Why is Uptown called Uptown when it's south of downtown in Minneapolis?

Live in a city long enough, and its geographic lingo becomes second nature.

Amy O'Meara, for example, has lived in "Lyn-Lake," an abbreviation for Lyndale Avenue and Lake Street. She also resided in the North Loop, coined after an old Minneapolis streetcar line. And then there was Uptown.

"It all makes sense, except Uptown," O'Meara said of the commercial area that is — bafflingly — south of downtown. O'Meara asked the Star Tribune to look into the name for Curious Minnesota, a community-driven reporting project fueled by great questions from inquisitive readers.

"Uptown" is common parlance today for the district around Hennepin Avenue and Lake Street, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon. For much of the 20th century, the area was commonly known as "Hennepin-Lake," despite efforts to push the Uptown moniker.

A century ago, in fact, Uptown appears to have referred to a very different part of Minneapolis — downtown. Newspaper clippings from the 1920s include Uptown references, meaning the central core area further from the Mississippi River, past 7th Street.

But modern day Uptown really staked its claim in 1929 when one of the area's most prominent attractions, then the Lagoon Theater, was renamed the Uptown Theatre.

"The name 'Uptown' was chosen to conform with a movement now in progress to establish the Lake and Hennepin community as 'The Uptown District of Minneapolis,' fashioned after the famous and prosperous district of that name in Chicago," the Minneapolis Star reported at the time.

"When we would go and interview folks who had lived in the community for a long time, including some people who spent a lot of time in the 1940s in the Uptown area, they didn't call it Uptown," Imboden said.

That began to change in the late 1970s as businesses distanced themselves from the seedier connotations of Hennepin Avenue and Lake Street, said John Meegan, owner of Top Shelf tailors, which operated at Hennepin-Lake before moving to Lyn-Lake.

"Hennepin and Lake was like a double negative. It conjured up two very bad images in the minds of most people," Meegan said.

Local business owners decided they needed to rebrand the neighborhood, he said, "And we took the name right off the Uptown Theatre."

This preceded the 1983 redevelopment of Calhoun Square into a major shopping center, which Imboden's book notes was about when the Uptown name went mainstream.