The Lowry Hill Tunnel, Half a Century Under the Hill

A freeway beneath the bluff

The Lowry Hill Tunnel carries Interstate 94 beneath the hill near downtown Minneapolis. At 1,496 feet in length, it was completed in late 1971 and remains one of the more distinctive pieces of freeway engineering in the metro.

The tunnel's construction was part of the same wave of mid-century freeway building that reshaped the edges of the neighborhood. It was the building of I-94 and the Lowry Hill Tunnel that prompted the relocation of the Thomas Lowry memorial from the Virginia Triangle to Smith Triangle Park in 1967.

Driving through it, most motorists barely register that they are passing under one of the city's grandest residential districts.

A boundary as much as a passage

For Lowry Hill, the tunnel and freeway form part of the neighborhood's northern boundary. The Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association describes the neighborhood as enclosed by I-394 on the north and I-94 and Hennepin Avenue on the east, with 22nd Street to the south.

Half a century on, the tunnel is simply part of the landscape, a reminder that even the most genteel neighborhood sits inside a working city.

Engineers bored an interstate through the same ridge that made Lowry Hill desirable in the first place.

A freeway beneath the bluff

The hill that gives the neighborhood its name is also, quite literally, a tunnel. Interstate 94 dives under Lowry Hill in the Lowry Hill Tunnel, a structure of just under 1,500 feet that carries the freeway between downtown and the western neighborhoods without cutting an open trench through the mansion district above.

Opened in the early 1970s as the interstate system pushed through the city, the tunnel was a compromise between the demands of high-speed traffic and the value of the historic neighborhood on top of it. The ridge that made Lowry Hill desirable — high ground above the old milling district — is the same ridge the engineers bored through.

A boundary as much as a passage

For the neighborhood, the tunnel and the open freeway trenches around it do double duty as borders. Lowry Hill is effectively hemmed in by I-94 and I-394 and by Lake of the Isles to the west, edges that have kept its footprint stable for half a century.