably more modest than the shelters at Jackson Square and North Commons, which cost approximately $12,000 and $16,000 respectively. On the other hand, neither of those parks had a pond. (Jackson Square actually had been a pond at one time, however, called Long John Pond. The cost of the Jackson Square shelter rose due to the need to drive pilings down 26 feet to get through the peat on which the park was built.)

The original recreation shelter at Van Cleve Park was built in 1910 facing the man-made pond. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

Wirth published a new plan for Van Cleve Park in the 1911 annual report. Although he claimed that Van Cleve demonstrated that a playground and show park could exist without “interfering” with each other, the playground occupied only a narrow strip of land between the pond and 14th Ave. SE. There were still no playing fields of any kind in the park then.

In 1917, Wirth recommended pouring a concrete bottom for the pond, really converting it into a shallow pool. Two years later the park board did pave the pond basin, but with tar macadam.

The Van Cleve shelter well after 1940 renovations, date unknown. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

Very few improvements were made at Van Cleve, or any other park in the city, for many years from the late-1920s to the late- 1940s. In 1935, in his last year as park superintendent, Wirth recommended that a swimming pool be built at Van Cleve in place of the pond, but the park board didn’t have the money for such a project during the Great Depression.

The park did get its share of WPA attention in 1940 when the federal work relief agency completed several renovations on the Van Cleve shelter to improve its capacity to host indoor recreation activities. Also included in those repairs were such basics as a concrete floor in the shelter’s boiler room. Comparing the two photos above, it’s obvious that the veranda was enclosed and the ground around the shelter was paved as well.

The man-made pond was finally filled in 1948. A modern, much smaller concrete wading pool was built to replace it the next year. The little rec shelter stood until a new community center was built at Van Cleve in 1970. By then Van Cleve, like most other neighborhood parks in the city, had been given over almost completely to active playgrounds and athletic fields.

Despite Cleveland’s aborted provision for a playground of some kind in his plan for Van Cleve Park in 1890, I imagine him astonished and a bit saddened to see neighborhood parks change so completely from the pastoral reserves and quiet gardens he had once preserved or coaxed from the urban landscapes of his time.

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

Writing one hundred years ago this week, then Minneapolis park board president Edmund Phelps, made several observations in the park board’s annual report for 1912 that attracted my attention.

“I notice in the Board’s report, especially between 1894 and 1900, frequent references to our bicycle paths and the very general use of the bicycle itself. It will be remembered that at one time there was great agitation for fine bicycle paths upon all main thoroughfares. During the last few years there has been nothing said in the reports and there has been no attention paid to keeping up bicycle paths for the reason that the use of the wheel, unfortunately, was very largely diminished.”

This is one of my favorite park photos. It first appeared in the Minneapolis park board’s 1896 annual report. It shows bicycle paths around Lake Harriet created that year. The layout of walking path, bicycle path and carriage way, there were no cars yet, is almost identical to today. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

The “wheel,” as Phelps called the bicycle, has made quite a comeback. Bicycle riders were generally called “wheel men” then although as this picture demonstrates riding bicycles was not strictly a male pursuit. Perhaps most remarkable however, despite the fact that today you could spend more on a bicycle than the park board paid for Lake Calhoun, the basic concept of the bicycle has not changed at all: two wheels on a connecting frame, pedals, seat, handlebars — and a dog out for exercise.

Another thematically related passage from Phelps’s 1912 report is worth noting.

“We ought not to mow forty acres of lawn at Lake of the Isles by handpower, but the best power lawn mowers, such as are used by parks and country clubs, should be provided, as they facilitate the work and reduce greatly the expense per acre.”

I have no idea if Phelps was a stockholder in The Toro Company.

Greater Grand Rounds

Finally, Phelps recommended an idea that was not new, but was placed in an automotive context I haven’t seen before. Writing thirty years after the creation of the park board, Phelps looked thirty years into the future and foresaw,

“Two or three trunk lines of excellent highway will connect the eastern and western extremities of our great country. Good roads of high class construction will prevail throughout every state of the Union. While these state roads should and will  radiate from the large cities of the commonwealths, yet all will connect in a nearly direct line with the nearest transcontinental highway.”

Combining the development of good roads for automobiles with his prediction that there would be more than a million people in the Twin Cities in thirty years (1943), Phelps wrote,

“Long before that time the boulevard system of the two cities should be extended so as to make one ‘Greater Grand Rounds’ of one hundred miles or more.”

Phelps then described a parkway system that followed Minnehaha Creek to Lake Minnetonka, around that lake, then south from Excelsior to Shakopee, down the Minnesota River valley and its “enchanting scenery” to Fort Snelling, through St. Paul to and around White Bear Lake, then to Anoka and the Mississippi River, passing many beautiful lakes on the way,” then back to Minneapolis along the river. Phelps concluded,

“I am sure that a boulevard similar to the one suggested eventually will be built. An enabling act should be prepared and presented to the Legislature at the present session, and passed, so that the work may be prosecuted later.”

