Lake of the Isles Anchors Lowry Hill's Western Flank

The Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association describes the neighborhood as bounded on the west by Lake of the Isles Parkway, along with Logan and Morgan avenues, with I-394 to the north, Hennepin Avenue and Interstate 94 to the east, and 22nd Street to the south. That western edge gives residents direct access to one of the city's signature lakes and its surrounding parkland.

The lake has long shaped the neighborhood's appeal. The families who built the mansions on Mount Curve and Kenwood Parkway valued proximity to the water and the parkways, and the lake remains a defining amenity for the hill today. The streets above it hold turn-of-the-century houses in styles from Queen Anne to Prairie to Tudor, including landmarks such as the Charles J. Martin House at 1300 Mount Curve Avenue.

Lake of the Isles is also daily infrastructure as much as scenery. Its walking and biking paths, the canoe channels that link it to Bde Maka Ska and Cedar Lake, and the skating it supports in winter put a major recreational amenity within a short walk of the hill's houses, and connect it to the broader Chain of Lakes that defines southwest Minneapolis.

That access ties the neighborhood into citywide debates that play out at the lake's edge, over shoreline restoration, water quality and Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board priorities, which regularly draw comment from the surrounding neighborhoods. Lake of the Isles sits in the same chain as Bde Maka Ska, the larger lake to the south restored to its Dakota name in 2018 in recognition of the people who knew these waters long before the city. The naming and the stewardship of the chain remain live civic questions that reach the hill.

The lake does for Lowry Hill's western edge what the freeways do for the others: it draws a hard boundary that has kept the neighborhood's footprint stable for decades. Unlike the freeways, it is a boundary residents are glad to live against.