Minnehaha Avenue carries you southeast from South Minneapolis toward the falls along one of the oldest corridors in the city, platted in the 1870s and built up fast once the streetcar lines reached it. The name comes from the Dakota: Mni Ha Ha means laughing water or curling water, a description of the waterfall a mile ahead of you. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made the name famous in 1855 when he published The Song of Hiawatha, a wildly popular epic poem set here — Longfellow had never been to Minnesota, but he based the poem on Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's accounts of Ojibwe culture and on illustrations of Minnehaha Falls.
The poem made this waterfall one of the most famous natural features in the United States before photography made it redundant. The avenue you're on was the main corridor connecting South Minneapolis to the falls and to Fort Snelling beyond, and it has retained much of its early-twentieth-century character: small neighborhood businesses, a mix of housing types, and a scale that feels human rather than automotive. The Longfellow neighborhood here has a strong Vietnamese American community and excellent Vietnamese restaurants along the avenue.