A Tale of Two Neighborhoods, One Hill

Both take their name from Thomas Lowry, the streetcar magnate whose horse-drawn lines opened the area in the 1880s, and they sit side by side in the Bde Maka Ska-Isles community. Hennepin Avenue divides them, and the two halves grew into very different places.

West of Hennepin, Lowry Hill is the mansion district. By 1906 the lots on Mount Curve Avenue, Groveland Terrace and nearby blocks held some of the costliest houses in Minneapolis, and the streetscape of broad lawns and well-spaced houses had taken shape by 1900. It remains one of the city's most expensive neighborhoods -- and one that has long fought density at its edges. In 1922, residents led by Albert C. Loring pushed the Minneapolis park board to buy the triangle that became Thomas Lowry Park, voting on Nov. 4 to block a proposed $2 million hotel-and-apartment complex on the site.

East of Hennepin, the Wedge is dense and walkable, a triangle of apartments and older streetcar houses with close to 9,500 residents in roughly a square kilometer. It gives its name to the Wedge Community Co-op, the food cooperative founded there in 1974 and now at 2105 Lyndale Ave. S.. Lowry's streetcars carried the wealthy up the hill and filled the triangle below with the apartments of the people who rode the lines to work. Today the Lowry Hill East Neighborhood Association governs that side with an 11-member volunteer board and open monthly meetings at 2744 Lyndale Ave. S..

Hennepin Avenue is both the boundary and the link. Its reconstruction, substantially completed in 2025, added bus lanes for the METRO E Line, a protected bikeway and wider sidewalks, and the work touched both neighborhoods at once. For all their contrast, the mansion district and the Wedge increasingly face the same question -- how much a close-in, desirable area should grow -- and they are asking it of one hill.