Downtown's Next Renovation?

A Familiar Tale of Urban Decline

Elliot Park resembles a three-dimensional mosaic. Within its bounds—Fifth Avenue South to Interstate 35W, Fifth Street South to Interstate 94—is a collection of fragments set haphazardly in concrete.

Elegant brownstones look adrift in a vast sea of parking lots. Lovingly restored buildings are separated by vacant lots from what might charitably be called works in progress, many of them boarded up. Social-service providers are a presence as are small churches, many unattached to their original denomination. A few single-story business structures are sprinkled throughout, their bland postwar exteriors revealing almost nothing about what goes on inside.

There also are businesses that bespeak at least a touch of prosperity—a Wells Fargo bank, the headquarters of construction company Kraus-Anderson. Hennepin County Medical Center is a four-block anchor on the neighborhood’s north end, but its bulk (like that of the Metrodome) also feels like something of a barrier to entry.

A “narrative” written by the neighborhood association, Elliot Park Neighborhood, Inc. (EPNI), as part of an application for development funds from the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation nicely summarizes perceptions of the area:

“Elliot Park often has been regarded as a neighborhood in a geographic sense only—serving variously as a vast parking lot for downtown, a warehouse for the poorest and most transient residents, a pass-through nether region for freeway-access streets, a service center for the needy and afflicted, and a gigantic tailgating facility for prodigal Metrodome patrons. Whether viewing the neighborhood from aerial photographs or on forays afoot, it is immediately apparent that so much of the landscape is virtually featureless due to the overwhelming presence of surface parking lots, unnecessarily wide one-way pair streets, and vacated or underdeveloped parcels of land.”

That’s not how things were in Elliot Park a century or more ago. Check out the corner of 10th Street and Park Avenue. On a slightly raised lot stands a handsome Italianate mansion. Now occupied by real estate businesses—and with much of its magnificent interior tile work still intact—the Hinkle-Murphy mansion reveals something that would surprise most people who see Elliot Park only from the commuter arteries of Seventh and Eighth streets: This was once a classy part of town.

You can get a deeper sense of that on Ninth Street, with its turn-of-the-last-century brownstones and row houses. These were residences for people seeking an easy commute to downtown in the pre-automobile age, often attorneys, doctors, and captains of local industry. David Fields, community development coordinator for EPNI, calls these “the condos of the 19th century.”

There were hospitals in Elliot Park then, too. The largest, Minneapolis Community, evolved into the fortress-like Hennepin County Medical Center. Swedish, Asbury Methodist, and St. Barnabas have all closed or moved away, most of their buildings absorbed by HCMC or North Central University.