The Como-Harriet Line. It’s now just a tiny museum line in southwest Minneapolis, but it once served downtown Minneapolis, the university, and the capitol. Much of its path was down city streets, where the signs of streetcars are long-gone. Through Como Park in St Paul and Linden Hills in Minneapolis, however, the line had its own right-of-way, off city streets. If you look carefully, you can still find signs of this.
The Como-Harriet museum line ends at Linden Hills Blvd, near Lake Harriet. From there, the only evidence of a streetcar line is a gently curving path of oddly placed alleyways and greenspace. I followed this pathway to France Ave and the streetcar suburb of Morningside, which merged with Edina in 1966.
September 20th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
[...] Max’s recognition of subterranean patterns from above is excellent; similarly, Evan Doorbell can hear the smallest click, thunk, or ka-chunk in the old analog phone system and know just what it is. For me, once I saw how these old urban commercial nodes mapped so directly to the Minneapolis streetcar system, I couldn’t stop seeing urban design patterns that persisted 50 years after the end of the streetcars. [...]