The Twin Cities: Two Cities, One River

Minneapolis and Saint Paul share a river and a metro area and not much else, or so the joke goes. The two cities grew up on opposite banks of the Mississippi with distinct characters that have persisted for a hundred and fifty years.

Saint Paul was the territorial and then state capital, platted by a trader and Catholic missionaries in the eighteen forties, organized around commerce and the river landing and the Catholic Church. Minneapolis grew up roughly ten miles to the west and northwest, organized around the falls and the mills, predominantly Protestant, Scandinavian in its immigration, industrial in its ambitions.

By the eighteen eighties, both cities had newspapers that ran regular editorials asserting the superiority of their city over the other, and the argument about which city was larger got sufficiently heated that the eighteen ninety census turned into a scandal, with each city accusing the other of padding its count and census takers reportedly arrested on both sides. The official numbers put Minneapolis well ahead, and it has been larger ever since.

The two cities share an airport, a professional sports infrastructure, a light rail system, and a regional economy. They have separate mayors, separate city councils, separate park systems, and separate identities. Visitors sometimes sense a rivalry they cannot quite name, which is accurate: it is a rivalry between cities that need each other and know it and have never fully made peace with the fact.

The Mississippi River runs between them. From the High Bridge in Saint Paul, you can see the Minneapolis skyline to the west, the Cathedral of Saint Paul to the east, and the river itself below, moving south through the gorge it carved through limestone ten thousand years ago.