| Loring Park | |
|---|---|
 Loring Lake | |
 | |
| Type | Urban park |
| Location | Minneapolis, Minnesota |
| Coordinates | 44°58′12″N93°17′02″W / 44.97000°N 93.28389°W |
| Area | 33.94 acres (13.74 ha) |
| Status | Open all year |
Loring Park is a park in the Loring Park neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Loring Park was established in 1883 after the passage of the Park Act, which first created the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. The park was first named Central Park. [1] In 1890 the park was renamed again in honor of Charles Morgridge Loring, who was the first president of the park board in Minneapolis. [2]
Loring Park was purchased by the Minnesota Public Parks board on April 28, 1883. The land was purchased for $150,000 and contained 30 acres of land. A few more pieces of land were added to the park for a total cost of $350,000. This was the first plot of land that was purchased by the Minnesota Public Parks board. Shortly after purchasing the land, the Minneapolis Public Parks board hired George Brakett and Horace Cleveland to design the park and to drain the bog in the lake. They used plants that were brought in from nearby woods to complete the design for the park. They also decided at this time to make the park pedestrian only. [1]
In 1906 the first permanent building in any Minneapolis park was constructed in Loring Park. The heated two-story shelter was donated by Charles Loring and was used as a warming house, recreation center and kindergarten. In 1960, the park renovated the shelter to be used as a space for senior programs. It was the first Minneapolis park to provide senior activities. [1] Loring Park was the first park in Minnesota to have electric lights. The lights were installed in fall of 1884 to be used to illuminate the pond during winter skating season. In 1916 the local General Mills Company provided the park with 91 electric lights. [3]
Loring Park was the center of the case Johnson v. Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB). This lawsuit was between the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board and Brian Johnson over First Amendment rights. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled that MSRB can not ban non-commercial material distribution in the park unless the material violates the law. [4]
Loring Park is the venue for various annual events. The Twin Cities LGBTQ+ Pride Festival, the Loring Park Art Festival and the wintertime Holidazzle are some of the more famous events. [5] Loring Park's location directly across from the Walker Art Museum makes it a fitting venue for the annual Loring Park Art Festival and a series of smaller artist gatherings. [6]
In 2014 and 2015 Chipotle held their Cultivate free music and culinary festival in Loring Park. The 2014 lineup included Portugal. The Man, The Mowgli's, and Grouplove. [7] Walk the Moon, Atlas Genius, X Ambassadors, Anderson East, and Hippo Campus were all slotted to appear at the 2015 festival. [8] Andrew Zimmern and Richard Blais also attended the event, a part of the festival's gratuitous "Chef Demos." [9]
In addition, Loring Park is home to the annual "Winterfest at Loring Park," which in 2016 included horse-drawn carriage rides, holiday crafts and the local Kairos Dance Company. It is hosted by the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board. [10] [11]
Beginning in 2016 the Minneapolis Downtown Council moved the annual Holidazzle winter event, which had previously been held downtown on Nicollet Mall, to the park due to the two year construction project along Nicollet Mall. The huge winter event attracts thousands of people and runs weekends from Thanksgiving through Christmas and focuses on local food vendors, a performance stage, fireworks, locally produced holiday gifts, a large beer tent, visits with Santa and many events for children. In addition, a skating rink and large warming house tent is set up which continues through early March as part of the event. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic Holidazzle did not take place in 2020. After returning to Loring Park in 2021 in a hybrid, more limited format and a full schedule in 2022, Holidazzle was put on hold for 2023 due to a lack of funding.
The park contains a small lake (Loring Lake, formerly known as Johnson's Lake) and paths for walking and biking. Originally named Central Park, it was renamed in honor of Charles M. Loring, known as the "Father of Minneapolis Parks."
The park is the site of various cultural, social and political events. It features a playground, biking and walking paths, public art, and a fishing pier. It displays two well-known pieces of public art: The 1971 "Berger Fountain" (also known as "Dandelion Fountain"), an authorized copy of the renowned El Alamein Fountain in Sydney (built by the original artist Robert Woodward and shipped to Minnesota), was gifted by Parks Commissioner Ben Berger in 1973 and installed in 1974–1975; [12] and a statue of Norwegian composer Ole Bull. [13] The Berger fountain is not currently operational (as of 2023), but a community group is working with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board to restore the fountain with an estimated construction date of 2025. [14]
The Loring Greenway is a 1,500-foot linear park that connects Nicollet Mall in downtown directly to Loring Park. It opened in 1979, and though it is public space owned by the city, much of the award-winning landscaping has been maintained by volunteers with the Loring Greenway Association in the decades since. By 2016, nearly 1,600 people were using the greenway daily for walking or biking, or for its playgrounds and other amenities. [15] [16]
Loring Park is mentioned extensively by Craig Finn by the name "Penetration Park" in songs by his bands Lifter Puller and Hold Steady. Portions of the television series Man v. Food's first-season finale were filmed in Loring Park. [17]
Nicollet Mall is a twelve-block portion of Nicollet Avenue running through downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. It is a shopping and dining district of the city, and also a pedestrian mall and transit mall. Along with Hennepin Avenue to the west, Nicollet Mall forms the cultural and commercial center of Minneapolis.
