Twenty-five years ago this month, the first phase of the Midtown Greenway opened up, connecting South Minneapolis’ West Isles, Uptown and Phillips neighborhoods. It would take years for the off-street biking and walking trail to come to completion and make it to the Mississippi River. But when it did, it became the best urban bike infrastructure in the country.
This means that it’s a great time to pause and offer the Midtown Greenway a happy birthday. Today, it’s a 5.5 mile, below-grade trail that cuts across the diverse neighborhoods of South Minneapolis. Because it’s car-free, it offers an unparalleled experience for over 5,000 people each day to get around the city without a car.
The trail’s railroad roots
The Midtown Greenway owes its life to two valiant public efforts. The first happened over a century ago when advocates demanded that a dangerous railroad through South Minneapolis’ industrial area be lowered below the street grade. Earlier this year, Brian Mitchell at Streets.mn penned a fascinating article detailing how this process went through in the early 20th century. The existing at-grade trail crossings were a menace to drivers and pedestrians, and the trench construction and adjustment for industrial railroad customers was astonishing.
(Today, there are a few traces of the old railroad industries for keen-eyed Greenway travelers; Mitchell’s article is a great decoder to those bits of vestigial urbanism.)
Fast-forward 80 years, and the other public effort emerged out of a convergence of different groups and ideas. The first step was when Hennepin County purchased the railroad right-of-way for “future transit” in 1993, an idea that might still be worthwhile if plans for a streetcar ever come to fruition. At the time, the rail trench was a blighted, marginal space, most famous for being in an iconic band photo featuring the Replacements.
Knowing that transit was a long way off, a group of South Minneapolis advocates began pushing to use part of the trench for a recreational trail, seeing the potential of the underused railroad trench. At the time, “rails-to-trails” bike corridors were a firmly established pathway for off-street recreation. Two men in particular, George Puzak and Tim Springer, co-founded the Midtown Greenway Coalition in 1995 and began raising the political and financial capital for the project.
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It took years of sustained work to create the Midtown Greenway in practice, including a heated debate over building transit in the trench. But in August of 2000, the first portion of the Greenway officially opened. It ran about three miles from Chowen Avenue, west of the chain of lakes, to around 5th Avenue South, at which point the rail line to the east was still active. Phase 2, adding five more miles to Hiawatha Avenue and the new Blue Line light rail, opened a few years later in 2004. The easternmost portion, to the Mississippi River, arrived in 2006.
Credit: Courtesy of Midtown Greenway Coalition
Key factors in urban bicycling
Since then, the Midtown Greenway has been a success – one of the nation’s best-used bike trails. Because it runs across the entire width of the city, riders experience Minneapolis’ diversity, from the tony riverfront and lake districts into the working class industrial areas in Seward, Phillips and Midtown. Riders pass within a block of everything from polluted iron foundries to big box stores to new apartment buildings to Somali malls to at least three dozen taco restaurants.
Linking these areas together has helped connect the city’s developing neighborhoods. The Midtown Greenway Coalition, which operates to this day, completed a study in 2021 pointing to economic development along the route, showing $1.8 billion of increased property values within 500 feet of the route since its opening.
The real benefit, though, is the separation from the threat of car traffic. While drivers bring their own insulated climate with them wherever they go, the cycling experience is inseparable from its environment. That means that cycling infrastructure, which might look identical on a map, has huge variability in comfort and accessibility. Once you factor in the noise and pollution levels, or the almost ubiquitous presence of speeding vehicles and 10% of drivers looking at their phones at any given moment, there’s a huge difference between an on-street bike lane and an off-street connection.
This is what makes Midtown Greenway such a treasure. Cyclists can ride together, chat and relax. It’s a space that’s safe for kids and seniors who might not feel great about dealing with cars. Once you reach to the Greenway, you’re in a different kind of space, one that opens up new possibilities and connections with the city.
Why aren’t there more Greenway-like trails?
To me, the 25th anniversary of the Midtown Greenway —a tremendous investment for sustainability, development and public health — begs the question: Why haven’t we built any more of these car-free connections?
It’s not for lack of trying. The problem is that it’s nearly impossible to “retrofit” a greenway through a residential neighborhood, or to acquire rail corridors from powerful and reticent railroad conglomerates. In 2016, I wrote about efforts to create a “greenway” on existing city streets in North Minneapolis. Allegedly the project is still going ahead in some form, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Elsewhere around the metro, efforts to use urban rail corridors remain a challenge. The Canada Pacific Spur connecting the former Highland Ford Plant to the heart of the West 7th neighborhood remains a pipe dream. Ramsey County has not expressed interest in acquiring the railroad right of way for a recreation trail, citing the high cost and duplicative nature of the trail, near the Sam Morgan bike trail along the Mississippi River.
If anything, the Midtown Greenway illustrates the utility of an urban trail running through the heart of residential and industrial neighborhoods. I’m guessing the trail would pay for itself over time with increased investment and tax base.
Similarly, other potential Greenway-type routes are mired in limbo. When I asked him about the latest efforts of the Midtown Greenway Coalition, Executive Director Soren Jensen pointed to the recent designation of the Midtown Greenway as a “regional trail,” something that the group pushed the Minneapolis Park Board to change earlier this year. The status should help the Greenway raise money and momentum for its big effort: extending the bike trail across the Mississippi River.
In 2023, the state Legislature funded a study, currently underway and due out in October, to examine the cost and benefits of using the existing railroad bridge for the bike route. If built, the river crossing would be transformative for Southeast Minneapolis and St. Paul. Theoretically, the Ayd Mill Road bike path, built in 2019, could connect into the network alongside an existing railroad corridor through St. Paul. I won’t be holding my breath, but given the payoff for climate and economic development, it’s a tantalizing goal that would seamlessly link the Twin Cities together.
At any rate, the difficulty of creating urban car-free trails makes it all the more impressive that 25 years ago, South Minneapolis activists managed to create one. Twenty-five years later, the Midtown Greenway remains an S-tier example of bicycling in the United States. Let’s take a moment to celebrate and appreciate what we have, and think about how to grow the network in the next quarter century.
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