Bridge Square to the Gateway

Bridge Square to the Gateway. . The City of Minneapolis was incorporated in 1855, soon after the first bridge opened across the Mississippi. Its two main thoroughfares, Hennepin and Nicollet Avenues, met at Bridge Square. That area quickly became the commercial center of a town that faced east toward the river. Minneapolis had no train service until after the American Civil War. People in a hurry used horses, but most simply walked., Only thirty years later, Minneapolis was looking to the West. The Northern Pacific Railroad reached the West Coast in 1883, and by 1893 James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway was completed to Puget Sound. Trains linked Minneapolis with the East via the Stone Arch Bridge, and a new Union Depot had risen on the south side of Bridge Square. As goods and immigrants crowded onto trains, Minneapolis began to see itself, like St. Louis, as a "Gateway to the West". The name was soon applied to the whole district., Railroads in the 1890s carried not only freight and passengers, but also nationwide labor unrest. Traffic in the Gateway stopped abruptly in April 1894 when the new American Railway Union struck the Great Northern after repeated wage cuts. The strike was soon settled, but the Gateway area became a center of labor strife and radical activity in the Mill City., The Gateway had once been a good place to find work, but by the twentieth century jobs for farm laborers and lumberjacks were drying up. The area became rundown and dirty and crowded with people without work. In 1915 the city created Gateway Park on the site of the old City Hall in an attempt to improve the neighborhood, but it continued to deteriorate. In the early 1960s over 180 structures were cleared from the district in a sweeping effort at urban renewal. These included the Gateway Park and the 1890 Metropolitan Building., Minneapolis City Hall dominated Bridge Square, the intersection of Hennepin Avenue (right) and Nicollet Avenue (left). In 1883 a giant light pole towering 257 feet was built to promote electric street lights., Riding trains to the city, transients gathered in the bars and flophouses that grew up near depots and railway yards. By the depression of the 1930s, the Gateway had become known as a haven for the poor., Bridge Square was becoming the Gateway in 1885. On the right, James J. Hill's Union Depot separated the city from the river. Across the river the Minneapolis Industrial Exposition Building dominated the skyline., In 1914 the Great Northern Depot replaced the 1885 Union Depot. It was torn down in 1978 after the last passenger train crossed the Stone Arch Bridge. It is now the site of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.