The parkway Phelps recommended was never authorized or built, but parks have been acquired along much of the route he suggested.

The First Automobile Ordinance

Phelps vision of automobiles, transcontinental highways and “Greater Grand Rounds” is not surprising given his early adoption of the automobile himself.

Phelps first appearance before the park board, more than a year before he was elected to be a park commissioner, was on behalf of the Automobile Club of Minneapolis. On May 7, 1903 Phelps requested permission for the club to have an automobile hill-climbing contest on the steep hill on Kenwood Parkway near Spring Lake. Hill-climbing contests were an early form of car racing, seeing whose car could climb a steep hill in the shortest time. As an inducement for approval of the club’s request perhaps, Phelps invited park commissioners and friends to attend the contest and afterwards be given a ride by automobile around the parkways.

1903 Model A Ford. It also came in a two-seat version. It was manufactured only in red. It had a top speed of 28 mph. (americanfords.com)

Phelps’s request for use of the parkway was approved, but he may have gotten more than he bargained for.  Immediately following approval of his request, the board directed the Privileges and Entertainments Committee to meet with the City Council Committee on Ordinances to develop an ordinance governing the use of automobiles in parks.

The park board subsequently passed an automobile ordinance on June 20, 1903. The ordinance restricted automobile speeds to 15 miles per hour, required that each car powered by gasoline have a muffler, that each car have a bell or horn, and a have at least one lighted lamp if operated after dark. In addition,

“Every person operating an automobile shall stop upon request or signal from any person in charge of a horse or horses, and shall also stop whenever a horse or horses show signs of fright at the automobile.”

Anyone convicted of violating the ordinance was subject to a fine of $2-$100 and, if in default of payment of a fine, imprisonment in the City Work House for a period of up to 90 days.

To give you some idea of how new cars were at the time, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated only four days before the park board’s automobile ordinance was passed in June 1903 and Ford’s first three Model A’s were manufactured in July. The success of those vehicles is still evident in Minneapolis where we refer to the Ford Dam and Ford Bridge, named for their proximity to and relationship with the Ford assembly plant in St Paul. The construction of the Ford Bridge made Minnehaha Park easily accessible to St. Paulites.

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

Last weekend I read Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota and Our Way or the Highway: Inside the Minnehaha Free State. That followed a recent rereading of Folwell’s History of Minnesota, Volume I, and I also had read Spirit Car recently. They were part of my continuing research into the history of Minnehaha Falls. (More on that project soon.)

With the sad story of the disintegration of relations long ago between American Indians and whites fresh in mind, I recalled a passage in the unpublished autobiography of former park commissioner Francis Gross. (Background on Gross and his autobiography.) Gross was born in Minnesota in 1870 and lived near the intersection of Plymouth (13th) Avenue and Washington Avenue North in north Minneapolis from 1875 into his teen years. Among his memories of childhood on the north side was this:

“Until shortly after 1880, the shore lands of the Mississippi river were grandly beautiful. Other than a small sawmill at the bridge on Plymouth Avenue, there stood virgin timber of many varieties. For a few years after our coming to the northside, each spring many Indians, their squaws and papooses, would travel from the north on the river in canoes and locate their camp at about 14th Avenue North on the river flat there. The many Indians, young and old, their tepees, boiling pots, the furs and beaded leather goods and trinkets they had brought to trade or sell was an interesting sight. Each evening they would entertain their white visitors with war dances. Made their drums taut by the heat of the campfire, painted their faces in most hideous designs and wore their best and most beautifully patterned and beaded dress. As this time was not long after the most serious of the wars with Indians in this territory, fear of the Indian was in the heart of every child. It can therefore be easily guessed that the sight of these hideously painted, tomahawk-swinging savages, performing at night in the sinister-appearing light given by a few torches, was a scene as exciting as any small boy could wish for.” (Emphasis added.)

I wonder if that fear may have been heightened for Gross as a child because he grew up in a community of predominantly German immigrants. In another section of his hand-written autobiography he recalled:

“On the north side until after 1885, it was common to hear German spoken whenever people congregated. The early settlers of the north side were mostly of German birth…When German immigrants came to Minneapolis, very few spoke English, hence it was necessary that they were met on their arrival by an American. Often, my father would meet those immigrant German families with his grocery delivery wagon.”

