Minneapolis Neighborhoods: Pattern and Character
Place
A descriptive tour of the city's principal residential districts, organised by the physical logic that produced them: the falls, the car lines, the lakes and the post-war edge.
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How the City's Housing Stock Was Built
Almost every question about why a Minneapolis house is the shape it is has a date attached to it.
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TThe milling city
The waterfall came first. Sawmills used it to cut the timber floated down from the north, and flour mills followed to grind the wheat coming in by rail from the west. For a period the city was the centre of American flour milling, and its early housing existed to serve that industry.
Early stock was accordingly close to the river, tightly packed, and built of wood. Very little of it survives, partly through fire and partly through the twentieth century's willingness to clear industrial districts wholesale.
TThe great platting
The decisive period ran from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the First World War, when the surrounding farmland was surveyed, platted into lots and sold. The instrument was the plat map: a recorded drawing dividing a parcel into numbered lots along numbered streets, and setting the lot widths that still govern what can be built.
Those recorded lot widths are the reason so much of the city has narrow houses. A lot platted for a modest frontage in 1900 is still that width today, and every subsequent building on it has had to accommodate a dimension chosen by a surveyor who has been dead for a century.
SStreetcars and the walking city
The streetcar network made the platted land usable. Lines radiated out along the arterials, and development followed them so closely that the map of the system and the map of pre-war housing are nearly the same drawing.
The result is a city built to a walking dimension it no longer strictly needs: small commercial nodes at old stop intervals, alleys behind every block, and detached garages added later at the rear because nobody in 1915 was planning for a car at the front door.
TThe bungalow decades
The nineteen-tens and twenties filled the platted grid at extraordinary speed, largely with bungalows and small period-revival houses. Plans came from pattern books and catalogues, materials were standardised, and builders worked a block at a time.
The building quality of this period is the reason so much of it survives. Dimensional lumber was generous, floors were hardwood, walls were plaster over lath, and foundations went below frost depth because in this climate they had no choice.
DDepression, war and the maps
Construction stopped almost entirely in the nineteen-thirties. What the decade produced instead was a lasting apparatus of mortgage lending, and with it the practice of grading neighbourhoods by risk. Districts were coloured on maps, and areas graded lowest, overwhelmingly those where Black residents lived, were denied the ordinary long-term credit that was extended elsewhere.
The consequences outlived the maps. A house that cannot be borrowed against is a house that is not maintained, improved or easily sold, and decades of that treatment leave a mark on a district's building stock that is still legible. Racial covenants recorded in deeds did similar work through private law. Both are void and unenforceable now, and both remain part of the documentary and physical record of how the city was shaped.
PPost-war expansion
After the war, federally supported lending and cheap land at the edge produced a different kind of housing: the rambler, the split-level, wider lots, attached garages, and streets designed around driving rather than walking.
Inside the city this shows up as a final ring of post-war building on the last open ground. Outside it, it produced the first suburban ring. The break between the two patterns is visible from the air and unmistakable on foot.
CConversion, infill and the present stock
The later twentieth century added relatively little new ground and a great deal of change to existing buildings: mills converted to dwellings, large old houses divided and sometimes reconverted, new buildings inserted on cleared lots, and a long slow programme of insulation, rewiring and mechanical replacement across the pre-war stock.
The practical result is that most Minneapolis houses are older than their systems. The frame may be a century old; the furnace, the wiring, the windows and the roof are all likely to be much younger, and their ages matter more to a buyer than the date on the building.