HCLIB Tumblr Waves Goodbye
After almost 13 years of blogging about Minneapolis and Hennepin County history on Tumblr, Special Collections staff are calling it quits. We’ve shared some pretty great stories, images, and discoveries through the years in nearly 2,000 posts!
Take a look back at our 10 most liked and reblogged original posts since 2011, which illustrate the wide variety of materials and subjects in our collections.
- Audubon’s Passenger Pigeons
- Sean Daley’s (Slug of Atmosphere) senior portrait
- Vice Raid at the Camel’s Club
- Ukrainian Easter Eggs
- First Mailwoman in Minneapolis
- John Glanton Photograph Identification Project
- Workers of the World Unite
- Eloise Butler and Women in Botany
- The Traveler’s Green Book
- House Plans Now Online
Subscribe to our email newsletter, published every other month, to stay on top of what’s new and noteworthy in Special Collections.
While we won’t be posting new content to the hclib Tumblr, you can continue to browse and search posts in the Tumblr archive. And more permanently in our web archive.
And as always, you can visit us in person at Minneapolis Central Library or contact us via email or phone for assistance with all your Minneapolis and Hennepin County history needs.
Bye bye!
Photo of a group of kids waving to the milkman, from the Minneapolis Newspaper Photograph Collection in the Hennepin County Library Digital Collections.
Welcome to Winter
Happy winter solstice! Here in Minnesota, we love winter, snow, and ice. Now bring on the snow!
Photos top to bottom:
- Unidentified skier jumping, 1940s (P49505) & Dennis and Dianne Loechler in just enough snow to ski, 1949 (P27232)
- City bus on Douglas Avenue, 1939 (P49724)
- Three men ice fishing, 1987 (ECCO0207) & Snow plow, 1948 (P49494)
- Three women sledding, 1940s (P04305) & Car buried in snow from plow, 1940 (P49519)
- Longfellow community in winter, 1929 (MPS06776)
- Janet Hahn hiding in a snow-laden tree, 1939 (P49498) & No parking here, 1922 (P49481)
- Barbara Fish makes a snowball, 1940 (P49502) & Mary Carol and Catherine Grun warm up by the radiator, 1941 (P01089)
Browse thousands of wintery scenes in the Hennepin County Library Digital Collections.
Resident Mountain Lion
With the sad news this week about the death of the cougar travelling through Minneapolis, here is a bit of the story of a much earlier cougar to find itself in Minneapolis. In June 1899, the Minneapolis Tribune reported that the park board had purchased a mountain lion, cinnamon bear, and “various kinds of foxes and tropical birds” to add to its growing zoo at Minnehaha Park. The park board bought the animals from “a stranded showman” for $325. This was the first mountain lion to live at a Minneapolis zoo.
The Minnehaha zoo that awaited the new mountain lion contained everything from moose and elk to alligators and sea lions. Started informally in the early years of the park, the zoo was such a favored attraction among park visitors that park officials continued to add animals. While the deer, moose, and elk could endure the snow and ice outside at Minnehaha Park, most other animals – including the mountain lion – were moved to enclosed barns for the winter.
Despite the popularity of the zoo, some questioned its place in Minnehaha Falls and the confined quarters of the animals. When Theodore Wirth took the reins as Superintendent of Parks, he got the park board out of the zoo business. While a few of the animals – deer, elk, and bears, for instance – remained in at Minnehaha Park until the 1920s, most of the other animals moved down the road to the new Longfellow Gardens in 1907. R. F. Jones, the owner of Longfellow Gardens, added other cougars to the zoo over the years, and three mountain lion cubs were even born at the zoo in 1926. Longfellow Gardens closed in the 1930s.
Excerpt from the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board Annual Report, 1899. Proceedings and annual reports from the park board are now fully searchable in the Hennepin County Library Digital Collections.
New Streamlined Church and a Street Renamed
In 1938, Minneapolis’s northside welcomed a new streamlined church, St. Austin’s Catholic Church, at the northeast corner of Washburn Ave. N and 38th Ave. N. Designed by Minneapolis architects Bard and Vanderbilt, but heavily influenced by the church’s pastor, Rev. James Troy, and his worldly travels (to Brno, Czechoslovakia in particular), the church was an unusually modern, white stucco building with steep arches and curved corners. It was unlike any other building in the city and unlike anything Bard and Vanderbilt would design again.
The Church of St. Austin was a newly-organized Catholic church, made up of about 1500 people who formerly attended St. Bridget’s, St. Ann’s, Ascension, St. Phillips, Holy Cross, St. Joseph’s, and Sacred Heart churches. The new church was named in honor of the late Archbishop Austin Dowling, who was the second archbishop of the Archdiocese of St. Paul (succeeding John Ireland) from 1919 until his death in 1930.
It was the church that led to the renaming of 38th Ave. N to Dowling Ave. N, which was officially changed by the city council on November 12, 1937. (Note, Dowling Ave. was not named after the other famous Minnesota Dowling, Michael J. Dowling, the Minnesota politician, newspaper publisher, businessman, and spokesman for the physically handicapped, who as a boy lost three of his limbs to frostbite, and for whom Dowling Elementary School in South Minneapolis is named.)