The connection between the fear and the immigrants is that many of the settlers in the Minnesota River Valley – the violent epicenter of the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War – were also German immigrants. I suspect the violence of that war was painfully felt by many in the German community in Minneapolis, too. While that war was 13 years in the past by the time Gross’s family moved to north Minneapolis, local newspapers carried many stories in the later 1870s of continuing battles between American Indians and U.S. forces not far to the west, including lurid accounts of battles featuring such famous names as Custer, Sheridan, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

I hadn’t planned to write here about this passage in Gross’s autobiography when I first read it, because it did not relate to parks or early land use in Minneapolis, nor do I believe it reflects on Gross whom I have always admired as a fair, just, and humane man. But I was drawn back to it in the convergence of my research.  Gross’s description had power and it had nothing to do with some anachronistic terms. Rather, the power comes from the poignant phrase: “fear of the Indian was in the heart of every child.”

It is not the object of the fear that impressed me – I can imagine as well fear of the White Man in the hearts of Indian children – but the sad realization that fear in the hearts of children can take lifetimes to conquer.

The greatest injustices, the greatest atrocities grow from fear of some monolithic, broadly-defined “Other” instilled young — a conviction reinforced last night as my daughter described watching the film Hotel Rwanda in her geography class.

The dangers of implanting fear in the hearts of children are as great today as ever. Let’s keep that seed from being planted and nourished in our children’s hearts.

David C. Smith  minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

If you know of accounts or pictures of American Indian encampments along the Mississippi River in North Minneapolis in the 1870s-1880s, such as Gross described, I’d like to learn more.

© David C. Smith

Karen Cooper tells me she has photos of more 19th- and early 20th-Century bridges over Minnehaha Creek at Minnehaha Falls than the ones I’ve already posted. You can see those photos and more next Sunday, Feb. 10, at 2 pm at Hennepin History Museum. (Get more info here.)

I’m told that Karen has the most amazing Minnehaha Falls collection. I’m looking forward to seeing part of it myself for the first time. Hope to see you there.

The 1910 stone arch bridge was actually made of reinforced concrete and given a facade of boulders found in the vicinity. (Minnesota Historical Society)

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

While looking for other things I keep encountering bits of information that deepen my understanding of and appreciation for Horace W. S. Cleveland’s profound contribution to Minneapolis parks.

More than a year before the creation of the Minneapolis park board and Cleveland’s “Suggestions for a System of Parks for the City of Minneapolis” a Minneapolis Tribune editorial, published January 22, 1882, announced “A Prospective Park.” The editorial noted that Philo Remington and Col. Innes, who ran the Minneapolis Lyndale Motor Line, were planning to lay out a park on the shores of Lake Harriet and “may eventually” donate it to the city. The newspaper had high praise for the property.

“It is a natural forest, with hill and dale, and comprises without exception one of the most beautiful bits of woodland scenery that can be found anywhere.”

But it was the following sentence that caught my attention and provided more insight into Cleveland’s influence in the city before the park board.

“Col. Innes has made arrangements with Mr. Cleveland, the celebrated landscape gardener, who laid out Union Park, Chicago, whereby that gentleman will take immediate charge of the work of superintending the laying out of a park that will not only be a credit to the city but an inestimable benefit to our citizens.”

I have found no evidence in Cleveland’s correspondence that he was actually hired for any work at Lake Harriet; he never mentions it. And who knows, Remington and Innes may have been blowing smoke. They had other grand plans that didn’t materialize. But whether they were serious or not about a park at Lake Harriet, the editorial indicates the high regard in which Cleveland was held in the city and the likelihood that, at the very least, he was already being consulted on park matters, especially around the lakes, before the park board existed.

A bit prematurely the Tribune enthused, “Minneapolitans may now congratulate themselves on the fact that a public park, the need of which has so long been felt, will soon be completed for their pleasure and benefit.”

Only a year later, at the next session of the legislature, a bill  was passed that created the Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners. Although Cleveland was never credited with designing any of the parks at Lake Harriet, he likely had considerable influence on how the lake shore was perceived and, later, developed.

Just another small piece of evidence of Cleveland’s immense influence on the Minneapolis park system. And yet his name does not appear on a Minneapolis park property.

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory@q.com

For more on Col. Innes’s plans for Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet see this entry.

For more on why Cleveland’s name should be connected to the vast park that is the Mississippi River Gorge see this entry and this one, too.

For more on Cleveland in general, search above for his name or click on his name in the tag cloud at right. I’ve written quite a bit about him. Take a closer look at the map from his “Suggestions…” at right, too.

One hundred years ago next week, Theodore Wirth made a request of the Minneapolis park board that made possible one of Minneapolis’s most cherry-ished landmarks — and parks. The park superintendent who was known for his passion for gardens – and also for hiring a talented full-time park florist, Louis Boeglin — asked the park board to approve preparing a square of ground next to the Minnesota National Guard Armory for a garden. At least for a summer.

