Minneapolis Lakes
The splendid "Chain of Lakes" is the city's signature visual feature. Lakes Brownie, Cedar, Isles, Calhoun, Harriet, Hiawatha, and Nokomis line up along the pre-glacial course of the Mississippi River. Rather than allowing the city's lakefronts to be masked by walls of houses and apartments, which would have been typical for scenic features elsewhere, the Grand Rounds plan called for the lakes to be encircled by parklands and parkways. So only a small section along the eastern shore of Cedar Lake is cut off from public access by private properties.
When parks development began a century ago, not all of the now-famous lakes were so appreciated. What became Lake of the Isles was more of a swampland, and required extensive dredging between 1889 and 1893 (halted because of the national financial panic), and again between 1907 and 1931, before emerging as the elegant naturalistic landscape it appears to be today.
Reflecting the notion of a chain of lakes, additional excavation was undertaken to link Isles to Cedar along the Kenilworth Lagoon; similarly, Isles was linked to Calhoun at the west end of Lagoon Avenue. Opening of this latter connection was marked by an extravagant Fourth-of-July festival in 1911, with the passage of the tour boat "Maid of the Isles" festooned with dozens of American flags. Lake Calhoun was connected to Lake Harriet by a creek, providing an official chain-of-lakes connection via Minnehaha Creek to lakes Hiawatha and Nokomis, the latter also requiring substantial dredging of shoreline swamplands.
In recent years, new environmental values have resulted in substantial changes to some of the lakefronts, notably in the substitution of prairie landscapes for lawn at the northeast part of Isles, and development of run-off retaining areas at the southwest edge of Calhoun. Reflecting the traditional sophisticated local perspective about parklands, these changes reflect much more than pure esthetics.