Minneapolis, Minnesota

Minneapolis is the largest city in Minnesota, the “land of 10,000 lakes.” Once predominately a mill town, the city is now home to many service industries and is the arts and entertainment capital of the Upper Midwest, noted in particular for its abundance of theater companies.

Landscape

Minneapolis is located in the southeast central portion of Minnesota. Water is plentiful in the “City of Lakes”: it is situated on the upper Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls, once the largest falls on the entire river. The city’s 58-square-mile land area ranges from an elevation of 945 feet down to 695 feet. The area was once covered in hardwood forest, although many trees disappeared as logging, mills, and other industry came to the city.

Summer temperatures are moderate and relatively dry compared with much of the Midwestern United States. The average high in July is 83 degrees Fahrenheit, and the average low is 63 degrees Fahrenheit. As with most of the Midwest, the occasional punishing storm can hit the city. A July 1987 storm brought ten inches of rain within seven hours, leading to damaging floods and two deaths.

Winters in Minneapolis are anything but moderate. Snow is common from November to April, with annual totals averaging 54 inches. January high temperatures average 19 degrees Fahrenheit, and drop as low as two degrees Fahrenheit (the record low is –34 degrees Fahrenheit). Wind chill temperatures are routinely below zero during the winter months.

In January 1975, one storm dropped 23.5 inches of snow on Minnesota. In 1982, another storm deposited 18.5 inches directly on Minneapolis, while winds gusting up to 60 miles per hour created intense wind chill temperatures of from –50 to –80 degrees Fahrenheit, and snow drifts up to 20 feet high. In January 2023, Minneapolis received 15.1 inches of snow, and in February of the same year, it received 13.4 inches of now.

The downtown area features seventy-two blocks of enclosed “skyways” between buildings, allowing shoppers and businesspeople to traverse the city without fighting snow-covered streets or arctic-like winter temperatures.

People

The total population of Minneapolis, according to a 2022 US Census Bureau estimate, is 425,096, the forty-sixth largest in the United States. The surrounding metropolitan area, including “twin city” St. Paul, is home to more than 4.0 million. Ethnically, the city is approximately 60 percent non-Hispanic White, 18.5 percent African American, 1.2 percent American Indian, 9.9 percent Hispanic, and 5.2 percent Asian.

The city has a strong Scandinavian heritage, as chronicled by the American Swedish Institute, a museum founded in 1929. Many Hispanic farm workers came to the area in the early 1900s. Hmong immigrants, mainly from Laos, also form a large community in Minneapolis.

The city claims ties to the famous Americans across various disciplines, including:

• Musicians the Andrews Sisters, Bob Dylan, and Prince
• Actors Josh Hartnett and Jessica Lang
• Television and motion picture writer and directors, including Joel and Ethan Coen, Al Franken, and George Roy Hill
• Writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, August Wilson, and Anne Tyler
• Politicians Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Jesse Ventura
• Oil executive J. Paul Getty
• Cartoonist Charles Schulz

Economy

While Minneapolis was once a fur trading post and a lumber center, its chief early economic activity was flour milling. The local wheat crops, including hardy winter wheat plantings, helped the city lead the world in flour production at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, many area companies trace their roots to this early manufacturing boom. Such firms include Cargill, established in Minneapolis in 1865. The company is the nation’s largest privately held corporation in terms of revenue, employing 150,000 employees in more than sixty countries. Other local food producers include Pillsbury, founded in Minneapolis in 1869, and General Mills, which grew out of Washburn Crosby, a milling company founded in 1928. Minneapolis remains one of the world’s leading grain markets.

Lumber mills failed in the early 1900s as the stock of local white pine trees was depleted. Other manufacturers remained in Minneapolis, including the 3M Company in nearby St. Paul, one of the area’s largest employers. During the latter half of the twentieth century, the city’s economy was increasingly dominated by retail, health care, and education.

Today, the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis is one of the state’s largest employers, with more than 24,000 workers on its payrolls. Medtronic Corporation, famous for its pacemakers and other medical equipment, employs 95,000 worldwide and is worth more than $51 billion as of 2023. Other large employers headquartered in Minneapolis include Allina Health, a nonprofit health care system that employed more than 28,500 people in Minnesota in 2022.

In 2017, Minneapolis-based retailer Target Corporation was thirty-ninth in the Fortune 500 ranking of the nation’s largest firms with revenues of more than $73 billion per year.

Landmarks

The city’s “castle” is the Turnblad mansion, which houses the American Swedish Institute, a museum that chronicles the Scandinavian heritage of Minneapolis. The thirty-three-room mansion was built in 1908.