The Society of American Florists and Ornamental Horticulturists (SAFOH) were holding their national convention at the Armory in August 1913. The Armory had been built in 1906 between Kenwood Parkway and Vineland Place adjacent to a park known as The Parade. To the east of the Armory, bordering on Lyndale Avenue, was an empty plot of ground that Thomas Lowry had donated to the park board in 1906. It was that square that Wirth asked for. The park board approved Wirth’s request the day he made it — March 4, 1913 — for the “free use” of the space by SAFOH for “an extensive display of outdoor plants consisting of the best adapted hardy and tender plants that can be used for the decoration of public and private grounds and of plant novelties that are not yet known to many florists.”

The green space to the right of the Armory was the site of the SAFOH Garden. Lyndale Avenue is at right. Kenwood Parkway, which no longer goes through, is at top. Thomas Lowry’s residence is where the Walker Art Center is now. (Atlas of Minneapolis 1914, reflections.mndigital.org)

To prepare for this test garden, the board authorized Wirth to provide the property with “the necessary dressing of good loam,”  which the board would pay for from funds allocated for The Parade.

As recently as 1911 Wirth had proposed to use the space for tennis courts, in keeping with the active recreation focus of the park, but those courts were not built. (See plan in 1911 Annual Report.)

The Minneapolis Tribune enthused that the garden would be one of the “most beautiful and extraordinary displays that the city has ever enjoyed.” The Tribune estimated (April 20) that some bulbs to be planted, which began arriving from florists around the country in April, were valued at up to $100 each and, therefore, a guard would be posted at the garden site.

As the dates of the convention approached much was written in local newspapers about the floral display that would inform and entertain 1,500 guests from around the country who would make Minneapolis the “floral capital of the country” for a week. (Tribune, August 10, 1913) . Private railroad cars were to bring florists from the major eastern cities and so many florists were coming from, or through, Chicago that both the Milwaukee Road and Great Northern had dedicated trains from there solely for convention goers.

The Tribune observed that membership in the Society was “coveted” because there was an “exchange of courtesies” among members, such as the “invaluable service” of a “telegraph order system between cities.” Many of us have used the FTD — originally Florists’ Telegraph Delivery — system, which was created in 1910, only a few years before the Minneapolis convention. The image of Mercury, at left, was first used in 1914.

The garden was such a huge hit — with florists and Minneapolis citizens — that one park commissioner recommended keeping the garden and naming it the Wirth Botanical Garden. Wirth, who was vice president of the national society before the convention, was unanimously elected president of the national organization while it was in session in Minneapolis.

The 1913 garden adjacent to the Armory, looking southwest from the intersection of Lyndale Avenue, coming in from left, and Kenwood Parkway, at right. The photo was taken from the Palace Hotel between The Parade and Loring Park. The garden is now part of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.  (MPRB)

The park board did support the continuation of the garden the following year and it became a popular attraction for decades, in part because of the labels that identified the plants. But the garden was never named for Wirth. It was referred to as the “Armory Garden” until the Armory was demolished in 1934.  At that time the land where the Armory stood was donated to the park board. After that the garden became known as “Kenwood Garden.” Those floral gardens, introduced as a concept 100 years ago next week, unquestionably facilitated the current use of the grounds as quite a different type of garden.

For the rest of the garden’s story, look for a documentary being produced by tpt and the Walker Art Center this spring in celebration of the 25th birthday of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. It is scheduled to premier in late May.

David C. Smith  minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

Teamsters who worked for the Minneapolis Park Board began working 8-hour days in 1913. With only a quick look into the history of the eight-hour workday, that strikes me as a fairly early concession by the park board. Many industries still worked longer days. The park board Proceedings for 1913 reported that park commissioners adopted this proposal on May 6, 1913.

To the Honorable Board of Park Commissioners:
 Your Standing Committee on Employment, to whom was referred the communication of the International Brotherhood of Team Owners asking that eight hours constitute a day’s work for teams employed by the Board, respectfully reports that the matter has been given careful consideration and your committee now recommends that all teams and men now employed by the Board working nine hours per day be placed upon a basis of an eight-hour day at the same wage per day now being paid.
Respectfully submitted,
 J. W. Allan, W. F. Decker, P. D. Boutell, P. C. Deming

Nothing in park board proceedings indicates why employees were given what amounted to a 12.5% raise that year. Pay rates published in the February 18 proceedings list teamster pay at $2.50 per day and pay for teams at $5.00 per day. In other words, a driver was worth the same as a horse.

You have to keep in mind that a teamster in those days was usually someone who drove a team of horses, not a truck.

Work crews building what became Victory Memorial Drive in north Minneapolis in about 1920. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

The photo above, taken a few years after the reduction in work day was approved, shows that horses and automotive vehicles worked side-by-side on road construction.

Theodore Wirth wrote in 1911 that some projects had been delayed in Minneapolis parks because there were no teams to be hired. Perhaps the shorter workday was necessary to compete for teams in 1913.

I know that a widespread 40-hour work week didn’t come for many years in some places and some industries. Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of labor history than I can provide some context for the decision of the park board to reduce the work day from 9 to 8 hours, but maintain the same pay. Also is there any significance in the request for shorter work day coming from the brotherhood of “Team Owners,” which I gather was not the same as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Any thoughts?

