Picture this intersection of Lyndale and Lake Street by the 1990s — one of the most fertile music and arts corners in the city, where cheap rent and independent venues let culture happen. The Bryant Lake Bowl on Bryant Avenue, the Jungle Theater on Lyndale, the Barbette restaurant that served as a de facto salon for the Minneapolis arts community — these institutions concentrated creative life into a few walkable blocks. The Lyn-Lake neighborhood sits between Uptown proper and the Powderhorn neighborhood, and it has historically been the transitional zone where the countercultural Uptown scene blended with the working-class South Minneapolis grid.
The stretches of Lyndale Avenue here are lined with small apartment buildings from the 1910s and 1920s, now occupied by a mix of longtime residents and recent arrivals drawn by the neighborhood's reputation. The Midtown Greenway, a converted railway corridor that runs along 29th Street a few blocks north, has become one of the best urban bike corridors in the country — flat, car-free, and running six miles from the Chain of Lakes to the Mississippi.