The Grand Rounds
Saturday, April 2, 2022 at 6:39AMArticle by Michael Rainville, Jr.
Minneapolis is full of wonderful parks, from Columbia and Webber to Minnehaha and Boom Island. The most remarkable facet of our parks is that many of them are connected via the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway System; an over fifty-mile parkway that creates a loop around Minneapolis, well, almost. The last segment needed to complete the Grand Rounds, dubbed “the missing link,” would connect East River Parkway near the University of Minnesota to St. Anthony Parkway in upper Northeast. Funding for the missing link was included in Governor Walz’s 2020 capital bonding proposal. Of the $2 billion that would be used throughout the entire state for various construction projects, $12.35 million would be used to complete the Grand Rounds. With the Grand Rounds on the cusp of completion, let’s take a look at how it became the nation’s and world’s best example of an urban byway.
Surveyors along Minnehaha Parkway with the Nicollet Ave. Bridge in the background, 1935.Parks and Minneapolis go together like peanut butter and jelly. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board was established in 1883, and its first president, Charles Loring, immediately hired Horace Cleveland, a well-known landscape architect, to create a masterplan for the park system. Cleveland had been lobbying for the creation of a unified park system between Minneapolis and St. Paul since 1872. From then until his hiring eleven years later, he fleshed out his ideas and even implemented some of them when designing the St. Paul neighborhood of Saint Anthony Park. Cleveland wanted to create a network of boulevards and parkways that connected parks and utilized the natural beauty of the area. Once hired, his plan quickly took shape with the creation of the Chain of Lakes parks and Minnehaha Parkway. The project would be named “The Grand Rounds” in 1891 when his updated plans for the Northeast and Southeast sections of Minneapolis were seen as ambitious and inspiring.
Cleveland’s ultimate goal was to create these natural areas for everyone to enjoy, especially the poor and less fortunate. At the time, Minneapolis was a small city, but the milling industries contributed to the city’s population drastically rising throughout the years. Cleveland wanted to make sure those with money didn’t buy all the naturally beautiful land and take away the opportunity for those with less income to experience the calming and peaceful splendor of what he experienced when he first came to Minneapolis in the 1870s.
1940 photo of workers building a brick wall along East River Parkway near the U of M.
A project this grand was not going to be completed overnight, so it was up to future Park Board presidents and superintendents to continue Cleveland’s and Loring’s vision. Theodore Wirth did just that when he acquired land to extend the parkway system to what it is today during his thirty-year tenure in the early 1900s. It would not be until the 1970s when the Grand Rounds would receive a facelift. The Park Board hired the famous San Francisco landscape architect firm Eckbo, Dean, Austin & Williams to update the park system. This led to a uniform look for the Grand Rounds. Pavement would be a different color than city streets, the parkways would be narrowed and bays for parking in certain areas would be added, the speed limit would be dropped to twenty-five miles per hour, separate paths would be made for bikers and pedestrians, and signage would be consistent throughout the system. All of these changes can still be seen today.
Once the Grand Rounds was completely updated and extended to include the downtown riverfront, it started to garner national attention. In 1997, it was designated as a Minnesota State Scenic Byway, and in 1998 it was designated as a National Scenic Byway, recognized as the premier national urban scenic byway by the Federal Highway Administration, and it provided the last link in completing the Great River Road along the entire Mississippi River.
Preferred and alternate routes of the "missing link" in SE and NE Minneapolis.
137 years in the making, the completion of the Grand Rounds is upon us. Minneapolis will soon once again show the world why we have the best and most comprehensive park system there is; a city of lakes, a city of nature, a city that inspires. The addition of the missing link and completion of the Grand Rounds is still quite a few years away, but if you’re interested in what this missing link will look like, check out the Park Board’s East of the River Park Master Plan they made available in February of 2019.
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About Michael Rainville, Jr.
A 6th generation Minneapolitan, Michael Rainville, Jr. received his B.A. in History, Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies, and M.A. in Art History from the University of St. Thomas.