Nicollet Avenue is a major street in Minneapolis, Richfield, Bloomington, and Burnsville in the U.S. state of Minnesota. It passes through a number of locally well-known neighborhoods and districts, notably Eat Street in south Minneapolis and the traffic-restricted Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis.
The Seward neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, is geographically southeast of downtown, consisting of the land bordered by the Hiawatha Avenue industrial district to the west, Minneapolis Midtown Greenway to the south, the Mississippi River to the east, and Interstate 94 to the north. Seward's bordering neighborhoods are Cooper to the southeast, Longfellow to the south, East Phillips to the southwest, Ventura Village to the west, Cedar-Riverside to the north, and Prospect Park/East River Road across the Mississippi River to the east. It is one of the neighborhoods that is part of the larger Longfellow community. Seward was named after former New York senator, governor, and US Secretary of State William H. Seward.
Whittier is a neighborhood within the Powderhorn community in the U.S. city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, bounded by Franklin Avenue on the north, Interstate 35W on the east, Lake Street on the south, and Lyndale Avenue on the west. It is known for its many diverse restaurants, coffee shops and Asian markets, especially along Nicollet Avenue. The neighborhood is home to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the Children's Theatre Company.
The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is an 11-acre (4.5 ha) park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States. It is located near the Walker Art Center, which operates it in coordination with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. It reopened June 10, 2017, after a reconstruction that resulted with the Walker and Sculpture Garden being unified as one 19-acre campus. It is one of the largest urban sculpture gardens in the country, with 40 permanent art installations and several other temporary pieces that are moved in and out periodically.
The Greater Grand Forks Greenway is a huge greenway bordering the Red River and Red Lake River in the twin cities of Grand Forks, North Dakota and East Grand Forks, Minnesota. At 2,200 acres (9 km2), the Greenway is more than twice the size of New York City's Central Park. It has an extensive, 20-mile (32 km) system of bike paths, which are used by bikers, walkers, joggers, and rollerbladers. In 2007, the system was designated as a National Recreation Trail by the National Park Service.
Lake Street is a major east-west thoroughfare between 29th and 31st streets in Minneapolis, Minnesota United States. From its western most end at the city's limits, Lake Street reaches the Chain of Lakes, passing over a small channel linking Bde Maka Ska and Lake of the Isles, and at its eastern most end it reaches the Mississippi River. In May 2020, the Lake Street corridor suffered extensive damage during local unrest following the murder of George Floyd. In August of the same year, city officials designated East Lake Street as one of seven cultural districts to promote racial equity, preserve cultural identity, and promote economic growth.
Loring Park is a neighborhood in the Central Community of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Located on the southwest corner of downtown Minneapolis, it also lends its name to Loring Park, the largest park in the neighborhood. The official boundaries of the neighborhood are Lyndale Avenue to the west, Interstate 394 to the north, 12th Street to the northeast, Highway 65 to the east, and Interstate 94 to the south.
Stevens Square is the southernmost neighborhood of the Central community in Minneapolis. Although one of the densest neighborhoods in Minneapolis today, the land was originally occupied by a few large mansions. Today, the area is composed mostly of old brownstone apartment buildings or mansions that have been subdivided into apartments, giving the neighborhood a heavy population density within its small geographical area; a short and wide neighborhood, it is nearly a mile long but only three blocks tall. Much of the neighborhood is a National Historic District, and five of the apartments were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993.
Downtown West is an official neighborhood in Minneapolis, part of the larger Central community. It is the heart of downtown Minneapolis, containing the bulk of high-rise office buildings in the city, and is what comes to mind when most Minneapolitans think of "downtown".
Charles Morgridge Loring was an American businessman, miller and publicist. Raised in Maine to be a sea captain, Loring instead became a civic leader in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he was a wealthy flour miller and in Riverside, California where he helped to build the first city hall. He was a popular and generous man who enjoyed many friendships and business associations.