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

© David C. Smith

H. W. S. Cleveland, the landscape architect who created the blueprint for Minneapolis’s park system in 1883, made his first visit to Glenwood Spring near Bassett’s Creek in north Minneapolis in the spring of 1888. In a letter to the Minneapolis Tribune, published April 22, 1888. Cleveland described that visit.

Bassett’s Creek in the vicinity of Glenwood Spring, about 1910 according to the Minnesota Historical Society. I’m not familiar enough with the lay of the land in the area to guess the exact location of this scene, but I was struck by how open the landscape was, especially given Horace Cleveland’s description of “large bodies of very fine native trees” in the vicinity of the spring. Perhaps those groves were behind the photographer. (Minnesota Historical Society)

Cleveland’s letter addressed the subject of the city’s water supply, noting that when he and his family moved to Minneapolis from Chicago in 1886 they experienced deleterious health effects – ”winter cholera,” as he put it — that they thought might be associated with Minneapolis tap water. He reported that after they began using Glenwood spring water his family had no further health issues and they also found the spring water more “palatable” than the city water, which was taken from the Mississippi. Cleveland wrote that he had used the spring water for more than a year before he visited the neighborhood of the springs. When he finally did visit,

“I was not alone surprised and delighted by the beauty of the springs themselves, and their topographical surroundings, but amazed and grieved that my attention had not been called to the locality when I first came by invitation of the park commissioners, five years previous, to study the possibilities of park improvements.”

Cleveland claimed that because he was put in charge of an engineer, Frank Nutter, who, he was told, was familiar with all the sites desirable for park purposes, he didn’t feel it necessary to look at areas he was not shown. Cleveland didn’t believe he was deceived or misled, but…

“An hour’s inspection of the area in the neighborhood of these springs satisfied me that no place in the neighborhood of the city, except the vicinity of Minnehaha falls, was so well adapted by nature for the construction of a park, comprising rarely attractive topographical features — while the distance from the center of business was less than half that to Minnehaha, and the apparently unlimited capacity of the springs, which gushed from the hillsides at various points over a widely extended area, seemed to offer every possible opportunity for the ornamental use of water.”

The prospect of bubbling springs of clear water and “hills and valleys of graceful form” that wouldn’t have needed “heavy expense in grading” to be transformed into parkland appealed to Cleveland’s aesthetic sense. He also asked ”whether it is worth our while to ascertain the character and capacity of the springs” to supply the entire city with water. Cleveland suggested that if the springs were capable of meeting the city’s water needs, “the city should secure them, and enough land around them to preserve them from contamination, and then enclose the area as an ornamental reservoir as had been done in Philadelphia, New York and Boston.

This photo of the ice house at Inglewood spring was taken in the mid-1890s. (Minnesota Historical Society)

What Cleveland didn’t know at the time was that the Glenwood and Inglewood springs may not have been well-known in 1883, when Nutter hosted Cleveland’s park exploration visit. Most accounts I can find of Glenwood Spring’s history claim it was discovered by William Fruen in 1884, a year after Cleveland wrote his “Suggestions for a System of Parks for the City of Minneapolis.” One account suggests Fruen found the springs in 1882. Some accounts have him discovering Glenwood Spring when building a mill on Bassett’s Creek, others when he was digging a fish pond. The latter tale, probably a tall one, was disseminated on the cached web site of the Glenwood Inglewood Water Company.

Fruen’s history with the spring includes filing the first vending machine patent in U. S. history. He invented a coin-operated machine in 1884 to dispense his spring water by the glass. Fruen also attempted to distribute his water by pipeline as Cleveland thought might be desirable. John West, owner of the posh West Hotel in Minneapolis, Thomas Lowry and Fruen wanted to build a two-mile pipeline from the spring to the West Hotel, and also sought permission to pipe the water into homes and restaurants along the way. That plan was vetoed in 1885 by Mayor George Pillsbury.

The Glenwood-Inglewood Company, 1910. The Glenwood and Inglewood springs were on adjacent property and run as separate water companies until about 1896. Until then, they were competitors. See below. (Minnesota Historical Society)

In the spring of 1885, Fruen published ads in the Tribune touting the purity of water from Glenwood Spring. He published a chemical analysis of the water conducted by Professor James Dodge of the University of Minnesota, who attested, “This water is extremely pure, being almost entirely free from organic matter.”

The ad invited readers to, “Drive out and see as fine a spring as you ever looked upon.” Another admonition in the copy is particularly interesting given the long association in later years of the Glenwood and Inglewood springs:

“Do not confound this spring with the Inglewood. Ours is the Glenwood.”

