The Thomas Lowry House and a Vanished Corner of the Hill

Thomas Lowry arrived in Minneapolis in 1867 and platted the first 220 acres of what became Lowry Hill, the Groveland addition, according to the Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association. His house on Mount Curve Avenue was photographed as early as 1880, and by 1906 Mount Curve and Groveland Terrace held some of the costliest houses in the city. Lowry oversaw much of the early growth of the Twin Cities streetcar system, the lines that opened the hill and the lakes district to development.

The bronze-and-granite memorial by sculptor Karl Bitter, dedicated in 1915, originally stood at the Virginia Triangle near Hennepin, Lyndale and Groveland avenues. The state highway department moved it in 1967 as I-94 and the Lowry Hill Tunnel went in, and it now stands in Smith Triangle at 2330 Hennepin Ave..

The Hennepin County Library preserves photographs of the original Lowry house, including the 1880 image. The freeway that displaced the monument in the 1960s cut through the southern edge of Lowry Hill, a change that helps explain why the neighborhood's surviving estates draw such a protective preservation instinct from residents and the neighborhood association.