Unfortunately, the streamlined St. Austin parish didn’t survive for long, cheaply built with stucco and wood trusses, rather than poured concrete, it wasn’t built to last. The church and parsonage were demolished in 1963, just 25 years after it was built, and five basic single-story homes were built in its place from 1964 to 1965 (pictured in Google streetview above).
St. Austin parish moved to a new brick building nearby, at the corner of Upton Ave. N and 41st Ave. N and eventually merged with St. Bridget parish. Their second building is now home to the New Oil Christian Center.
Photos, 1940 map, and building permit index card from the Hennepin County Library Digital Collections. See more photos of St. Austin Catholic Church.
Party Entertainment in the 1990s
If you were planning a holiday party in the 1990s, Hauser Artists could have helped you find some novel entertainment. Hauser Artists, who sent out this promotional postcard, represented a number of local musical acts. Just a few of the highlighted ensembles mentioned here include:
- Hauser-Braunstein Duo: “Guitar and flute music for Christmas and Hanukkah”
- Ritzmiller-Marazzo Duo: “Space age Christmas music for two synthesizers”
- The Merrie Olde Christmas Carolers: “They wear Dickens costumes and bring along sleigh bells, finger cymbals and kazoos.”
This postcard is part of our Minneapolis and Hennepin County Vertical Subject Files.
Cars, Cars, and More Cars
Zoom into the photo above, from 1967, and you’ll see cars parked sometimes eight cars deep, packed into surface parking lots like sardines. (Presumably parking attendants were managing the movement of cars in and out of these lots throughout the day.) Parking and traffic congestion had been a problem in downtown Minneapolis since at least the 1940s and was still a major concern in 1969 when the above report was published. When much of the Gateway was demolished in the late 1950s and early 60s (“urban renewal”!), a lot of land was converted to parking lots. But with more parking spots came even more cars driving downtown. Newly built highways were improving speedy access to downtown and a comprehensive public transit plan, from the newly formed Metropolitan Transit Commission, was still in the works. Cars primarily got people where they were going.
Much of downtown remained a sea of parking lots for decades. Browse over 1,400 photos of parking lots in the Hennepin County Library Digital Collections. Find parking studies from the 1940s to the early 2000s in the Minneapolis History Collection on the 4th floor of Central Library.
Society of Amateur Chefs Tackles Thanksgiving
Many an amateur chef will be cooking a turkey today, but in 1949 an entire society of them worked to prepare the perfect holiday bird.
Founded in 1947, the Minneapolis Society of Amateur Chefs was a club for those men in the upper tier of society who had a love of food and cooking. Only the third chapter of the national society, the Minneapolis amateur chefs met monthly for gourmet feasts created by members. In the club’s first few decades, dinner menus included everything from Moo Goo Gai Pan to moose rib roast prepared by the moose hunter himself.
In the week before Thanksgiving 1949, the society embraced one of each year’s greatest cooking challenges – the Thanksgiving turkey. In these photos from our Digital Collections, society members (including a lawyer, a business owner, a doctor, and a Pillsbury executive) divide up the labor of turkey cooking.
Hennepin County libraries are closed today (November 23, 2023) for Thanksgiving.
H C L
Welcome to Hennepin County Library, where insurance, electricity, football, and antiques are top of mind! *wink*
This 1970s graphic covers one side of a large mailing envelope and was found in the Hennepin County Library Communications Records. This collection contains brochures, booklists, flyers, reports, posters, strategic plans, event and program calendars and other publicity documents from the library’s Communications Department, from 1952-2022. The purpose of the envelope is unknown, as is the designer “SJ.”
Edit 12/27/23: Thanks to an HCL retiree (and newsletter reader), SJ has been identified as Sheila Jorgenson, who worked on and off for both Minneapolis Public and Hennepin County Libraries in the publicity departments and as a librarian from the 1960s through 1990s.
Remembering Jody Williams, 1956-2023
In August, I met with Minneapolis book artist Jody Williams. We gossiped about other artists, talked about tiny things, and she shared stories about her life-long love of books and her chaotic 1960s childhood, growing up near Chicago with five siblings. But the real reason she was visiting was to sell old work from her archive. I’ve been buying Jody’s work for the Hennepin County Library’s Book Arts and Fine Press Collection for over a decade, but didn’t have any of her early work and wanted to better document her legacy as a book artist. She brought with her nearly all of her books–work spanning over thirty years as a book artist–and it all fit in just one box. Jody’s work is tiny.
She had the first editioned artists’ book she ever made, her first book housed in a box, her first book under the name Flying Paper Press, her first book printed in her own studio, a book about phobias, an alphabet bestiary jack-in-the-box, books which melded her training in printmaking and metalworking, and her semi-annual periodical devoted to tiny things, among others. What they all had in common was their diminutive size, Jody-designed font, and impeccable precision. We now have 20 of Jody Williams’ books in our collection.
Jody died on October 17, 2023, after a long battle with cancer. She will be missed and will be remembered fondly for her contributions to book and printing arts in the Twin Cities.
Jody’s books will be on display at Minneapolis Central Library starting in mid-December 2023 through February 2024.
