Mount Curve Avenue's Mansion Row Still Crowns the Hill

The costliest blocks in the city

By 1906, the lots fronting Mount Curve Avenue, Groveland Terrace and the nearby blocks were the addresses of some of the most expensive houses in Minneapolis. The extension of the electric streetcar along Hennepin Avenue and westward along Douglas Avenue had touched off a real-estate boom on the hill in the 1890s, and within a decade the ridge had filled with the homes of lumber, milling and merchant families.

The characteristic streetscape of broad lawns, boulevard shade trees and generously spaced houses was already taking shape by 1900. The neighborhood standard then was a spacious two-and-a-half-story house with deep porches and elaborate exterior detail, and it largely remains so today.

What makes Mount Curve unusual among grand American avenues is how intact it is. Block after block of the original estates survive, many still in single-family use, their carriage houses and stone walls reading like a catalog of turn-of-the-century taste.

A ridge with a view

The avenue follows the crown of the hill, and the homes on its north side look out over the basin that holds downtown Minneapolis. That topography is exactly why the wealthy chose it: the hill caught the breeze, sat above the smoke of the milling district, and offered a prospect over the growing city below.

Today the same ridge gives residents and visitors one of the best vantage points in the city, a fact not lost on the architects who oriented the grandest rooms of these houses toward the skyline.

The standard was, and still is, a spacious two-and-one-half-story house with generous porches and exterior detail.

Who built the row

The hill filled in fast once the electric streetcar reached it. Through the 1890s and into the 1900s, lumber, milling and merchant families moved up from the smoke of the riverfront and the downtown core, and by 1906 the lots fronting Mount Curve Avenue and Groveland Terrace were among the most expensive in Minneapolis. The Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association's own history records that the look took hold by 1900: broad lawns, boulevard shade trees, well-spaced houses, and a standard of a spacious two-and-one-half-story home with generous porches and exterior detail.

The architects who shaped the street are still household names among preservationists. William Channing Whitney, who designed the landmark Charles J. Martin House at 1300 Mount Curve, worked the avenue, as did the firm of Kees and Colburn, responsible for the 1906 Donaldson mansion. The result is a street that reads like a built catalog of turn-of-the-century American taste.