Elliot Park

The fortunes of Elliot Park, one of the oldest Minneapolis neighborhoods, have risen, fallen, and are rising again with the prospects of the rest of downtown. Forty-one years after Minneapolis was founded in 1852, the wealthy physician Joseph Elliot donated his farmland for the park that now bears his name. At the time, Elliot Park was the only downtown neighborhood with its own park (it also had a hospital and the city’s first public school) and these amenities attracted wealthy residents who built mansions along Park Avenue.

As Minneapolis boomed in the early 1900s, developers built high-density apartment buildings—some of the old brownstones that still stand today along Chicago Avenue. During the Depression, working-class immigrants moved in, converting the mansions into multi-family dwellings. Then the post-WWII boom shifted the national middle-class zeitgeist from cities to suburbs. Interstates 94 and 35W decimated area businesses, a development from which the neighborhood almost didn’t recover.

Between 1950 and 1970, Elliot Park lost 54 percent of its population, and its remaining residents were beset by poverty and crime. “I remember back in the late seventies and early eighties being aware that Elliot Park was not a place to go to,” says David Fields, community development coordinator for Elliot Park Neighborhood, Inc. (EPNI). “It had a liquor store called Lil’ Judges that was notorious as the place to get the cheapest kind of booze.”

In Fields’ estimation, the opening of the Metrodome in 1982 didn’t help matters, because it brought with it suburban-style acres of parking lots. “There used to be more restaurants and residential areas there as part of an extension of the Cedar-Riverside area,” he says. “Now people just come in for games and leave.”

Resilience and Recovery
Elliot Park is now a recovering and fast-growing downtown neighborhood (it experienced the fastest growth in Minneapolis between 1980 and 2000, according to city census data), a testament to the vision and conviction of many long-time and new residents.

In 1976, for example, concerned residents started a neighborhood group to address livability and safety concerns. Today that group, EPNI, is focused on preserving the neighborhood’s housing stock, promoting a development vision, and encouraging economic and cultural growth. In the 1980s, the Central Community Housing Trust (CCHT), a nonprofit affordable housing developer, began to build affordable housing units throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul, with the lion’s share concentrated in Elliot Park.

“They reclaimed threatened buildings and locked them into low-income housing tax credits, which means they’ll stay affordable,” Fields says. “A lot of people say we’ll be gentrified, but I say we can’t be because a lot of units are locked in. But that gives us a chance to then welcome new builders and create a real cross section of demographics.”

Fields credits other neighborhood institutions such as Augustana Health Care, which provides housing and health care for seniors; Hennepin County Medical Center; and North Central University as important stakeholders that have contributed to Elliot Park’s revitalization. The Lil’ Judges that Fields remembers? It’s now the North Central University bookstore.

In the 1990s, Elliot Park development got a big boost from an infusion of $4.2 million in Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP) funds, which the EPNI used to provide many home and business loans and home improvements, including funding for the mixed-use East Village development and the Grant Park Homes condominiums.

Sharon “Shar” Kanan, co-owner of the neighborhood coffee shop E.P. Atelier, was one beneficiary. Kanan grew up in the area but had moved to Los Angeles for many years; in 2002 she moved back to Elliot Park to finish a book and became active in the community. Sensing that the neighborhood needed a hangout, she decided to open a coffee shop and in 2004, with the help of EPNI, she received a $35,000 loan that helped make E.P. Atelier a reality.