Loring Park’s Greenway Plaza gets an upgrade. But the walkway needs more love.

On June 26, a private ceremony at Loring Park’s Greenway Plaza will feature Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey cutting a ribbon for a $30 million upgrade to the area. The money came from the homeowners who live in the large condo towers — Loring East and Loring West — and most of it was spent on upgrades and refurbishments to buildings. But there’s a civic gift, as well — improvements to the Greenway Plaza, an urban oasis that’s coming up on its half-century mark.

“The plaza is the biggest item that we’re celebrating,” says John Zesbaugh, project coordinator. “It goes along the Greenway, and it’s pretty spectacular. Flowering annuals, shrubs — it’s very parklike on the Loring Park East side.”

“I have pond jealousy with Loring Park West,” Zesbaugh jokes about the building’s designed areas that have large rocks and pines. “It looks like the North Shore.”

It’s a welcome sign of continued investment in Loring Park.

“People reinvesting $30 million of their own money is a shining light for Minneapolis,” Zesbaugh says. “A shining light for this neighborhood.”

The light has dimmed from time to time. Loring Park’s fortunes have varied over the decades. The city’s first park — known as Central Park when it opened in 1883 — became a home for the well-to-do. It was the natural site for early civic monuments that range from the well-known and beloved, like the statue of violinist Ole Bull eternally sawing away atop a plinth, to small stone markers commemorating local notables like, well, Charles Loring, father of the park system. The area got a dodgy rep in the 1970s and beyond, but new residences brought back its reputation as a jewel in the park system’s crown.

The private residences may have brought back the park’s vitality and population, but the most public addition was the Loring Greenway, finished in the summer of 1980. It’s a green and pleasant 1.3-mile walkway that connects the barren streets of downtown Minneapolis to Loring Park. Designed by M. Paul Friedberg, a New York-based landscape architect who also designed the nearby Peavey Plaza, the Greenway provides a gently winding path lined with the standard urban green-space amenities — planters, trees and benches.

However, the Greenway is showing its age in two ways.

One, the fountains are dry at present. The main pyramid-shaped water feature that announces the Nicollet Avenue entrance looks parched, as does the larger, similar-shaped Berger Fountain located midway through the journey to Loring Park. It doesn’t help that the fountain, named after former parks commissioner Ben Berger and colloquially called the dandelion for its shape, is a bare and ruined object awaiting renovation.

Two, the style at Greenway feels outdated. The walkway was completed almost 45 years ago, and it looks like it. The planters with flowers bursting from slots look like a strange filing system. The pyramid fountains remind you of a late ’70s mall, as do the light fixtures.

This is probably inevitable in any postwar design. Something designed with classical motifs — columns, figurative statuary in a pseudo-Baroque fountain, elegant old streetlights — is already dated, in a sense. It’s a timeless style factored in to our civic visual vocabulary, and if the Greenway had been built in the 1920s it would seem like a European street transplanted to Minneapolis. Anything built after the war would reflect the styles of the times, and look passé when the styles moved on.

And the style of the Greenway has moved on.

That said, it’s still a lovely walk. There are spots where you see only a canopy of trees above. Move a few yards down the walk, and tall towers peek through the leaves.

Two-story residences give it a human scale, as well. It’s the perfect blend of density and space, and walking it on a pleasant summer day makes you wonder why the Greenway is the exception, not the rule.