Minneapolis Audio Walking Tour

Highlights

• University of Minnesota

  Chartered in 1851, seven years ahead of Minnesota's statehood, the University of Minnesota is one of the oldest public universities west of the Mississippi. The Minneapolis campus straddles the Mississippi River — the main campus on the east bank, the West Bank campus housing the arts and social sciences on the other side.

• 
  Target Field

  Your view here opened in 2010 as the new home of the Minnesota Twins, ending twenty-eight years in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome — a dome Minnesotans loved and mocked in equal measure, its Teflon roof deflating in snowstorms. Target Field was intentionally designed as an outdoor ballpark, which means that April games here can be genuinely cold — fans show up in parkas and hand warmers — and that summer games are genuinely beautiful, with views of the Minneapolis skyline rising directly behind left field.

• 
  Fort Snelling

  Fort Snelling, this stone fortress at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, was built by the U.S. Army from 1820 to 1825 to assert American sovereignty over the fur trade territory acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase. The location was not accidental: the Dakota people called this point Bdote, the meeting of the waters, and considered it among the most sacred places in their world — the place of creation.

• 
  Bde Maka Ska

  For 150 years the lake in front of you was called Lake Calhoun, after John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator and the most prominent political defender of slavery in American history, a man who had nothing to do with Minnesota. The Minnesota DNR officially restored the Dakota name Bde Maka Ska — which means White Earth Lake — in 2018, and the Minneapolis Park Board followed.

• First Avenue

  That black building with silver stars on its exterior is First Avenue, one of the most important music venues in the United States. First Avenue opened in 1970 as a Greyhound bus depot conversion — the Depot had stood at this corner since 1937 — and became the center of Minneapolis's extraordinary live music scene.

All 40 stops

• Stone Arch Bridge (Mill District)

  Your feet are on the only stone arch railroad bridge over the Mississippi in the country.

• Mill City Museum (Mill District)

  Notice the building behind you — once the largest flour mill on Earth.

• Guthrie Theater (Mill District)

  Your eye catches that cantilever jutting out over the river, one of the most distinctive gestures in the Midwest.

• Mill Ruins Park (Mill District)

  Beneath the grated walkways at your feet runs the hydraulic tunnel system that powered the most productive flour-milling district the world had ever seen.

• St. Anthony Main (St. Anthony)

  Cross to the east bank and your first steps land in what was once a separate city.

• Nicollet Mall (Downtown)

  Picture Mary Richards tossing her beret right here on Nicollet Mall.

• First Avenue (Downtown)

  That black building with silver stars on its exterior is First Avenue, one of the most important music venues in the United States.

• Orpheum Theatre (Downtown)

  Your gaze lands on the Orpheum, opened in 1921 as a vaudeville palace, one of three grand theaters built along this stretch of Hennepin Avenue…

• Target Field (North Loop)

  Your view here opened in 2010 as the new home of the Minnesota Twins, ending twenty-eight years in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome — a…

• Warehouse District (Downtown)

  Brick warehouses from the 1880s and 1890s surround you here in the Warehouse District, built to hold goods arriving by rail from the flour mills…

• North Loop (North Loop)

  Picture this block a decade ago — mostly industrial, printing plants, warehouses, and parking for the Farmers Market that has run here since 1876.

• Basilica of Saint Mary (Loring Park)

  On May 31st, 1914, the Basilica of Saint Mary in front of you, on its slight hill above downtown, was consecrated as the first basilica…

• Loring Park (Loring Park)

  Picture Minneapolis in the 1880s, in need of its own Central Park — this landscaped green space became that answer, a counterweight to the industrial…

• Walker Art Center (Lowry Hill)

  Few contemporary art museums in the United States command the respect the Walker Art Center does, and it earned that not through size but through…

• Spoonbridge and Cherry (Lowry Hill)

  A giant stainless steel spoon holding a maraschino cherry is the most photographed object in Minneapolis — Spoonbridge and Cherry, the single image that says…

• Kenwood (Kenwood)

  Kenwood on a summer morning shows you exactly what flour money built.

