[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by Chef

I think Minneapolis is more of a legacy city than people realize. Minneapolis and St Paul combined had around 365,000 people in 1900 which would have made it the eighth largest city in the US - larger than Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cincinnati, Washington or New Orleans.

There are two reasons why it isn't perceived as such. The original buildout of Minneapolis was extremely dense - almost its entire population of 200,000 in 1900 lived in what is now downtown. Other than the Warehouse District, a few mills along the river and some pockets in Elliot Park almost none of that city survives. Most of the city now is the streetcar suburbia that grew up between 1900 and 1930.

The other reason is that the city's main manufacturing industry was food processing which for the most part is still here, so the city didn't go through the same deindustrialization that the rust belt did in the 1980s. The Twin Cities actually have a fairly significant manufacturing component to their economy, it is just not in heavy industry to the same degree as other Midwestern cities were.

yep the first thing that comes to mind for a clevelander looking at minnys riverfront food history structures is gee, arent they lucky these buildings were for food and not heavy industry, which cant be redeveloped so easily.