What’s the story behind Minneapolis’ Boom Island Lighthouse?

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For a landlocked state, Minnesota has an outsized share of lovely lighthouses — from stunning Split Rock overlooking Lake Superior to the Lake City Marina light, the only operational lighthouse on the Mississippi River.

Minneapolis even has one — the Boom Island Lighthouse.

James Kronlokken was walking in Boom Island Park along the Mississippi River recently and noticed the little lighthouse out on tiny Hall’s Island. He snapped some photos without really thinking about it.

Then he started wondering about its story.

“Afterwards, I thought, ‘What a strange location for a lighthouse. Why was it located here?’” said Kronlokken, who lives in Eden Prairie. He reached out to Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project, to find out.

Built in 1987, the Boom Island Lighthouse isn’t historical. (During the steamboat era, kerosene lamps called post-lights dotted the Mississippi River’s banks in the Twin Cities, keeping captains on the right route. There wasn’t a lighthouse.)

It isn’t necessarily practical either. (Although it does light up at night.)

It is pretty. And that was the point, said park historian David Smith, author of “City of Parks: The Story of Minneapolis Parks.”

“It was purely decorative,” he said.

The 35-foot lighthouse was the brainchild of Boom Island Park’s designer, Ted Wirth, the grandson of influential parks superintendent Theodore Wirth. It has watched over decades of striking change along Minneapolis’ riverfront.

Long before becoming a park, Boom Island played an important role in the city’s sawmill industry at St. Anthony Falls. In the 1800s, as logs came floating down the Mississippi from forests up north, their ends were branded with different sawmill company stamps.

Workers on the island would use booms — essentially a series of logs chained together that worked as a trap — to catch the stamped logs so they could be sorted and sent to the right sawmill.

In those days, Boom Island was still an actual island. Ensuing layers of silt and sawdust — as well as debris from a terrible fire in 1893 — filled in the channel separating it from the riverbank.

During the next century, the island became a train yard, covered by more than two dozen tracks. “There was a roundhouse on the island where they turned around the trains,” said Smith.

In 1982, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board used state funding to buy Boom Island and hired landscape architect Ted Wirth, then based in Montana, to submit a plan for the park.

He made quick work of it, Smith said.

“Ted Wirth, he told me that he was hired on a Friday afternoon and submitted a plan on the next Monday,” he said. “The lighthouse was part of that plan. The goal was to create an icon for the city, which obviously never happened.”

The little lighthouse has long served as a scenic backdrop for photos — of students dressed up for prom, of the annual 4th of July fireworks above the park, and of the city’s skyline.

But despite Wirth’s intent, it never really entered into consideration as a city symbol in the way that landmarks like Minnehaha Falls, the Stone Arch Bridge or the sculpture garden’s Spoonbridge and Cherry have, said Smith.

“Perhaps icons can’t be created intentionally,” he said.

When Boom Island Park opened in June 1987, Star Tribune reporter Randy Furst called the lighthouse a “visual highlight” and described it as “an imitation of the real thing, with a light on top for evening boaters.”

The new park, which now fills 22½ acres, kicked off ambitious efforts to reclaim the city’s riverfront that continue today.

When Wirth, who died in 2009, first designed Boom Island Park, the lighthouse was inside its boundaries and connected by land to the riverbank.

But in 2018, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board led a restoration of the area where the lighthouse is located. They dug a new back channel and recreated the island that was once there, called Hall’s Island.

The lighthouse now sits at the southern tip of Hall’s Island. It is part of Graco Park, which opened in 2024 and stretches north along the riverfront.

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