A century of shoreline: how Lake of the Isles got its shape

Lake of the Isles looks timeless, but its shoreline is the product of deliberate decisions stretching back more than a century. The Minneapolis Park Board designated the land around the lake as a park on Nov. 6, 1886, and the first dredging to improve its shores began in 1889 on the northern arm, continuing through 1893.

The lake was then radically reshaped under longtime parks superintendent Theodore Wirth. He converted roughly 100 acres of water, 67 acres of swamp and 33 acres of dry land into about 120 acres of water and 80 acres of dry land, dredged the lake to an average depth of about eight feet, and expanded the southern island. The clean-edged urban lake neighbors take for granted today began as a marshy, irregular body of water.

In 1919 the Park Board passed its first ordinance preventing canoe landings on the lake's islands, an early move to protect the small islands that give the lake its name.

During the Great Depression, when nearly all maintenance in the city's parks was carried out under federal work-relief programs, the Works Progress Administration built a masonry shoreline retaining wall at Evergreen Point on the lake. The original WPA wall there was replaced in 2003, but stonework from that era remains a defining feature of the lake's edge.

Understanding the shoreline as a made landscape changes how to read present debates over it. When the Park Board replaces mowed turf with native plantings, it is not letting the lake go wild so much as choosing a different kind of management, the latest in more than a century of deliberate shaping. The lawn edge some neighbors miss was itself an intervention, not the lake's original state.

Much of that history survives in plain sight along the parkway path: the defined shoreline created by early dredging, the masonry along the bank, and the island protections dating to 1919.

Sources: Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board,; Minneapolis Park History,