Groveland Terrace, the Quiet Companion to Mount Curve

By 1906, lots on Groveland Terrace and adjacent Mount Curve Avenue held some of the costliest houses in Minneapolis, the result of a real-estate boom that drew the city's new money to the hill in the decades after the streetcar arrived.

The area's prominence traces to 1874, when Thomas and Beatrice Lowry built a Second Empire mansion on a five-acre parcel at 2 Groveland Terrace, the site now occupied by the Walker Art Center. Lowry then put the surrounding land on the market, and the city's wealthy families, enriched by lumber, milling and trade, left the congested downtown to build in the roughly 75-block area between Lyndale and Fremont. The Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association's own history names Mount Curve Avenue and Groveland Terrace together as the addresses where the most expensive houses went up; see

The two streets share a builder class, an architectural vocabulary and a vintage. Mount Curve runs along the crest of the ridge; Groveland Terrace curves below it, lined with the same spacious two-and-a-half-story houses, deep porches and generous lots beneath boulevard trees. Because it sits off the better-known avenue, Groveland Terrace is quieter and less photographed.

Preservationists treat the two streets as a single early-1900s streetscape rather than separate addresses, with several houses across both carrying landmark or National Register recognition. That shared standing matters when demolition or new development is proposed: an intact ensemble is easier to defend than a scattering of individual houses, which is why the hill's advocates emphasize the whole over any single address.