Lawrence A. Martin
Minneapolis Park System In General.
The Minneapolis park system is governed by a nine-member elected board of commissioners, with six commissioners representing each of the city's park districts and three commissioners elected at large. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board was established by charter as a semi-independent board with the power to enact ordinances governing park use, to levy taxes, and establish its own budget (with limited veto power by the Mayor and some City Council control over the allocation of state funds). The approved budget of the Park Board for 1998 was approximately $46 million. Currently, the Park Board organization includes five divisions to provide administration, planning, programs, development, maintenance, and police protection for the city's recreational facilities. The Minneapolis Park System consists of more than 170 park properties including local and regional parks, playgrounds, tot lots, triangles, golf courses, gardens, picnic areas, biking and walking paths, nature sanctuaries, and a 55-mile parkway system. Together, these properties total nearly 6,400 acres of land and water. In addition, many Minneapolis cultural and historic amenities are located on park land or administered by the Park Board, such as the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Historic Fort Snelling, the Stevens House, the Ard Godfrey House, the Longfellow House, and the Grand Rounds National Scenic Highway.
Minneapolis Park Board History.
In 1857, Edward Murphy donated the land for the City's first park, which was Murphy Square, 801 22nd Ave South. Murphy was an earlier settler and entrepreneur who had taken over, in 1853, the operation a ferry on the Mississippi River. In 1847, a ferry was established by William Cheever, which ran from the foot of Essex Street on the east bank to the foot of 3rd Street South on the west bank. A ferry ran there until 1889, when the Franklin Avenue bridge was finished. Murphy claimed the west side of the area served by the ferry after the west side of the Mississippi River was opened to settlement, which was initially known as Murphy's Landing. The Minneapolis Park Board, established in 1883, took over responsibility for the respective park system from the Minneapolis city council. In that year, the predecessor to the current Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board was created by an act of the Minnesota Legislature to serve as an independently elected, semi-autonomous body responsible for maintaining and developing the Minneapolis park system to meet the needs of citizens of the city of Minneapolis. For over a century, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board has gained experience in park management, including the development and enhancement of park and recreation facilities and programs.
About 25 years after the donation of the first park, the Minneapolis Board of Trade and others took their need for parks and open space to the State Legislature. On February 27, 1883, the Legislature authorized an independent Board of Park Commissioners for the City of Minneapolis, with its own taxing authority. Soon after, city voters elected the first park Commissioners.
Using eastern cities as a model and drawing on Fredrick Olmstead's city design concepts, a system of boulevards was envisioned which would connect large parks, stimulate private development, increase land values, and eventually increase financial revenues for the city. The Park Board hired Chicago landscape architect Horace W.S. Cleveland, who was a protégé of Frederick Olmstead, to develop a grand vision for parks which was called "The Grand Rounds." The civic aspirations of a growing metropolis led the Board to pursue open space acquisition to provide space for "passive recreation." Plans for the St. Paul park systems also were originally developed by Cleveland in the late nineteenth century. Cleveland had the foresight to envision an inter-linking network of scenic drives, parks, and river boulevards for the "United Cities", and understood the importance of preserving some of the natural features of the land adjacent to the cities' lakes and rivers. Cleveland's legacy to Minneapolis is a park system comprising almost 6,400 acres, 1,400 of which are water, and 58 miles of parkways. During the late 1800's, twenty-one park areas were either acquired by or donated to the City or the Park Board.
During the early 1900's, the Park Board began promoting active recreation, which soon became the major use of parks, and the Board created a division of recreation within its administrative structure. In 1901, William Folwell, president of the Minneapolis Board of Park Commisssioners, proposed the idea of parks in the outlying areas of Hennepin County. Theodore Wirth championed this plan for an expanded park system during his tenure as Superintendent of Minneapolis Parks from 1906 to 1935. In 1906, Theodore Wirth became the superintendent of Parks in Minneapolis. He later became known as the 'father' of the Minneapolis park system. Born in Switzerland and educated in Europe, Wirth came to the United States in 1888, at the age of 25. After working in various positions in New Jersey and Connecticut, he moved west to Minnesota. He was a dynamic, progressive, energetic leader who loved flowers. The first two Minneapolis Park Board greenhouses were erected in 1907. Prior to 1906, the Park Board had purchased their bedding plants. In 1906, wooden hotbed frames were used, along with space in the neighboring Minneapolis Floral Company greenhouses. Two more Park Board greenhouses were built in 1909 and a third pair were added in 1912. The 1.5-acre outdoor rose garden was established and 4,000 roses were planted in 1907.
