Minneapolis Grand Rounds
The Minneapolis Grand Rounds is unique in the United States, indeed in the world. Visitors to Minneapolis soon encounter a continuous series of naturalistic parkways which interconnect the city's celebrated lakes, Minnehaha Creek, and the Mississippi River. Rather than following the underlying city street grid like well-known nineteenth-century parkways in Buffalo and Kansas City, the Minneapolis parkways, known collectively as the Grand Rounds, encircle the entire city in a glorious wreath of green.
Minneapolis acquired its first land for a park in 1857, just one year after Minneapolis was incorporated as a town. The idea of a citywide Minneapolis park system was advanced in 1883 by Horace Cleveland, a landscape architect from Chicago who had previously worked with the famous Frederick Law Olmsted. Perhaps because memory of the devastating 1871 Chicago Fire was still fresh, Cleveland's plan called for widening major city streets like Lyndale and Lake as combination firebreaks-boulevards. These landscaped city boulevards were to extend out to connect with lakes Calhoun and Harriet.
The character of the city's new park system changed radically in 1891, when a committee of park commissioners led by William Watts Folwell, who was also president of the University of Minnesota, proposed the naturalistic layout which became the Grand Rounds. Although progress was slowed by the financial panic of 1893, Boston landscape architect Warren Manning, who had worked directly for Olmsted, was engaged in 1899 to draw up the Grand Rounds concept into a plan.
After Theodore Wirth was hired as Superintendent of Parks in 1906, he embarked on a three-decade campaign of parks development. By the time of Wirth's retirement in 1935, the Minneapolis park system, including its now fully matured Grand Rounds, had become an extraordinary urban environment, central to the civic self-image of Minneapolis.
In the late 1960s, San Francisco landscape architect Garrett Eckbo was engaged to update the Grand Rounds. Eckbo's provisions ranged from major changes like instituting one-way parkways, to devising parallel networks of walkways and bikeways, to details like characteristic curb profiles.
Today, more than a century after Theodore Wirth's arrival, the Minneapolis Grand Rounds remains a magnificent setting, for its recreational venues as well as for its visual diversity and sheer beauty. The park system has been beloved by generations of Minneapolitans right up to the present.
To visit the National Scenic Byway's website for Grand Round Click HERE