Nicollet Island
When I accepted a leadership role in the Nicollet Island resident group at the time (in 1970), The official description of the housing on the North Tip, along Hennepin Ave., and on the east bank was that of dilapidated housing slated for removal. The residents were described as being beset with a variety of social ills. In the larger context, the newly established St. Anthony Falls Historic District and the extant urban renewal plan for the area were on a collision course. In a still larger context, issues of blight surrounding the downtown core and significant issues of exclusion from the planning process for persons affected by urban renewal had to be borne in mind.
What ought not be lost in the heat of current debate is the central role that Nicollet Island has played in the history of Minneapolis and earlier still that St. Anthony Falls and its environs played in the cultures of the two major Native American settlements for which the Mississippi was a significant line of demarcation. This historical reality is what engendered Congressional establishment of the St. Anthony Falls Historic District and the eventual designation of Nicollet Island as a regional park by the State of Minnesota.
Several postulates emerged as our tasks played out in the 1970s. With the help of the State Historical Society we understood that many buildings were beyond utility or appropriate continued use and these were all removed in due course. This cleared the way for the bridge and highway improvements now in place.
It was also a matter of general agreement, borne out by a 40-acre study of the east bank area, that this part of the Nicollet Island-East Bank urban renewal area could sustain a major commercial and residential development. That too is in place, albeit with some financial growing pains for Riverplace and St. Anthony Main that required infusions of CDBG funds in the 1980s. At considerable expense to the then Minneapolis Housing and Redevelopment Authority, the old limestone structure that had been sited further from the river was moved to its present location abutting the open plaza at Riverplace. Main Street was replumbed and repaved with cobblestones and the streets were renewed on the Island itself. The Bicentennial Commission spent their entire budget establishing the amphitheatre park on the South Tip of Nicollet Island.
In due course, a bridge span was moved at Hennepin County's expense to create a surface link between the south tip of the Island and Main St. The old sash and door limestone structure was rehabbed into the Nicollet Island Inn, the Grove St. Flats were saved from oblivion, and the residential community on the north tip was established as a unique resource hearkening back to residential architectural styles in the early decades of the city's history.
The planning scenario also addressed another important postulate, namely that there should be a residential presence on the north tip of the Island in order to avoid - especially once Boom Island and ribbon parks along both banks of the Mississippi the strip were improved as open space - what was familiarly referred to as the "Central Park" syndrome. This was a significant matter - with no 24-hour residential presence, the north tip of the Island and its environs qua regional park would not be safe.
There was also general agreement about another postulate, namely that all the public should have access to this historical area. This meant in practice that there could not be a gated community on the Island. The compromise that was reached here leaves the land itself in the public's trust, requires that infill in the residential area is consonant with the historical architectural character of the preexisting buildings and left significant open space where commercial buildings had once stood, and puts a lid on speculation in the value of the houses themselves.
It was a real pleasure in the 1980s to be able to give history tours around the Historic District via horse carriage. Subsequent establishment of excursion boat tours anchored on Boom Island, the renovation of the Stone Arch bridge, and major improvements on the west bank of the river within the Historic District give credence to the viability of the St. Anthony Falls area as a major uplifting factor for Minneapolis, the metropolitan region, and Minnesota itself. This is the birthplace of Minneapolis and that reality is celebrated by a carefully crafted evolution in the urban renewal process that for once did not destroy what was "renewed" and included those affected by the process at the heart of the planning involved.
This is what stewardship has meant for Nicollet Island since the total clearance intentions of the urban renewal plan were set aside 35 years ago. One may celebrate this in a grand way with fireworks, bands and concerts and one may appreciate the quiet pleasures to be found in the District's and the Island's natural setting. I give the Islanders, including De LaSalle, great credit for taking this responsibility seriously and I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to the many bodies, both public and private, who are keeping this legacy alive.
