Once a farm road on the edge of the city, Lake Street quickly grew into a busy streetcar route and a major manufacturing and retail center. Wonderland amusement park ("Ten Acres of Fun for Ten Cents," between 31st and 33rd Avenues) enchanted hundreds of thousands of thrill-seekers for seven years, starting in 1905.
Minneapolis-Moline produced farm equipment -- and the first Jeep -- at Lake and Hiawatha Avenue until 1972; the site is now a Target store. By 1928, Sears was ruling Lake from its 13-story Art Deco fortress at Chicago Avenue.
By the mid-1950s, Lake had evolved into a car dealership epicenter and Greasyspoonland (remember Ci and Vy's Cafe, Curly's and Harvey's Avalon Cafe?). By the 1970s, parts of the street were hitting the skids, driven by an onslaught of adult-only businesses, rising crime and declining property values.
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Thankfully, a number of stalwart businesses never gave up, and where some saw decline, others saw opportunity. As modest immigrant-owned cafes and shops began filling empty storefronts, the street slowly began to come back to life, aided by several big-bucks projects, including the long-vacant Sears store going the housing/offices/retail route, a busy new light-rail transit station at Hiawatha Avenue and a nearly completed $31 million redesign that stretches from Dupont Avenue to the Mississippi River. Today, Lake Street probably encounters more socially and economically diverse communities than any other Minneapolis street.
That top-to-bottom makeover, four years in the making and the first since 1954, is turning this former ugly duckling into a major swan, dressing up a 70-block corridor with nearly 900 trees and distinctive, historically minded street lamps.
Good looks will no doubt lead to more good things to eat. Case in point: Pescaderia Kora (717 E. Lake St.), a seafood market, is on its way.
