The 100th anniversary of the monument honoring Thomas Lowry, one of the foremost movers and shakers in Minneapolis history, will be marked Tuesday evening.
A program on the developer and streetcar magnate, who died in 1909 — and the monument erected to him — will be held at the downtown Minneapolis library's RMKC meeting room at 7 p.m.
The memorial to Lowry is the city's most outstanding civic monument, in the opinion of architect Peter Sussman, who also is an amateur historian and a board member of Preserve Minneapolis.
The bronze and granite statue stands in Smith Triangle at 2330 Hennepin Av. S., opposite Temple Israel. But that's not where it was dedicated 100 years ago Tuesday.
The original site was the now-gone Virginia Triangle at the intersection of Hennepin, Lyndale and Groveland avenues.
The state highway department moved the statue in 1967 as Interstate 94 and its Lowry tunnel were being constructed, according to a Park Board history.
"One day it was there, and the next day it was gone," recalled Sussman, who passed through the bottleneck area frequently as a youth.
It's difficult to overstate Lowry's role in the city's development. Initially a lawyer, then a real estate developer, he later co-founded the Minneapolis Street Railway Co., serving as its longtime president. He also played a major role in the Soo Line railroad. His streetcar and real estate ventures often overlapped. According to the website MNopedia, one-third of the land that's now Minneapolis passed through Lowry's hands in the 1870s.
