You knew they were the best all along. Now you’ll know why.

 

July 2006

We knew the Twin Cities’ suburbs were hot when they made The New York Times on April 30. Seems the Times was enamored of St. Louis Park, Burnsville, and Apple Valley’s quests to create and re-create perfect downtowns—the “latest thing” in real estate. It’s easy to be lured by the ’burbs: According to the 2000 census, about 75 percent of the Twin Cities’ population lives in the suburbs in the traditional “seven counties” (the metro, by the way, includes four more Minnesota counties and two in Wisconsin). Our history started in them, our future—and about 80 percent of our kids under the age of seventeen—lives in them. Lifestyle trends are the first to start in the ’burbs, whether it’s the GI homes of Richfield and Roseville, Bloomington’s International Village and other “swinging singles’” complexes of the 1970s, the 1980s’ tract housing of Eden Prairie and New Brighton, the 1990s’ “gated community” at Bearpath in Chanhassen, or the millenicade’s million-dollar McCastles on Minnetonka. When retail needed room to grow, Edina’s Southdale became the Twin Cities’ and the nation’s first enclosed mall, the Mall of America won the nation’s pocketbooks and, set to expand again, has become a ’burb unto itself. The Shoppes at Arbor Lakes in Maple Grove, stripped away the mall façade and debuted the metro’s first “lifestyle” center. Corporate giants General Mills, 3M, and Best Buy headed to the burbs, and Target is about to rock its corporate culture with a new “campus” in Brooklyn Park.

We made a giant X across the metro, dividing it into north, south, east, and west (sorry, we had to draw the line at the Wisconsin border), then set out to find the best of each. Frankly, about the only area of modern life our suburbs haven’t surpassed their city counterparts’ reign is in dining and the arts, but they’re trying and we’ve found the best of them too. We’ve tried to toss aside our city bias, but welcome your feedback. E-mail us at edit@mspmag.com  to clue us in to your favorite suburban bests. We’ll post them on our website—and may even try this again next year. — Jean Marie Hamilton