Kenwood on a summer morning shows you exactly what flour money built. The neighborhood sits on a glacial ridge between Cedar Lake and Lake of the Isles, and the houses along its curving streets were built from the 1880s through the 1920s by the millers, lawyers, bankers, and merchants who ran Minneapolis during its most expansive decades. The architecture is eclectic in the best sense — Queen Anne cottages next to Colonial Revival mansions next to Arts and Crafts bungalows — but the scale is uniformly generous: wide lots, deep setbacks, mature elm and oak trees forming a canopy that shades the sidewalks in summer.
Kenwood has remained a wealthy neighborhood continuously since it was developed, which is unusual in American cities where wealthy neighborhoods tend to decline and regenerate on fifty-year cycles. The quality of the housing stock and the extraordinary access to the Chain of Lakes has kept it stable. The poet Robert Bly, the artist George Morrison, and dozens of Twin Cities cultural figures have lived in this neighborhood over the decades.
Walk a few blocks and let the houses tell you what Minneapolis looked like when it thought it was going to be the Chicago of the North.