There's an element of "location envy" that's been in the Nicollet Island residential mix for longer than even De LaSalle can assert. Col. King had his mansion where De LaSalle now stands and cared for his prize livestock where we now enjoy the Farmstead Rose Garden, perhaps arriving via "King's Highway" aka Dupont Ave. S. William Eastman had his mansion where the De LaSalle football field is now located. He also built Eastman Flats (torn down for DeLaSalle's building and parking lot that faces Hennepin Ave.) and the Grove St. Flats that are still extant, renovated, on the National Register of Historic Places, and home to folks who paid handsomely at market rates for their respective parts of this condominium.
People of more modest means settled on the North Tip of the Island, beginning with a farmhouse of sorts built in 1863, as I recall. Still there, renovated, part of the residential cooperative ensemble. There are pictures from the Civil War years that show Nicollet St. as a raw cut in the earth and the South Tip with a field under cultivation where the Park Board has put in a surface parking lot for the adjacent private enterprises.
During the heyday of milling expansion, Franklin Steele attempted a flour mill whose millrace tunnel construction led to a collapse of the limestone riverbed and a thirty-year effort by the Army Corp of Engineers to stabilize St. Anthony Falls. Also during this time after the Civil War, a limestone suspension bridge was built from the Island to Bridge Square on the downtown side of the river, the lumbering years brought Boom Island its name, and the gandy dancers who built our railroads recreated themselves in a red light district that kept the original farmhouse company on the back of the Island.
The other houses on the North Tip, still there, renovated, etc., now recognized as a unique ensemble of 19th-century residential architectural styles, were built in the 1880s or thereabouts and housed middle- and working-class families whose children attended school where Carlson Store Equipment Manufacturing Company operated and where there is now some of that precious open space on the North Tip that helps gives the Island its credence as a regional park. I used to find clay marbles in the ground when I had one of the community garden plots in the vicinity during the 1970s.
The Island is something of an antiquarian's paradise because the North Tip community survived World War I and the flu pandemic, the Great Depression - bootlegging days on the island, I'm told - a fresh influx of families as everywhere in the 1950s, and some folks on the fringe of society in the 1960s. A fascinating place to this day and still there to be experienced by the general public because of herculean efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to keep this gentle ambiance a part of Minneapolis' and St. Anthony's historical legacy.
Robert Lilligren wrote to Mpls Issues a while back describing how he likes to stop by Nicollet Island as a place of spiritual substance. Well he might, given his Native American heritage. I don't think it's accidental, parenthetically, that religious folks of a contemplative bent built an edifice that looks out over Lake Calhoun or that first the Unitarians and later the French immigrants established Our Lady of Lourdes church to look out over St. Anthony Falls. We are a busy people, we Americans, and we have few enough opportunities to grasp the majesty of the Mississippi as it passes through our settlements on a natural scale far surpassing mere human activity.
From Boom Island to the James J. Hill limestone railroad bridge, with Nicollet Island squarely in media res (in the middle of the place, literally), we have achieved remarkable recognition of the centrality of this physical geography. Not to be taken lightly because here lies the heartbeat of our city. Minneapolis would not have come to be were it not for this riverine environment. I submit that Minneapolis has turned its collective attention to the Mississippi in many major ways over the past forty years. I am intensely pleased that we have been able to keep the essential qualities of the riverfront available to all and this is a great statement of egalitarian reality.
The early movers and shakers accepted the value of heterogeneous settlement on the Island while sketching out far grander visions for parks and lakes and a greenbelt surrounding the city. No one paid much heed as multi-story walkups proliferated along the downtown side of the river, spilling over onto Hennepin Ave. and the East Bank; and here today, gone tomorrow, the Gateway Project in the 1960s and subsequent radical transformations of the Island settlement area swept away buildings and people alike, leaving something of a tabula rasa, a blank slate, on which we have been crafting our awareness of our past and our preparations for our future. No small task and something compelling enough to warrant slow, reflective, thoughtful process.