The Minneapolis Streetcar System was a proposed streetcar system for the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Extensive studies and plans for the new system were completed in 2007 and presented to the Minneapolis City Council in January 2008; on April 2, 2010, the Council voted to approve the plans and seek funding. On December 21, 2010 the Federal Transit Administration granted $900,000 to further study the Nicollet and Central Avenue corridors. In June 2021, after no further development on the system, a bill authorized the Metropolitan Council to use funds collected for the Nicollet-Central line to be spent on bus rapid transit funding.
Peavey Plaza is a park plaza that serves as a public outdoor space in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota at the south end of Nicollet Mall between South 11th and 12th Streets. The sunken plaza and its amphitheater were designed by landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg and built in 1975 alongside Orchestra Hall. The Cultural Landscape Foundation has deemed the plaza a "marvel of modernism" and it was named one of the top ten most endangered historical sites in Minnesota before its rehabilitation in 2019.
The Northwestern National Life Insurance Company Home Office, was also known as the Loring Park Office Building, and is now a 75 unit boutique apartment complex known as 430 Oak Grove located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was designed by the architecture firm of Hewitt and Brown in the Beaux-Arts style as the headquarters of the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 16, 2012.
Twin Cities Pride, also known as Twin Cities GLBT Pride, is a nonprofit organization which runs an annual celebration in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota every June focusing on the LGBT community.
The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB) is an independent park district that owns, maintains, and programs activities in public parks in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. It has 500 full-time and 1,300 part-time employees and an $111 million operating and capital budget.
The Bde Maka Ska Public Art Project is part of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board's Bde Maka Ska–Harriet Master Plan. In parallel with the restoring the name of Lake Calhoun to its Dakota name, Bde Maka Ska, a public art project was initiated to commemorate Ḣeyata Oṭuŋwe, a 19th-century Dakota agricultural community on the southeast bank of Bde Maka Ska, and its founder, Dakota leader Maḣpiya Wic̣aṡṭa.
Minneapolis is often considered one of the top biking and walking cities in the United States due to its vast network of trails and dedicated pedestrian areas. In 2020, Walk Score rated Minneapolis as 13th highest among cities over 200,000 people. Some bicycling ratings list Minneapolis at the top of all United States cities, while others list Minneapolis in the top ten. There are over 80 miles (130 km) of paved, protected pathways in Minneapolis for use as transportation and recreation. The city's Grand Rounds National Scenic Byway parkway system accounts for the vast majority of the city's shared-use paths at approximately 50 miles (80 km) of dedicated biking and walking areas. By 2008, other city, county, and park board areas accounted for approximately 30 miles (48 km) of additional trails, for a city-wide total of approximately 80 miles (130 km) of protected pathways. The network of shared biking and walking paths continued to grow into the late 2010s with the additions of the Hiawatha LRT Trail gap remediation, Min Hi Line pilot projects, and Samatar Crossing. The city also features several natural-surface hiking trails, mountain-biking paths, groomed cross-country ski trails in winter, and other pedestrian walkways.
The U.S. city of Minneapolis featured officially and unofficially designated camp sites in city parks for people experiencing homelessness that operated from June 10, 2020, to January 7, 2021. The emergence of encampments on public property in Minneapolis was the result of pervasive homelessness, mitigations measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Minnesota, local unrest after the murder of George Floyd, and local policies that permitted encampments. At its peak in the summer of 2020, there were thousands of people camping at dozens of park sites across the city. Many of the encampment residents came from outside of Minneapolis to live in the parks. By the end of the permit experiment, four people had died in the city's park encampments, including the city's first homicide victim of 2021, who was stabbed to death inside a tent at Minnehaha Park on January 3, 2021.
Loring Greenway is a 1,500-foot linear pedestrian greenway in downtown Minneapolis that connects Nicollet Mall with Loring Park. It was designed by landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg, who also designed Peavey Plaza near the Nicollet Mall end of the greenway. Opened in 1979, it was part of the Loring Park Development District that razed older properties, created the adjacent Hyatt hotel and built new surrounding multi-family apartment and townhouse buildings in the Loring Park neighborhood. Now approximately 2,500 housing units flank the greenway spine. Originally retail businesses were planned to line the greenway, but private development focused on residential, and the small commercial spaces never materialized. The greenway is noted on a historic marker in a series along the north side of West Grant Street between LaSalle and Nicollet.
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