The Great Depression led to federally funded programs that enabled the parks system to make major capital improvements and to keep desired jobs and maintenance programs. Also, community cooperation helped build youth recreation programs, playgrounds and park neighborhood centers. The Minneapolis Park Board also had responsibility for the operations of Wold Chamberlain Field, the Twin Cities airport, from 1926 to 1943. In 1926, the airfield had grown from a single hangar to 325 acres and eight hangars. The Park Board gave the field a new title, the Minneapolis Municipal Airport. Initially, its main terminal, a former Park Board warming house, was staffed by two Park Board employees. A new terminal building was built in 1930. In 1943, the Legislature established the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) and assigned it the responsibility of operating the airport.
During the period from World War II to the mid-1960's, many open areas of the City were developed. In 1944, the Minneapolis Park Board opened the most northern American Rose Society test garden in the United States. Neighborhood parks in these areas were acquired and developed, financed through assessments to the benefited area. New parks were proposed during urban renewal efforts in the City, but some parkland was ultimately lost due to freeway construction.
During the period of the mid-1960s to 1999, the Board adopted a no-net-loss-of-land policy and added recreation to its official title. Additional neighborhood parks were acquired by the Park Board to help achieve geographic equity. The "Bicycle Grand Rounds" were developed to parallel roadways. In 1990, the population of Minneapolis was 368,383. Population of the seven county Twin Cities metropolitan area was about 2.6 million, about 60 percent of Minnesota's state population of about 4.4 million. By 1992, the Minneapolis park system covered 6,400 acres.
In 2000, an analysis of system infrastructure identified $100 million in capital improvement needs for the neighborhood park system and funding gaps of $5 million for programs and other services. Land was acquired and development was begun for the Fort Snelling Athletic Complex. Riverfront construction projects, such as Mill Ruins Park, the North Mississippi Interpretive Center, and the Upper River Master Plan, were begun.
The Development of Specific Parks.
The history and the names of the many Minneapolis parks tell a great deal about the settling of the city and about its people. Several parks, such as Windom, Logan, and Beltrami, have had more than one name through the years, and for a long time Gluek Park had no name at all.
Columbia, Windom and Logan are Northeast's oldest parks. Another park, the East Side Park was built in 1882 on the site where the Exposition Building once stood on the east bank of the Mississippi River. In 1883, the Minneapolis City Council spent $52,422.64 to acquire the land for Logan Park originally known as First Ward Park. The park board acquired 8.5 acres of the Moulton Tract, later to become Windom Park, for $25,000 in 1886, and a much bigger piece of land farther north, which later became known as Columbia Park. Columbia Park was founded in 1892, on 183 acres of hilly land west of Central Avenue. It was so named because of its acquisition during the Columbian year and because of its proximity to the suburb of Columbia Heights.
In the east end of the city, the Armour Company decided to build a packing plant in St. Paul instead of the land it owned in Minneapolis (now Gross Golf Course) . When the city started to build St. Anthony Parkway, the park board acquired a 14 acre tract of land, which it named Grandview Park. Grandview was renamed for Portius C. Deming on May 21, 1930. Deming apparently was a very ardent advocate and promoter of the St. Anthony parkway project and was also a Minneapolis Park Commissioner from 1895 to 1899 and the president of the Park Board from 1915 to 1917.
Beltrami Park started out as Maple Hill, an 1857 private cemetery where many Civil War veterans also were buried. In 1894, more than 1,000 bodies were moved from Maple Hill to Sunset and Hillside Cemeteries. In 1908, the Minneapolis Park Board gained title to some of the land and built a playground on the eastern part of the park. Eventually the land was converted to a park and named in honor of Giacomo Constantino Beltrami (1779-1885), an Italian jurist, scholar and explorer who discovered the source of the Mississippi River in 1823.
Gluek Park, was named in honor of Arthur Gluek, who donated $25,000 to the city if it would name a park in his family's honor at the site of the brewery. Gluek Brewery was founded in 1857 by Gottlieb Gluek, a German immigrant, who dug two artesian wells on the site. The brewery building was torn down in 1966, and the city bought the land in the late 1970s. Arthur Gluek died in February, 1990. Work on the park was finished in 1994. It was officially named Gluek Riverside Park on May 6, 1995.
Logan Park was named for a Civil War hero. Logan Park was purchased by the Park Board in 1883 and was originally called First Ward Park. Its name was changed to Logan Park in honor of General John Alexander Logan, a general who served in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Logan was also a representative in Congress and a senator. In 1884, he was the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States. In the late 1800s, Logan Park was a decorative city square.
