On a beautiful fall day, I walked all of the Lyndale neighborhood that I had missed on my prior walk. Actually, not quite all. Construction activity closed much of Stevens Avenue even for pedestrians, so those blocks appear in neither route. One indirect consequence is that this second route isn’t a closed loop; it starts under […]
The Lyndale neighborhood is named for the Lyndale School, which in turn was named for Lyndale Avenue. The original school was immediately east of the avenue, where Painter Park now is. The avenue was in turn named for William S. King’s Lyndale Farm, but that was to the west of the avenue. The neighborhood runs east from Lyndale Avenue […]
Public art was a larger part of what I photographed this day compared with my first day walking the Lowry Hill East (Wedge) neighborhood. That was just a coincidental result of the route, which was planned with the mundane purpose of filling in the blocks I had previously omitted, aside from a couple that were closed […]
Only the northern tip of the Lowry Hill East neighborhood is east of Lowry Hill, which may explain why “The Wedge” is the more common name. Certainly it is more descriptive: the neighborhood occupies the wedge-shaped area between Hennepin and Lyndale Avenues north of Lake Street. I began and ultimately ended at the point marked […]
A glance at the map shows larger spaces between the streets in the northern part of Lowry Hill than in the grid-like southern portion I previously walked. This difference relates to the topography but also to the land uses: large institutions and mansions fit large spaces. I began at the intersection of Lyndale and Groveland Avenues […]
The Lowry Hill neighborhood is named for the “devil’s backbone” ridge that runs through it, approximately on the dividing line between my two walks. Thomas Lowry and his 19th-century peers lived on the north side of the hill, whereas this first walk concentrated on the more grid-like area to the south, largely developed in the […]
The day after exploring the western part of the Loring Park neighborhood, I was back for the eastern part, which is to say, everything east of LaSalle Avenue. However, as the route map reveals, I also included some streets in the northwest that I had skipped the previous day. (The two days’ routes repeatedly cross in […]
Big houses, bigger apartment buildings, really big churches. Even though there is no direct cause-and-effect linkage, it makes sense that a neighborhood with some dense housing also has a cathedral, a basilica, and four other churches that are of similar grandeur. I saw half those churches on my first of two days walking the Loring […]
One eats first with one’s eyes. So I ate first (before walking even a single block) and did it with (but not only with) my eyes. And then I proceeded to keep on using my eyes as I wound my way through the remaining corner of the Longfellow neighborhood, everything south of my first walk and east […]
I already remarked that the Longfellow neighborhood is diverse, encompassing residences and industry, art and history, churches and schools, food and drink, and much else—signs on utility poles, for instance. So it came as no surprise that I saw some of those same elements south of Lake Street too. But diversity being what it is, this walk […]