After New York City, Minneapolis has more theaters than any similarly sized city in the United States. The Guthrie Theater is the largest regional playhouse in the country, and counts 32,000 subscribers. There are many smaller playhouses that host a wide variety of productions.

Museums include the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, known for its ancient art collections, and the Minnesota Children’s Museum in St. Paul. Both are highly ranked nationally. The Mill City Museum, opened in 2003, is located in an 1880 riverfront mill building that was once the largest flour mill in the world. The Falls of St. Anthony are still an attraction in the city, although they have been cut down from their original grandeur in order to provide water to various mills.

The entire city was thrust into the national spotlight during the 1970s, thanks to the popular television series The Mary Tyler Moore Show, ostensibly set in Minneapolis. The façade used for the show’s newspaper office was actually the Midwest Federal Savings and Loan building. Moore’s home in the series also remains a stop for many tourists, although the residents of the private Kenwood Parkway mansion do not welcome visitors looking for memorabilia.

The city’s Metrodome sports arena, formerly the home to the Minnesota Twins and Vikings, was a giant bubble made of Teflon-coated fiberglass suspended by air pressure (250,000 cubic feet of pressure per minute). The roof collapsed a few times as heavy snows caused the fabric to tear. Outfield baseball players routinely complained that the roof’s off-white color was the same as that of slightly dirty baseballs, making balls hit high very difficult to see. In 2014, the roof of the Metrodome was deflated, and demolition of the stadium commenced. In 2010 the Minnesota Twins had moved to the Target Field in Minneapolis, and the Minnesota Vikings played at the TCF Bank Stadium from 2014 to 2015 before moving to the U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis in 2016.

Nearby Bloomington, Minnesota, is home to the Mall of America, a gigantic shopping mall with more than 520 stores, an amusement park, and an aquarium.

History

American Indians, particularly the Dakota band of the Sioux tribe, were well established in the area of Minneapolis before French explorers arrived in the territory in the 1600s. Father Louis Hennepin is credited with naming the Falls of St. Anthony in 1680.

As a part of the Louisiana territory, the area of Minneapolis west of the Mississippi came under Spanish control in 1762. Lands east of the river, including portions of Minneapolis, came under English control following the French and Indian War of 1763. The area was ceded back to the French briefly before Napoleon and President Thomas Jefferson agreed to the Louisiana Purchase, in which the entire area was sold to the United States.

While French, Spanish, English and American settlers were all claiming rights to the area, it was still home to many American Indians, although foreign diseases, such as whooping cough, killed many of them. In addition, white incursion onto native lands led to armed conflict, but a treaty with the Sioux gave the US rights to the territory in the early 1800s. Fort Snelling was established in 1819 to solidify this claim. During the 1800s, the economic foundation of the city shifted from the fur trade to flour, as the first mills were built using the river’s waterpower. Minneapolis was incorporated as a city in 1867, just as the railroads were opening the plains to greater trade.

Early efforts to tame the river for power were met by numerous setbacks, as the limestone and sandstone riverbeds faltered under heavy construction. One of the worst disasters was the 1869 collapse of a 2,500-foot tunnel. The Falls of St. Anthony drew many tourists at one time, including authors Henry David Thoreau and Mark Twain.

Minneapolis is somewhat responsible for the plethora of shopping malls found in American today. Initially, connecting the various stores in the city was a response to the cold winters. The trend began with the opening of the Southdale mall in the suburb of Edina in 1956. The skywalks that in effect make a large chunk of downtown Minneapolis a giant mall were first built in 1962. This Minneapolis mall innovation culminated with the construction of the mega-sized Mall of America in nearby Bloomington.

Trivia

• The Mall of America is the size of seventy-eight football fields.
• Wheaties breakfast cereal was first produced in Minneapolis in 1924.
• Minneapolis claims to have more golfers per capita than any other city in the country.
• Minnesota’s more than 10,000 lakes create 90,000 miles of shoreline, more than California, Florida, and Hawaii combined.
• The Metrodome hosted the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the NCAA basketball championships.
• University of Minnesota hospitals conducted the first open-heart surgery and the first bone marrow transplant operations performed in the United States.

Bibliography

Day, Holly, and Sherman Wick. Nordeast Minneapolis: A History. The History Press, 2015.

Millett, Larry. Twin Cities Then and Now. Minnesota Historical Society, 1996.

“Minneapolis City, Minnesota.” QuickFacts, US Census Bureau, www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/minneapoliscityminnesota/RHI725221Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

Pennefeather, Shannon M., editor. Mill City: A Visual History of the Minneapolis Mill District. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2003.

Walker, Charles Rumford. American City: A Rank and File History of Minneapolis. U of Minnesota P, 2005.