William Fruen’s son, Arthur, donated 13 acres of land along Bassett’s Creek to the park board in 1930, which was the beginning of Bassett’s Creek Valley Park. Arthur Fruen was a city council member at the time and an ex-officio member of the park board. I don’t know if that 13 acres included the site of the original spring — in other words, if Cleveland’s vision of a park that included the spring was partially realized nearly 50 years after he first saw it.

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

© David C. Smith

One of my favorite photos of Lake Calhoun. The photo is undated, but I would estimate that it was taken in the late 1910s. The view indicates it was taken from the Minikahda Club on the west side of the lake looking northeast toward downtown. The photo was taken after the Lake Calhoun Bath House (center) was completed in 1912, but before a parkway was built on the west side of the lake, which occurred in the early 1920s.

Lake Calhoun’s northwest shore and Bath House in late 1910s. Photo taken from Minikahda Club. Click to enlarge. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

Note how far into the lake the diving platforms were built.

One of things I like from this photo is a sense of the connection between Lake of the Isles and Lake Calhoun. There is some open land between them. This was taken a few years before construction began on the Calhoun Beach Club across Lake Street from the bath house.

Another remarkable feature of this photo is the prominence of the Basilica on the skyline west of downtown. The Basilica was dedicated in 1914.

This is the view that Theodore Wirth hoped could one day be incorporated into the park system if the Minikahda Club ever relocated. Wirth wrote in the 1906 Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners, his first, that this view was of “such scenic beauty that it is almost a crime to pass it unnoticed.”

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

© David C. Smith

Ok, it wasn’t really a Minneapolis park project, but it still deserves a laugh: Minnehaha Creek converted into a 30-foot-wide power boat canal from Lake Minnetonka to Lake Harriet!

Lake Harriet could have been more like Lake Minnetonka.

Minneapolis was obsessed in the spring of 1911 with the upcoming Civic Celebration during which the channel between Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles would be opened. That was a very good thing. Huzzah, huzzah. But the attention it was drawing to the city also focused a lot of eyes on a very bad thing: Minnehaha Creek was nearly dry – in the spring! – which meant almost no water over Minnehaha Falls. Minneapolis could hardly celebrate the opening of the lake connection at the same time it suffered the ignominy of a dry Minnehaha Falls. The many out-of-town visitors anticipated for the celebration would surely want to see both. And let’s face it, a fifty-foot waterfall written about by a Harvard poet, which attracted visitors from around the world was a bit more impressive to most people than a short canal under a busy road and railroad tracks. The Minneapolis PR machine could call the city the “Venice of North America” all it wanted with its new canal, but visitors’ imaginations were still probably fueled more by the images of the famous poet’s noble heathen, beautiful maiden, and “laughing waters.”

The generally accepted solution to the lack of water over Minnehaha Falls was to divert Minnehaha Creek into Lake Amelia (Nokomis), drain Rice Lake (Hiawatha), dam the outlet of the creek from Amelia to create a reservoir, and release the impounded water as needed — perhaps 8 hours a day — to keep a pleasing flow over the falls. Unfortunately, with all the last-minute dredging and bridge-building for the Isles-Calhoun channel, that couldn’t be done between April and July 4, when the Civic Celebration would launch.

Into this superheated environment of waterways and self-promotion stepped Albert Graber, according to the Saturday Evening Tribune, May 28, 1911. With the backing of “members of the board of county commissioners, capitalists, attorneys and real estate dealers”, Graber proposed to dredge Minnehaha Creek into a canal 30-feet wide from Lake Minnetonka to Lake Harriet. This would provide not only a water superhighway from Minnetonka to Minneapolis, and boost real estate prices along the creek, but it would also create a much larger water flow in Minnehaha Creek, solving the embarrassment of no laughing water.

“The plan, say the promoters, would enable residents of summer houses on the big lake to have their launches waiting at the town lake.”
Saturday Evening Tribune, May 28, 1911

Sure, there were problems. Not every plan could be perfect. The plan would require dismantling the dam at Gray’s Bay at the head of Minnehaha Creek, which might lower the level of Lake Minnetonka. But Graber and his backers had thought of that. The Minnesota River watershed in the area of St. Bonifacius and Waconia would be diverted into Lake Minnetonka — no problem! – which also solved another bother: it would reduce flooding on the Minnesota River.

The dam at Gray’s Bay had been operated by Hennepin Country since 1897. Many people then and now consider the dam the cause of low water flow in Minnehaha Creek, but the earliest reference I can find to low water in the creek was in 1822, when the soldiers of Fort Snelling wanted to open a mill on Minnehaha Creek, but were forced to move to St. Anthony Falls due to low water. That was about the same time that two intrepid teenagers from the fort discovered that the creek flowed out of a pretty big lake to the west.

Graber estimated that dredging Minnehaha Creek would cost about $4,000 a mile for the nine miles between the two lakes. He and his backers, which included an officer of the Savings Bank of Minneapolis (who presumably had a summer house on the big lake and could put a launch on the town lake), provided assurances that the money to finance the project could be “readily found.”

