The history of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden dates back to the early 20th century. Its land was donated to the Park Board in 1906 by Thomas Lowry, whose home was just up the hill, where the Walker Art Gallery and Walker Art Center would later be built. This acreage was just a small slice of the total land donated for parks over the years by Lowry, a real-estate magnate and head of the Minneapolis Street Railway Co. (later the Twin Cities Rapid Transit System).
In 1913, the land caught the eye of then-parks superintendent Theodore Wirth, who approached the Park Board with a temporary proposal: A formal garden that would coincide with the national convention of the Society of American Florists and Ornamental Horticulturists, to be held that summer at the neighboring Armory.
Wirth had a strong horticultural bent: In 1907, he designed the beloved Lyndale Park Rose Garden, the second-oldest public rose garden in the U.S. (Wirth also designed the oldest, in Hartford, CT in 1904, when he was superintendent of parks for that city.)
The resulting Armory Garden made a splash with the out-of-town florists and was an instant hit with the locals – so much so that it endured for more than 50 years. With the 1934 demolition of the Armory (the white building in the image below), the name changed to Kenwood Garden, which met its own demise in 1967 with the construction of the I-94/Lowry Tunnel highway project. It remained a mostly empty plot of land for the next two decades.
More Minneapolis Sculpture Garden history
- David C. Smith delved into a deeper history of the Armory Garden on his blog, Minneapolis Park History. Smith is author of City of Parks: The Story of Minneapolis Parks.
- Walker Art Center director emeritus Martin Friedman penned a lively and insightful account of the history of the parkland and its development into the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in a 1988 essay for the Walker’s Design Quarterly. Friedman passed away in 2016, just a day before the groundbreaking for the garden reconstruction.
- Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) produced a 26-minute program on the history of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in conjunction with its 25th anniversary (2013).
Fun fact #1: The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is a part of Parade Park, originally known as “The Parade”—a reference to its use for military drills by National Guardsman training at the adjacent Armory.
Fun fact #2: The floral displays at the Armory Garden wowed Minneapolis just months after another, more infamous Armory Show shocked the nation. The 1913 exhibition at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory displayed some 1,400 modernist and avant-garde artworks and had Americans exclaiming about the boundaries of art—a role played by the future Walker Art Center on a number of occasions, as a leading institution for contemporary art.