• Lake of the Isles (Chain of Lakes)

  Nothing about Lake of the Isles is natural; it is a designed landscape from end to end.

• Bde Maka Ska (Chain of Lakes)

  For 150 years the lake in front of you was called Lake Calhoun, after John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator and the most prominent…

• Uptown (Uptown)

  Where Hennepin Avenue meets Lake Street you are at the commercial heart of Uptown, the creative and countercultural center of Minneapolis for fifty years.

• Lyn-Lake (Uptown)

  Picture this intersection of Lyndale and Lake Street by the 1990s — one of the most fertile music and arts corners in the city, where…

• Powderhorn Park (Powderhorn)

  Powderhorn Park wraps around a small lake shaped vaguely like a gunpowder horn, and that shape gave the neighborhood its name.

• South Minneapolis (South Minneapolis)

  South Minneapolis is where you'll find the city's real life.

• Minnehaha Avenue (Minnehaha)

  Minnehaha Avenue carries you southeast from South Minneapolis toward the falls along one of the oldest corridors in the city, platted in the 1870s and…

• Minnehaha Falls (Minnehaha)

  Fifty-three feet of falling water: Minnehaha Falls pours over a limestone ledge into a gorge that carries Minnehaha Creek south toward the Mississippi.

• Fort Snelling (Fort Snelling)

  Fort Snelling, this stone fortress at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, was built by the U.S. Army from 1820 to 1825 to…

• Northeast Arts District (Northeast)

  Everyone who lives here calls Northeast Minneapolis Noreast, and beginning in the late 1990s the arts district you are walking into turned from a gritty…

• Grain Belt Brewing (Northeast)

  Reflected in the Mississippi, the neon Grain Belt sign is one of the most beloved pieces of commercial signage in Minneapolis, and the brewery behind…

• Northeast Neighborhood (Northeast)

  Flour mills, rail yards, and ironworks once surrounded these residential blocks of Northeast Minneapolis, which went up in the 1880s and 1890s to house their…

• Elliot Park (Elliot Park)

  Elliot Park counts among the oldest neighborhoods in Minneapolis, developed in the 1880s east of downtown between the mill district and the emerging commercial center.

• Phillips Neighborhood (Phillips)

  Directly south of downtown, the Phillips neighborhood has been one of the most contested and misunderstood neighborhoods in Minneapolis for sixty years.

• Franklin Avenue (Phillips)

  Since the 1950s, when federal relocation policies brought thousands of Native people from reservations across the country to cities including Minneapolis, Franklin Avenue, running east-west…

• Cedar-Riverside (Cedar-Riverside)

  Wedged between the University of Minnesota's West Bank campus and the Cedar Avenue bridge over the Mississippi, Cedar-Riverside is one of the most remarkable urban…

• Seward Co-op (Seward)

  Founded in 1972, the Seward Co-op grocery store on Franklin Avenue is one of the oldest and largest food cooperatives in the country, part of…

• Minneapolis Institute of Art (Whittier)

  Locals call the Minneapolis Institute of Art simply Mia, and it holds one of the finest encyclopedic art collections in the country, covering 5,000 years…

• Fifth Street (Downtown)

  Fifth Street cuts through the heart of downtown Minneapolis and ties together two eras of the city's commercial history.

• Hennepin Avenue (Downtown)

  Father Louis Hennepin, the Belgian Franciscan friar who reached St. Anthony Falls in 1680 and wrote the first European descriptions of this landscape, gave Hennepin…

• University of Minnesota (University)

  Chartered in 1851, seven years ahead of Minnesota's statehood, the University of Minnesota is one of the oldest public universities west of the Mississippi.

• Dinkytown (University)

  Bob Dylan spent two crucial years in Dinkytown, at this corner of 4th Street and 14th Avenue Southeast, while he was still Robert Zimmerman.

• Prospect Park (Prospect Park)

  Up on the hill above you, a water tower with a conical cap over a cylindrical base — the silhouette of a witch's hat …

• Como Park Zoo (Como)

  Free since it opened in 1897, Como Park Zoo in Saint Paul, just across the city boundary from Minneapolis, is one of the last major…

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