Marshall Terrace Park, Waite Park, and Windom Park honor Minnesota politicians. The Park Board bought Marshall Terrace in 1914. It was named for William R. Marshall, governor of Minnesota from 1866 to 1879. Waite Park was named for Minneapolis district judge Edward Foote Waite, who was often called the father of the juvenile court system and who also served as an assistant Hennepin county attorney, Minneapolis police chief, municipal judge, juvenile judge, district court judge and assistant United States district attorney. The Park Board bought Windom Park and named it for William Windom of Winona, Minn., a U.S. senator who became secretary of the U.S. Treasury.
Audubon Park became part of the Minneapolis park system in 1910. It was named for the renowned American ornithologist John James Audubon (1785-1851), who was born in Haiti, raised in France, and emigrated to the United States in 1803.
Minneahaha Park is one of Minneapolis' oldest and most popular parks, attracting over ˝ million visitors each year. Before Minnehaha was a park, it was a train stop with as many as 39 train trips per day arriving at the Princess Station. In 1889, the State of Minnesota loaned the City of Minneapolis $100,000 to purchase the park from its private owners. The park was named Minnehaha, which means 'laughing waters', for the falls as they were referred to for the first time in Henry W. Longfellow's poem 'Song of Hiawatha.' A zoo was establish in 1894 and was closed in 1934. Minnehaha Park contains 193 acres and also has a 53-foot waterfall, limestone bluffs, and river overlooks. The Park contains Oak, Elm, Silver Maple, Basswood, Hackberry and Cottonwood trees as well as native and prairie woodland wild flowers. Nearby Hiawatha Avenue was once the main path Indians used to travel back & forth between the two falls located in Minneapolis (St. Anthony - the big falls and Minnehaha - the little falls).
In the 1870s and 1880s, when Cedar Lake and Lake Calhoun bustled with resort activity, Lake of the Isles, just two miles from the heart of downtown Minneapolis, remained a mostly deserted, mosquito-infested marshland. Then, during the period from 1886 through 1888, the Minneapolis City Park System made considerable progress in acquiring park properties in the lake district by donation, condemnation, and purchase. Civic leaders believed the city needed parks as a refuge from urban development. In 1907, a group of citizens proposed attaching Lake of the Isles and Lake Calhoun for the purpose of sport. The Minneapolis Park System undertook the project and, in 1911, the lakes were connected. Shortly thereafter, in 1913, Cedar Lake joined the chain. Perhaps the most well-known symbol of Lake of the Isles's history is the Peavy Fountain. Given to the Minneapolis City Park System in 1891 by Frank Peavy, this tall granite rock with a watering trough for horses originally served as a stopping point for travelers venturing out from the city. Following World War I, the fountain was rededicated as a memorial to the horses of the 151st Field Artillery which were killed in action. The trough now is a flower bed.
Loring Pond and the surrounding Loring Park were acquired by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board in 1883. Loring Pond consists of two basins. The smaller of the two basins was originally a wetland that was excavated during 1883-84 to form the small, or north basin. The north basin was again dredged in 1976-77. Located in the heart of downtown Minneapolis, Loring Pond and the surrounding Loring Park are an important part of city life. Throughout the year, the Park plays host to concerts, movies, picnics, ice skating, tennis, horseshoes, sunbathing, wildlife and people watching, jogging, and relaxing. The Pond and Park provide valuable habitat to ducks, geese, squirrels, turtles, songbirds, and numerous aquatic organisms.
Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden.
Eloise Butler was a nobody in her time. She was a spinster school teacher with no important family connections, no significant wealth, and no connections to people in high places. Yet she persisted to overcome many obstacles put before women interested in botany. Despite dismissive treatment by the Minneapolis Park Board, she founded a native wild flower garden that was one of the first that was established nationally and was certainly the most complete of its time.
Eloise Butler was born in 1852 on a farm in Appleton, Maine, the third child and second daughter of schoolteacher parents of limited income. She and her adored older sister, Cora, had, in their childhood, spent as much of their time as possible roaming the woods and bogs around their home finding and identifying the plants that grew there. They called it "botanizing" and it would remain their favorite shared pastime throughout their lives. Butler and her four brothers and one sister were fortunate to have parents who believed in education and saw to it that all their children received the best one they could provide. That meant they help her pay for college with what money they could spare to supplement the $38 per month she made from teaching in local one room schools. She had begun teaching while she was still in high school. Butler got her college degree from the newly opened Eastern State Normal School in Castine, Maine in 1873.
While she was still in college, she attended a summer institute at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts and became fascinated with algae. Having discovered microscopes and algae, she set about finding and identifying all the algae on her botanizing rambles.
