Editor’s Note: Max Hailperin is walking each of Minneapolis’ 87 neighborhoods, in alphabetical order. He chronicles his adventures at allofminneapolis.com, where the original version of this article was published April 26, 2025.
Layers of Minneapolis’s African-American and Jewish history were visible on this walk through Oak Park. (Older layers, such as a dairy farm, I know only from reading.)
The Oak Park addition was platted in 1884 but largely developed in the early decades of the 20th century. It occupies the southwest portion of the Near North neighborhood, between Humboldt and Penn Avenues and Olson Memorial Highway and Plymouth Avenue. My walk covered most of this area, as shown in the route map below, though I didn’t get as far east as Humboldt. (Stay tuned for Day 5.)
The route’s main loop, marked in blue, has its beginning and end (A and B) at the south end of Barnes Place, a small triangular park bounded by two branches of Elwood Avenue and by James Avenue, where it curves to transition into Irving Avenue.
To the west of the park is the modern home of Zion Baptist Church, which traces its history to an 1889 founding by Rev. Robert T. Hickman and others from the group he lead in an 1863 escape from slavery in Missouri. How did they wind up in Minnesota? Read William D. Green’s The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity in Minnesota, 1860–1876 for that and much more.
Turning west on Olson Memorial Highway (the former 6th Avenue), the next intersection I passed was with Logan Avenue. There, I spotted a brick-clad apartment building from the 1920s, now operated by Project for Pride in Living.
Architecturally, what interests me is hinted at by the bit of tile roofing visible at the left of the photo. Namely, the facade I photographed is only one of two “front” surfaces of the building, with the other on that left side, along Thomas Place.
I continued along the highway as far as Newton Avenue before backtracking to turn north on Morgan Avenue. (On the route map, red segments such as between Morgan and Newton indicate spurs walked forward and then back.)
After turning west again from Morgan Avenue onto Oak Park Avenue, as I crossed Newton Avenue I spotted another of those brick-clad apartment buildings from the 1920s, which are common across much of Minneapolis. As you can see, this multi-unit housing is present within the fabric of single-family and duplex houses, rather than being separated out.
The next intersection I passed through on Oak Park Avenue had a considerably more distinguished building of the same vintage, the former Mikro Kodesh synagogue, which has more recently been home to the Disciples Ministry Church of the late Pastor Paul.
At Penn Avenue, I turned back south to the highway and looped around to Newton Avenue, where I turned north. At the intersection with 8th Avenue, I spotted what was once the main entrance of a church building, as confirmed by a library photo from 1971. In addition to the different entrance orientation, one can see the church was roughly 2/3 the size prior the 1972 addition. Why so tiny? It was initially intended as a satellite chapel for a larger church. That’s another layer of history too, featuring Lutherans from Norway.
Rather than going all the way north to Plymouth Avenue, Newton connects via a block-long “12 1/2th Avenue” to Oliver Avenue, so that my walk naturally turned back south. I continued all the way back to the highway before retreating to 8th Avenue.
That spur into the 700/600 block of Oliver was kind of pointless, just a bunch more single-family and duplex houses, so nothing worthwhile, right? Wrong. If I didn’t walk every block of every street, I’d miss standouts like the house shown here, which pops with new white-framed windows and a fresh coat of green paint on the stucco.
Eighth Avenue brought me back to Elwood at the northern end of Barnes Place. There I got saw a second example of a 1926 synagogue turned into an African American church. The Tifereth B’nai Jacob congregation’s “Elwood Shul” is in some ways parallel to Mikro Kodesh — an immigrant community (from Bessarabia in this case, Russia in the other) Americanizing, shifting from the Orthodox stream of Judaism to the Conservative, and eventually moving on. Indeed, the two congregations subsequently merged. The building is still today in use by the same church that took it over in 1957, First Church of God in Christ.
As I turned back west on Oak Park Avenue, I saw two more institutional buildings that likewise reflect this Jewish past. On the south side is the Oak Park Center of Pillsbury United Communities, which a plaque on the flagpole base reveals to have been the Emanuel Cohen Center.
On a personal note, as a son of a woman who served in the US Army in World War II, I was particularly glad to see that the dedication is to the “men and women of Emmanuel Cohen Center who gallantly served in the armed forces of our country.” For a men’s club to think of that in 1945 is not to be taken for granted.
Across on the north side of the avenue, the former Jewish Sheltering Home for Children now houses Avenues for Youth. Perhaps the metaphor of layers of history doesn’t do justice to the amount of continuity to be found amidst the considerable change.
If you’ve mastered the art of tracing my blue path on the map, you’ll recognize that at the corner of Oak Park and Morgan Avenues, I needed to turn north. (I had earlier walked the southern part of Morgan Avenue and the western part of Oak Park Avenue.) That in turn took me to a third example of a synagogue turned into a church, albeit one built in 1937 rather than 1926.
On Plymouth Avenue, I passed the University of Minnesota’s Robert J. Jones Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center (UROC) and then came to a building where a perforated metal ImageWall® provided an introduction to the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and Gallery (MAAHMG) I would find inside.
Before turning from Penn Avenue onto 12th Avenue, I continued on a spur as far as Oak Park Avenue. That way, I saw the west as well as north faces of the building that was once Lincoln Junior High School, then Lincoln Community School, and is now vacant.
Back on Plymouth Avenue, I walked past a couple blocks of the larger Plymouth Avenue Townhomes and Apartments complex, built in 1974 under the name of Legacy Village and renovated in 2016.
The Apostolic Church Redeemers Assembly building in the 1200 block of Logan Avenue North has a cornerstone indicating that in 1965, it became the home of the Holsey Memorial Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, another African-American congregation founded in 1946. But the cornerstone is newer than the building, which dates to 1936 as a Hebrew school.
Across the street is another more recent building likewise devoted to the development of youth, Hospitality House. The institution has a history extending several decades further into the past than the building. Like so much of what I encountered on this walk, that history features several twists and turns of re-invention as leaders saw opportunities to adapt to new needs.
The southern end of my walk down Logan Avenue was at Olson Memorial Highway, with the PPL apartment building I previously photographed on the east side. On the west is the La Crèche Early Childhood Center, which I chose to feature through a photo of the playground fence.
The La Crèche building itself is another legacy of the neighborhood’s Jewish past, though in this case the connection is to the Jewish labor movement: it was the relocated Labor Lyceum. However, judging by photos, the exterior must have been altered after the move. Another historical connection is to the Schaper Manufacturing Company, make of the Cootie game.
From Logan Avenue, Thomas Place took me back to my starting point at the Barnes Place park, which will also be the starting point for my fifth and final walk in Near North.
All photos are by Max Hailperin.