The Mississippi Gorge and the Chain of Lakes
Near Minneapolis St Paul, Minnesota
Minneapolis is a city built on water in ways that most of its visitors do not immediately appreciate. Within the city limits there are twenty-two lakes, connected by parkways and trails. The park system that maintains them is consistently ranked among the best urban park systems in the United States and has been cited by the Urban Land Institute and others as a national model.
The chain of lakes on the southwest side of Minneapolis, Lakes Calhoun, Harriet, and Isles, are connected by channels and parkways that allow a continuous loop of more than ten miles by foot or bike. Theodore Wirth Park to the northwest holds two more lakes and wetland areas.
The parks owe their shape in large part to one man: Horace Cleveland, a landscape architect from Boston who came to Minneapolis in eighteen seventy-two and made the argument, for years, that the city should acquire its lake and river shorelines before development consumed them. His proposal, submitted in eighteen eighty-three and later nicknamed the Grand Rounds, outlined a connected parkway system linking the lakes to the river gorge. The Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners adopted a version of his vision beginning in eighteen eighty-three and built it out over the following four decades.
The Mississippi Gorge runs through the center of the city. The river drops ninety-five feet between St. Anthony Falls and the edge of the gorge. The limestone walls of the gorge, some reaching about one hundred feet in height, are part of the same geological formation that created the falls. The river here is narrow and fast compared to most of its length, and from the gorge's rim trails you can stand in a city of three hundred thousand people and hear nothing but water.
The Minneapolis park system is now a unit of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, which extends through the gorge and along the river corridor.
