Faith Communities Quietly Anchor Neighborhood Life

The Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association's places-of-worship roster runs from the Basilica of St. Mary, built in 1914 at 88 17th Street North as the first designated basilica in the United States, to Temple Israel, founded in 1878 at 2323 Fremont Avenue South and the oldest synagogue in Minneapolis. Between them sit the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis at 900 Mount Curve Avenue (established 1881), Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church at 511 Groveland Avenue (founded 1875), Lake of the Isles Lutheran Church at 2020 West Lake of the Isles Parkway, St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral at 519 Oak Grove Street (established 1858, present building completed 1910), and St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Lake of the Isles at 1917 Logan Avenue South.

Several predate nearly every other institution in the neighborhood. Hennepin Avenue United Methodist, organized in 1875 and housed since 1916 in a spire that once stood as the second-tallest structure in Minneapolis, was designed by Edwin Hawley Hewitt, who had earlier built St. Mark's Cathedral nearby; in its downtown origins the congregation ran child care for low-income mothers, meals, a gymnasium and a library, and by the 1950s it was among the first racially integrated churches in Minnesota. Hennepin Avenue UMC became a reconciling congregation explicitly welcoming LGBT members in 1993.

The Star Tribune has described Hennepin Avenue as holding a large slice of Minneapolis church history, and these buildings remain among the few rooms in the neighborhood large enough to hold a crowd. As congregations nationally contend with aging buildings and shifting attendance, the upkeep of those spaces is a real cost their members carry.

[unverifiable: specific recent neighborhood meetings or mutual-aid events hosted in these spaces are not documented on the association's page and have been left out rather than asserted.]