Why doesn’t Minneapolis’ Tangletown follow the grid?

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The twists and turns of Minneapolis’ Tangletown neighborhood make it stand out on a map. It’s one of the few areas of the city that deviate from an orderly grid.

Many of its street names are unique to the neighborhood, such as the evocative Rustic Lodge Avenue.

The contrast has always made Abby Bulger curious.

“I have a friend that lives in Tangletown and I always got confused when I tried to get to her house, following the grid system until it stopped being a grid system,” said Bulger, who lives in Uptown.

Bulger reached out to Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project to ask: “Why is Tangletown the way that it is?”

The picturesque, hilly tangle of streets near Minnehaha Creek was initially laid out by a landscape architect. It was outside city limits when it was first developed in the 1880s with the aim of becoming what real estate agents called a “fine suburb.”

That first venture fizzled as most of the lots failed to sell before the city swallowed up and surrounded the area, explained neighborhood historian Tom Balcom. Still, the eventual development kept true to much of that initial vision, he said.

Balcom, who grew up in the area and led tours of Tangletown for the nonprofit Preserve Minneapolis for many years, said the curving streets of the neighborhood create unique views as you travel through it.

Tangletown’s history is also unique. A four-story brick orphanage once anchored the area, which counted famous architect Harry Wild Jones as its first nonfarmer resident. Jones designed the neighborhood’s signature water tower.

The neighborhood’s boundaries run from 35W to Lyndale Avenue S. and from 46th Street to Diamond Lake Road.

It didn’t get the name “Tangletown” until 1996. Before that, it was officially called Fuller (after the now-demolished Fuller Elementary School, named for journalist Margaret Fuller).

Its first developers gave it a different name altogether, however: Washburn Park.

In 1886, milling tycoon and former U.S. Sen. William Washburn first purchased the area’s more than 200 acres of farmland along with a group of investors.

He called it Washburn Park — not after himself, but in honor of his brother Cadwallader, a onetime governor of Wisconsin who had died four years earlier. In his will, Cadwallader Washburn left instructions — and a perpetual endowment — to found a home for orphans near Minneapolis.

The will “stipulated that the site be outside the Minneapolis corporate city limits but within a few miles of downtown, that it be quality land not less than 20 acres, and that it be in a desirable setting with ample natural shade,” Balcom wrote in a 1984 account for Minnesota History magazine.

As Washburn looked for a spot for the orphanage, he was also thinking about creating a real estate development surrounding it. He “went out into this area, looking for an area that was hilly and could represent a higher plane of houses and streets,” Balcom said.

He found it in the woods near Minnehaha Creek, about 5 miles south of downtown. In an 1886 map of newly platted Washburn Park, real estate agents H.E. Ladd & Co. marketed the development as a retreat:

“No city in the country of the size and importance of Minneapolis is as destitute of fine suburbs; places where the men of business can get away from the noise of the city and the inconvenience of small lots and crowded neighborhoods,” the map’s accompanying text reads.

“The streets follow the natural depressions of the land,” the description continued, noting that lots ranged from a quarter-acre to 3.5 acres.

The marketing also calls Minnehaha Creek a “poetic stream” and mentions that landscape architect Horace Cleveland — who had recently created the plan for Minneapolis’ parks and parkway system — supervised Washburn Park’s layout.

Washburn built the Washburn Memorial Orphan Asylum in 1886 on the hill at 50th Street and Nicollet Avenue where Justice Page Middle School now stands. (The orphanage was torn down in 1929. Just a superintendent’s cottage still stands, at the intersection’s southwest corner.)

In 1887, Jones built his own chateau-style residence, called Elmwood — which remains a private home at 1 Elmwood Place.

That same year, Washburn Park became part of Minneapolis as the city annexed land. But most of the development’s lots remained unsold, Balcom said.

“It was just a hard time back then to sell large lots, and the automobile wasn’t around yet. ... It was just horse carriages,” he said. “After Washburn died, it was kind of forgotten.”

In 1908, Thorpe Brothers Realty Co. bought all of Washburn Park’s unsold land, split it up into smaller lots and realigned a few streets, according to Balcom’s account in Minnesota History magazine.

Development took off, and most of the neighborhood’s homes were built in the three decades that followed.

There is one home, however, that was never built but still sparks plenty of local curiosity because a street still bears its name: Jones’ design for a magnificent residence he called “Rustic Lodge.”

He created the plans — including a log exterior and a skylight decorated with antlers — for a woman named Nellie Mead, according to Balcom. Only a foundation was built. Its namesake avenue remains, though.

Jones did build a lasting landmark for the neighborhood, however. In 1932, south Minneapolis was facing water-pressure woes. The city tasked Jones and another local resident, sculptor John Daniels, with designing the Washburn Water Tower.

The project replaced the original 45-foot-tall water tower, which was constructed in 1893 and conveyed water from Minnehaha Creek.

Daniels was famous at the time for his stone and metal works as well as his butter sculptures at the Minnesota State Fair. He designed and created eight plaster casts of 16-foot-tall sword-wielding figures called guardians of health.

They are accompanied by eight 5-ton eagles. (The birds, according to newspaper accounts at the time, were inspired by a giant bird that attacked a worker during the construction of Jones’ house.)

As the tower rose, the Minneapolis Journal wrote about the dramatic figures that “romance is being put into the water business.”

The 110-foot-tower no longer supplies water to the neighborhood and is now empty. But the romance remains.

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