The Evening Tribune article concluded with an announcement that meetings of those interested in the project would be held in the near future with an eye to beginning work before the end of the summer. Graber noted that his inspection of the project had been, no surprise, “superficial”, but that he would make a thorough report soon to his backers. I can find no evidence that the idea progressed any further.

The Board of Park Commissioners would have had no role in the plan, except, perhaps, allowing power boats to enter and be anchored on Lake Harriet. (I think they would have said no.) Park board ownership of Minnehaha Creek west of Lake Harriet to Edina wasn’t proposed until 1919 and the deal wasn’t done until 1930.

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

© 2013 David C. Smith

Not many people would recognize this Minneapolis park property, which lies outside city limits and was acquired in 1928, twelve years after this photo was taken. There is some uncertainty about how much of this property is still technically owned by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, but the property is administered by another agency.

Four-wide racing at the Snelling Speedway, 1916. (Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board.)

This is the famous Twin City Motor, or Snelling, Speedway in 1916, the second year of its three-year life. The speedway was named informally for its location adjacent to Fort Snelling. The infield of the two-mile concrete track was later used as a landing field for airplanes — and eventually became Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners acquired the land in 1928 to develop it as an airport for the city. The task fell to the park board because it was the only agency of Minneapolis city government that could own land outside of city limits. (The law that permitted the park board to own land outside city limits was passed by the Minnesota legislature in 1885 to permit the park board to purchase land in Golden Valley for part of what eventually became Glenwood (Wirth) Park .) The park board built and ran the airport from 1928 until the Metropolitan Airports Commission was created in 1943, at which time the park board turned over administration of the airport. The park board had spent a significant percentage of its meager resources in those years developing the airport.

The enormous grandstands pictured left and center were built in 1915 to hold 100,000 people. The problem was that far, far fewer attended the few races held there. The first major race in 1915, a 500-mile race patterned after the Indianapolis 500, was widely promoted by the newspapers for weeks. The weekend of the race – the first weekend in September, just before the State Fair opened – the Minneapolis Tribune wrote that hotel rooms were impossible to find in the Twin Cities; hoteliers were referring unaccommodated visitors to private homes for a place to sleep. It was said to be the busiest weekend in the history of Minneapolis hotels with guests arriving from around the country. The Twin City Rapid Transit Company built a special spur track to the speedway to transport the crowds.

Unfortunately for the promoters, drivers, and the legions of workers who constructed the track and were not paid, attendance was much smaller than hoped. Society columns in the Tribune covered the rich and famous who attended the races and trumpeted this “innovation in divertisement” for the social elite, but the paper reported race attendance at only 28,000.

The 1915 race was a disappointment in every respect. The banked concrete track, heralded as the fastest and safest track in the world, was in fact extremely rough. The cars vibrated to pieces and the drivers didn’t fare much better.  The champion Italian driver, Dario Resta, was reported to have denounced the roughness of the track “vociferously” after his first test drive during race week. If you know any Italian curse words, you could probably translate the “vociferously”. He was prescient, because his car didn’t survive much more than 100 miles on race day. But potential race fans didn’t know that ahead of time.

Neither could they have imagined the snoozefest that the race became. It only takes a glance at the race results to understand how tedious the day must have been for spectators. With only twenty cars starting the race and most of them falling apart or dropping out for mechanical reasons early on — having a “mechanician” riding along, the second person visible in the cars, didn’t prevent mechanical failures — there wasn’t much action despite the nail-biting finish of the race, which was won by 1/5 of a second. The Tribune, which had promoted the race so breathlessly, could hardly contain its excitement proclaiming in its headline Sept. 5, 1914, “Cooper Wins Closest Finish in History.”

Here’s part of the problem! 1915 500-mile race results. (Minneapolis Tribune, September 5, 1915)

An exciting finish didn’t make up for the rest of the race. The slow pace of the race, only 86 mph, dragged it out for nearly six hours, and the third place car was more than a half-hour behind the leaders. The Tribune blamed the pace on the fact that the cars of so many of the ”most daring” drivers – ”speed demons” — were incapacitated. Those drivers included the famous Italians Resta and Ralph De Palma and the American “Wild” Bob Burman.  Picture only eight cars spread over a two-mile track, none of them travelling much faster, and some not as fast as, ordinary traffic on 35W and think of what you’d be doing to amuse yourself as a spectator. As stirring as the finish must have been with Cooper and Anderson pushing their matching Stutzes to the finish (the Stutz company dropped racing the next year anyway), most of the barely awake spectators headed for the exits before O’Donnell’s Duesenberg, manufactured in Minneapolis, came anywhere near the finish lap in third place.

