Kenwood Pitches In on the Winter Party and the NYE Skate

Kenwood, the neighborhood rising north of Lake of the Isles, co-hosts two of the season's cold-weather staples — the Lake of the Isles Winter Party and the New Year's Eve Skate — alongside Lowry Hill and East Isles. Both events lean on shared sponsorship to keep them free.

The Kenwood Neighborhood Organization also partners on the DNR fishing clinic, part of a steady pattern of cross-neighborhood cooperation around the lake. Year-round, Kenwood tends to show up as a co-sponsor rather than a bystander on the lakeside calendar.

Cold-weather neighbors

The winter events are where the Chain of Lakes neighborhoods most visibly act as one, pooling pit fires, cocoa and volunteers on a single frozen lake. In summer the neighborhoods can run their own events in their own corners; in winter, when the work is harder and the daylight shorter, they close ranks. A winter party or a New Year's skate is too much for any one association to mount alone, so they do it together.

That shared model is also what keeps the events free. By splitting the costs of refreshments and the load of volunteer hours across three associations, Kenwood and its neighbors can put on gatherings that no single neighborhood's budget would cover. Cooperation is not just neighborly here; it is the thing that makes the free winter calendar possible at all.

A shoreline in easy reach

Kenwood's stretch of shoreline puts it in easy reach of the action, and its residents turn out in force when the fires are lit. The neighborhood rises just north of Lake of the Isles, so for many households the winter party is a short walk downhill — close enough that the events feel like a natural extension of the block rather than a trip across town.

That proximity shows in the turnout. When the pit fires ring the shore on a cold afternoon, a good share of the bundled-up crowd has simply walked down from Kenwood, and a good share of the people running the show live there too.

Why the cooperation matters

There is a lesson in how readily these neighborhoods share a calendar. Plenty of adjacent communities guard their events jealously; the Chain of Lakes neighborhoods instead treat the lake as common ground and the season as a joint project. The result is a richer, more reliable slate of free gatherings than any of them could manage alone — and a habit of cooperation that pays off well beyond the winter.

Kenwood's steady role in that arrangement, on the cold-weather staples and the DNR clinic alike, is a small but real part of what keeps the whole system working.