When Minnehaha Flowed with Whiskey by Karen E. Cooper

Author:Karen E. Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press

This picnic pavilion gave groups a place for their church picnics and dances. It added to the options for hospitable gatherings at the falls but wasn’t an income source for the park board, as they paid someone to be in charge of the place.

THE MINNEHAHA PARK SYNDICATE

As the park board began providing amenities, the people who had been investing in the land around the park were also promoting the area. Their efforts had started some years earlier. In 1883, a millwright named Edward M. Runyan decided to try his hand at real estate and formed the North Star Real Estate Company. He had a great break late in the year, when he got the exclusive sales rights to Palmer’s Addition to Minneapolis. This was a large tract lying between Minnehaha Avenue and what became Hiawatha Avenue, from about 34th Street South to 41st Street. It was platted into lots to be sold and added to the city. Minneapolis was growing south. Minnehaha Avenue, constructed in the 1870s, ran from the city straight to the falls; it paralleled the Milwaukee Road train tracks. With roads and railroad access, this part of the city was opening up. Runyan was there to take advantage of it.

The park board brought family-friendly amenities to Minnehaha. The board began accepting donated animals for a zoo in 1893, the same year a vendor began offering pony rides in the park. One of the few reminders of the zoo is the name for a section of the park: the Deer Pen. In this area, once surrounded by a high fence, the board kept bison, deer, elk, and sometimes even a moose. At the top western edge of the Deer Pen, the zoo housed an array of animals, everything from guinea pigs to bears, even the cinnamon bears that state Senator Daniel Hixson had been so threatened by back in 1889. The zoo was shut down when Theodore Wirth took over as superintendent in 1906; many of the animals were in bad health, having been very poorly cared for. Some had to be put down. Others were transferred in 1907 to the Longfellow Gardens Zoo across Hiawatha Avenue from Minnehaha Park. But the hoofed stock stayed in the Deer Pen until 1923.

The pens and cages that once housed the other zoo animals are long gone, but a careful eye can find their footings by looking below the top western edge of the Deer Pen in early spring, before the leaves come out.vi

Bears and visitors at the Minnehaha zoo, about 1899

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