When her family left Maine and moved west to Indiana, Butler followed when her current teaching term was over. But, since she found the same employment conditions in Indiana as in Maine, she made up her mind to go to Minneapolis, where they were advertising for teachers for their public schools. She joined the faculty at Center School, which was a facility with four classrooms on each of two floors and a large assembly hall on the third. The school taught primary through high school students, had one male principal, seven female teachers, and 700 students who had to be taught in two separate sessions per day. Butler earned the sum of $50 per month. Later, she moved on to the newly built South High School and taught botany there until her retirement from teaching in 1911.
Early in the history of botany, anyone with an interest and a willingness to read and learn could develop a reputation as an expert. However, after the Civil War, the field of botany began to be dominated by the academics who formed closed fraternal societies that refused to admit "amateurs," which included most women. Of 1,185 women identified as active in botany by the turn of the century, only 2% were affiliated with a college or university and only 15% had any botanical career at all. Those who did have a botanical career were elementary and high school teachers, lab assistants, illustrators, curators, librarians or horticulturists. Many of the women engaged in botanical studies had done the work that became the basis of scholarly books by men.
Butler did the same, providing her precious original work to men writing the books and getting the expert reputation. For many years, she sent her algal specimens to the Reverend Francis Wolle, who wrote the two volume text Freshwater Algae of the United States. Several of the species she sent him were new to science and two he named for her (Cosmarium eloiseanum and Staurastrum eloiseanum). Conditions were such that women were only allowed to be collectors, not namers, even among the ranks of the "amateurs."
Butler was always learning more. She went to every summer institute she could afford. She corresponded with the botanists she met there. She read widely and discussed botany any time she could. Through a connection with a friend's husband she had met in Cora Butler's hometown of Malden, Massachusetts, the Butler sisters began supplying specimens of seaweeds to Frank Collins, who was then the foremost amateur authority on marine algae and seaweeds in the country. Eloise Butler and Cora Butler made three trips to Jamaica from 1891 to 1901 to collect seaweeds for him. This was 30 years before it became a tourist destination and the conditions there were most primitive. The seaweeds collected by the Butler sisters were carefully salted, packed, and shipped to Collins in Malden. Only 31 species were known from Jamaica when they first went on their collecting trip, but Eloise and Cora Butler added 190 species and varieties to that number. Though Collins credited their collections, the resulting papers he wrote only bore his name and he named all the new species found by the Butlers.
As the city of Minneapolis grew and spread over the surrounding countryside, Eloise Butler became more and more upset about the destruction of its native wild flower habitat. Several times over the years, Butler had petitioned the Park Board and the University of Minnesota to develop preserves for their protection. Her requests were ignored. Finally, understanding that they would never listen to just her, Butler spent the winter of 1906-1907 drumming up support from the citizens of Minneapolis. In the Spring of 1907, she was able to get the Park Board to grant her permission to use three acres in an existing park. The most important apparent reasons for their agreement was that they already owned the land and that Butler was volunteering to do the work, with the only cost to the Park Board being the price of the fencing for the three acres.
Over the years Butler labored to catalog, maintain and extend the collection. The Park Board unwillingly followed her lead, expanding the garden slowly to nearly fourteen acres before she died. The site chosen was mostly bog and the surrounding slopes. As the garden grew and after Butler retired from teaching, the Woman's Club of Minneapolis petitioned the Park Board to name her as curator of the garden and to pay her a salary. They did so and set Butler's salary at $50 per month for the "season". Her duties included the collection and culture of 600 species of Minnesota plants still to be obtained, the labeling of the plants with common and botanical names, and the keeping of extensive records on the plants. These records included a topographic survey, with the location and the history of each plant to be kept on a card in a catalog file.
Eloise Butler was always at odds with the Park Board on matters of financing the garden. As it grew outside the bounds of the original three acres, security for the rare plants in the garden became difficult. Often the orchids were picked, the delicate stream side plants were trampled, or whole plants were dug up and taken away. Again and again, Butler begged for fencing, but Theodore Wirth, the Park Superintendent, was busy developing golf links, ski facilities, and a bathhouse in the Park and he brushed her pleas aside. Finally, in 1923, Butler became so determined not to see her life's work so badly treated, she spent $700 dollars of her own money to have the fence constructed. She was dumbfounded when Wirth offered to reimburse her for it.
In 1929, the Park Board named the garden the "Eloise Butler Wild Flower Garden" in recognition of Butler's lifelong commitment to it. She continued her strenuous work in her beloved garden into her eighty first year and died there on the afternoon of April 10, 1933. According to her wishes, Butler was cremated and her ashes spread in the garden. Her legacy to her contemporaries was one of the finest, and most complete, native plant gardens then in existence.
