{"id":748,"date":"2014-05-27T10:00:13","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T15:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/historyapolis.com\/?p=748"},"modified":"2024-01-10T13:43:36","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T19:43:36","slug":"elliot-park-and-clevelands-vision-for-minneapolis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/2014\/05\/27\/elliot-park-and-clevelands-vision-for-minneapolis\/","title":{"rendered":"Elliot Park and Cleveland’s Vision for Minneapolis"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Published May 27, 2014 by Stewart Van Cleve<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Today’s blogger is Stewart Van Cleve, a graduate student in the program for Library and Information Science at St. Catherine University. The author of Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota<\/em>, Stewart discovered the tower archives at Minneapolis City Hall when he was researching the history of gay sexuality in the city. He has joined forces with Historyapolis to illuminate the holdings of this forgotten cultural repository. <\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1883, a Minneapolis physician, Dr. Jacob Elliot, donated land to help create one of downtown Minneapolis\u2019 first parks. Since them, his gift has become a site that reflects more than a century of change in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n

By the turn of the century, Elliot park had became unofficially known as \u201cSwede Park,\u201d a reference to the large Swedish American community that settled in the surrounding neighborhood. By the 1930s, the area had become home to several hospitals\u2014including General Hospital, the precursor to the Hennepin County Medical Center\u2014and a large portion of the city\u2019s multifamily housing. After suffering a devastating loss of half its population to the construction of Interstate 94 and 35W, the area surrounding Elliot Park has slowly rebounded into a clear indication of the city\u2019s diverse future.<\/p>\n

Elliot Park\u2019s oblong shape owes itself to an important moment in local history, when early urban developers abruptly shifted downtown\u2019s river-parallel street system to a cardinal grid. Their decision created an unavoidable mess of numbered and named streets at downtown\u2019s southern border. Walking along Elliot Park\u2019s eastern edge, a pedestrian can find a clear contemporary example of the odd intersections that resulted; they can cover the distance between Eighth Street and Fourteenth Street in less than one city block.<\/p>\n

The park\u2019s strange shape and mangled surroundings posed a significant design problem\u2014one of many\u2014that confronted the Minneapolis Park Board when it began in 1883. The board hired an influential \u201clandscape gardener\u201d from Chicago, Horace Cleveland, who envisioned a series of \u201cnatural\u201d parks (as opposed to more formal gardens) that linked to one another with a series of scenic byways. While major portions of Cleveland\u2019s plan, including today\u2019s Grand Rounds, exist largely according to Cleveland\u2019s plan, the landscape architect\u2019s proposal for Elliot Park is a far cry from the needs of a 21st<\/sup> century urban park.<\/p>\n

Discovered in the Tower Archives in Minneapolis City Hall, this proposed design for Elliot includes the major elements of late 19th<\/sup> century landscape design, including large open lawns, ornamental water features created to appear \u201cnatural,\u201d and walkways that curved so that they resembled natural paths. The park\u2019s design\u2014clearly intended for the aimless strolling, and not the purposeful walking trips of the area\u2019s immigrant laborers\u2014only lasted for a few decades. Over time, public need ironed out the curving trails, emptied the pond, and paved over the open lawns.<\/p>\n

Today, Elliot Park\u2019s layout indicates a clear disparity between form and function. Tennis courts, a play area, and a ball field occupy the space formally dedicated to grassy knolls and the ornamental pond. An entire street\u2014Tenth Avenue between Eighth Street and Fourteenth Street\u2014closed to make way for a basketball court and the Elliot Park Recreation Center. Even the size of Elliot has changed; the park includes an entire block that was not part of Cleveland\u2019s design; it includes a second play area for children and one of the city\u2019s few public swimming pools.<\/p>\n

Stored in the city\u2019s attic for untold decades, Cleveland\u2019s beautiful design and its ultimate fate offers an important lesson in urban planning; beautiful design only works when it meets the needs of the people who enjoy it. If it doesn\u2019t meet those need, then the plan is worth little more than the paper it\u2019s drawn on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Published May 27, 2014 by Stewart Van Cleve Today’s blogger is Stewart Van Cleve, a graduate student in the program for Library and Information Science at St. Catherine University. The author of Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota, Stewart discovered the tower archives at Minneapolis City Hall when he was researching the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":751,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[165],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4087,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions\/4087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}