Thomas Lowry, the Streetcar Magnate Who Gave the Hill Its Name

The man behind the name

Thomas Lowry was a leader in the development of rapid mass transit in Minneapolis, the figure most associated with the horse-drawn streetcars that first ran through the area in the 1880s and the electric lines that followed. Both Lowry Hill and the Lowry Hill East neighborhood, better known as the Wedge, carry his name.

Lowry's transit lines did more than move people; they made the hill developable. The extension of the electric streetcar along Hennepin Avenue and west along Douglas Avenue opened the bluff to the real-estate boom of the 1890s, turning farmland and rough hillside into one of the most desirable addresses in the city.

A memorial to Lowry once stood at the Virginia Triangle, where Hennepin and Lyndale avenues meet. It was relocated to Smith Triangle Park in 1967 to make way for construction of Interstate 94 and the Lowry Hill Tunnel.

A name on both sides of Hennepin

The split naming can confuse newcomers. Lowry Hill proper sits west of Hennepin Avenue, climbing toward Kenwood and the Lake of the Isles. Lowry Hill East lies on the other side of Hennepin, a denser, more commercial wedge of blocks bounded by Lyndale Avenue.

Both owe their early growth to the same transit network, and both still bear the name of the man who built it.

The same streetcar line that built the mansions on the hill filled the Wedge with the apartments of the people who rode it.

Streetcars that built a city

Thomas Lowry arrived in Minneapolis in the late 1860s and, more than any other single figure, built the system that moved its people. He installed the horse-drawn streetcars that first ran through what is now Lowry Hill East in the 1880s, then helped electrify and consolidate the lines into the Twin City Rapid Transit Company, whose cars eventually reached every quarter of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

That transit network did more than carry passengers; it determined where the city grew. The same streetcar line that pushed up Hennepin Avenue and west along Douglas opened the hill to the developers and lumber families who built its mansions, while the denser blocks east of Hennepin filled with the apartments of the people who rode the cars to work.

A name on both sides of Hennepin

Lowry's name now sits on both halves of the divide his streetcars helped create. The mansion district west of Hennepin is Lowry Hill; the dense, triangular neighborhood to the east is Lowry Hill East, universally called the Wedge. The Lowry Hill East Neighborhood Association still opens its own neighborhood history by crediting Lowry and the streetcars that first ran along its streets.