Time and urban development have changed the garden today. The water table is lower and the soil dryer. The use of highly treated city water as the irrigation source has changed the pH and mineral relations too. Many of the rare, site dependent, treasures that Butler had nurtured during the 1910's, 1920's, and 1930's have subsequently disappeared. Though the garden is still very beautiful during the flowering season, it is not the same place it was in Butler's day.
Minneapolis Park and Related Area Restoration.
Restoration activities in the parks have occurred under the direction of Park Board's Environmental Operations staff. Before the early 1990s, management practices were primarily limited to the enhancement of existing vegetation at several remnant prairie, bog, wetland and woodland sites using buckthorn removal, prescribed burning, and mowing. The first systematic restoration effort began in 1993, with the receipt of an Legislative Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCMR) grant to restore the prairie at several park sites. Prairie plantings were deemed more likely to be accepted by the public than other types of restorations, since a prairie landscape would maintain the open "park-like" vistas to which most people are accustomed.
Site selection was initially an intuitive process undertaken with the assistance of an established restoration firm. A variety of experimental planting techniques were employed, including seeding through turf grass with no site preparation, but most proved unsuccessful. The failure of this project, combined with public outcry over a controversial budget-driven cutback in mowing turf grass along shorelines and steep slopes, forced a reevaluation of the Park Board's approach to restoration management.
In 1995, the Park Board agreed to fund a five-year Vegetation Conversion Program to reestablish native plant communities throughout the park system. Under this program, almost 50 sites have been converted. Most of these conversions have involved the replacement of existent turf grass sites with prairie grasses. A limited number of wetland, savanna, and forest restorations also have been undertaken. Site selection and management practices have become more established, and assessment and evaluation are built into the management plan. Site selection criteria for the establishment of new prairies included whether or not the site is located in a neighborhood or a regional park, with regional parks given a priority because of their greater availability of open space, what is the extent of tree cover, with sites with full sun exposure preferred, and whether or not there is a low potential for recreational use, following policies to reduce the likelihood of human impact and to preserve recreational space; steep slopes and other areas which are difficult or dangerous to mow, such as sites where it has been difficult to establish turf grass because of poor soil, especially sand and gravel areas.
The other large-scale Minneapolis Park restoration effort is funded through a program established under section 319 of the federal Clean Water Act. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency administers the grant program through its Clean Water Partnership with local units of government. The Chain of Lakes Clean Water Partnership was formed in 1994 to improve water quality in the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes - Brownie, Cedar, Lake of the Isles, Calhoun, and Harriet. In cooperation with the Minnehaha Creek Watershed District, the Park Board and other agencies is working on the construction and/or restoration of wetlands and detention ponds, on upgrading storm sewers, and on altering shoreline erosion control practices through a public education campaign.
The experience of Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board in parkland restoration has been qualitatively different than that in St. Paul. The Minneapolis Park Board embarked on a comprehensive parkland restoration program with clearly articulated ecological goals, which were habitat creation and enhancement, water quality improvement, shoreline erosion protection, expanded environmental education/volunteer opportunities for the public, and reduced herbicide/pesticide use. It created an important monitoring tool, the Vegetation Management Database, which was critical for establishing routine maintenance practices. Unfortunately, funding for the Vegetation Conversion Program was cut for its third year of operation, in 1998.
The mechanism used by the Park Board to encourage citizen involvement in the restoration planning process, Citizen Advisory Committees, can also create as many problems as it solves. The Chain of Lakes master planning process often ended up in neighbors lining up on one side, environmentalists on another side, and designers and park planners on yet a third side. Though Cedar Meadows encountered a number of problems (initial planting/seeding failure and contractor inexperience), neighbors generally supported the project. The proposed wetland plantings for Lake Harriet, on the other hand, generated substantial neighborhood resistance, recalling earlier controversies related to reduced mowing of turf grass in the parks.
Sources:
http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/horticulture/components/6642c05.html http://www.minneapolisparks.org/default.asp?PageID=51 http://www.i5ive.com/article.cfm/northern_gardening/16250 http://home.talkcity.com/LibertySt/columbiaheights/news/1999/neoct19.htm http://www.mspmag.com/feature.asp?featureid=2010 http://www.minneapolisparks.org/default.asp?PageID=2 http://www.npcr.org/reports/npcr1064/npcr1064.html#_Toc397247952 http://www.mspairport.com/Airport_News/Airport_History.asp
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This webpage was last updated on March 5, 2002.