Chandler and the great Barney Oldfield were still on the track — with no one in the stands and the sun about to set — plodding along more than an hour from finishing when they were mercifully flagged off the track in the dusk. The most notable thing about the Oldfield performance was that his relief driver – the drivers took breaks during the race – was the later World War I flying ace, Eddie Rickenbacker.

It’s no wonder that the Tribune concluded the next day, in a heroic effort at understatement:

“The crowd could not be called enthusiastic, the length of the grind and the heat probably preventing continuous hilarity.”

Prospective ticket buyers probably didn’t imagine the downside of what was then endurance racing. The greater problem was the cost of the tickets. Ticket prices were widely acknowledged as being much too high — the lowest ticket price was $2 and that didn’t include a seat, which cost another $2.50, the equivalent of what the park board paid workers for an 8-hour workday then.

(For more detail on the 1915 race, go here.  Noel Allard reconstructs the race, and the era in racing.)

Lower Prices, More Hilarity

The speedway’s promoters realized that they had to reduce prices as well as the tedium of a 500-mile race the next year. For the 1916 Fourth of July race, admission to the bleachers was cut to $1.00 and prices for seats in the grandstand began at $2.00. In hopes of more hilarity, even if not continuous, the race was shortened to 150 miles. A full day of racing was also to feature races of 50, 20 and 10 miles.

The roster of drivers was much the same as 1915: Resta chose to race in Omaha and Burman had crashed and died two months earlier in a California race. Oldfield returned, but only in capacity of referee, while his former relief driver, “Rick” Rickenbacker, had his own car to drive. (I’m no expert on race cars of the era, but it’s possible that Rickenbacker’s white Maxwell is on the far left in the photo above.) St. Paul’s own Tommy Milton, known then for his success at state fair races, but who would win two Indy 500s in the 1920s, entered in a Duesenberg. The Tribune predicted the largest race crowd in Minnesota history.

It was not to be. While I haven’t found an attendance figure for the race, there couldn’t have been many fans buying tickets because the total gate was only $8,000. We know that because at the time the flag was supposed to drop on the first race, the promoters had not yet posted the $20,000 in prize money for the races and the drivers, obviously noting the sparse crowd, refused to race until the prize money was in trustworthy hands. After a two-hour delay that caused the 50-, 20-, and 10-mile races to be scrubbed, the promoter turned over the entire gate receipts of about $8,000 and wrote a $12,000 personal check to cover the rest of the prize money for the 150-mile race. And off they went down the stilll-rough concrete track, bouncing like the promoter’s check.

Ralph De Palma won the race by a 12-minute margin in a time of just under an hour and a half, or an average speed of  a bit over 91 mph. He was one of only seven finishers, with Tom Milton finishing fourth.

By 1930 the Minneapolis park board had begun the transformation of the old speedway into an airport, but a segment of the old 2-mile oval still remained. The Mendota Bridge is upper right. Note the NWA hangar among the airport buildings. The landing strip was not on the old concrete race track, which was too rough. Airplanes landed on the grass in the infield of the old race track. (J. E. Quigley, Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board)

That was essentially the end of the Twin City Motor Speedway. Within two days the speedway had declared bankruptcy and never recovered. The speedway that cost more than $800,000 to build went into foreclosure in August of 1916. The owner of the Indianapolis Speedway, who was a stockholder in the group that owned the Twin City Motor Speedway, declined to purchase the track.   By the spring of 1917 the track property was already being mentioned as a possible site for an airfield or training ground for the navy aviation corps. Both Dunwoody Institute and the University of Minnesota had proposed to begin training military aviators and a site was needed.

A group of race car drivers led by Louis Chevrolet — yes, that Chevrolet — organized a final race at the track in 1917, which the Tribune called a “revival” race. The patient was too far gone to be resuscitated, despite a victory by Ira Vail in the 100-mile race at the much-improved average speed of more than 96 mph. Less than three months later the Tribune reported that the receiver for the bankrupt speedway had rented a portion of the grounds to a hog farmer who was fattening 500 pigs by feeding them Fort Snelling garbage. The speedway was finished, but the land was about to be given over to the service of a whole different kind of speed — and eventually the Minneapolis park board.

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com

© 2013 David C . Smith

The Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis is becoming one of the iconic images of the city. Have you ever wondered how those arches were made? I have. So I found this photo of the bridge under construction. The deck of the bridge is maintained by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, so let’s call it a park. Day and night the bridge provides the best views of the city. A hike over the bridge between Mill Ruins and Father Hennepin Bluffs, in either direction, is a must for visitors and residents.

This stereoscope image shows the stone arches being built over forms in 1883. (Henry Farr, Minnesota Historical Society)

The two-track railroad bridge was being built at the time the park board was created in 1883.

The Stone Arch Bridge being completed in 1883. (Burlington Northern, Minnesota Historical Society)

This is another favorite shot of the bridge as it neared completion

David C. Smith   minneapolisparkhistory[at]q.com