Star Tribune Obituary: Walter Carpenter, former Minneapolis Park Board president
Walter Schenck Carpenter, a vigorous opponent of encroachment on recreational lands who helped Minneapolis save its elms from Dutch elm disease three decades ago, died Dec. 21 at his Minneapolis home. He was 80.
Elected to the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board in 1965, Carpenter championed court battles to stop highway construction through city parks.
"The park system of Minneapolis for too long has been used as a conventional route for the highway planners," he wrote in a 1967 newspaper commentary opposing losing 21 acres of Minnehaha Park to an expansion of Hwy. 55.
"We must resist the continuing efforts and emphasis on only the economic worth of our lands and reach a new era when recognition is given to the social values which contribute to human enrichment," Carpenter wrote.
The board lost its case in a Minnesota Supreme Court decision that backed the Highway Department. About the time the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the board's appeal in 1970, the board and the Highway Department were coming to an agreement about alternate routes.
Carpenter became president of the board in 1967, and pushed through a suspension of the rules to restructure the board ahead of 1969, when a reorganizational charter amendment would take effect. He had written the amendment "to reduce the size of the 18-member board -- totally unwieldy," said his wife, Elsa. The amendment, approved by city voters, called for a nine-member board. He left the board in 1971 after four years as its president.
A graduate of Washburn High School and the University of Minnesota, Carpenter owned several landscape-related businesses over the years. In 1994 he was elected to the hall of fame of the Minnesota Nursery and Landscape Association for urging an aggressive program in Minneapolis of trimming, removing and feeding parkway elms in the face of the devastating sweep of Dutch elm disease in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "As a result of his efforts, Minneapolis still retains thousands of elms," the association newsletter said in 1994.
In addition to his wife, Elsa, survivors include a daughter, Ann Carpenter Kay of Minnetonka; sons Matthew of Eden Prairie, Scott of St. Louis Park and Judd of Minnetonka, and nine grandchildren.
Services will be held at 3:30 p.m. Jan. 6 at First Universalist Church, 3400 Dupont Av. S., Minneapolis.
Trudi Hahn, Star Tribune, December 30, 2004
Staff writer Mike Meyers contributed to this article.
Trudi Hahn is at thahn@startribune.com.