Up on the hill above you, a water tower with a conical cap over a cylindrical base — the silhouette of a witch's hat — has marked Prospect Park since 1913 as one of the most distinctive landmarks in Minneapolis. It sits at the top of Prospect Park, a neighborhood developed in the 1880s on glacially sculpted hills east of the University of Minnesota, with curving streets that follow the terrain rather than the grid. A streetcar speculator developed the land and wanted something picturesque rather than gridded, and the result is one of the few Minneapolis neighborhoods where you can get genuinely disoriented by the street layout.
Residents here have an unusually strong neighborhood identity and a long history of activism — this was among the first neighborhoods to organize around historic preservation and traffic calming. The view from the tower platform, when open to visitors, takes in the Minneapolis skyline, the University campus, and on clear days the Chain of Lakes to the southwest. The neighborhood holds only about 2,500 residents but has produced a disproportionate number of the people who have shaped Minneapolis politics and culture over the past half-century.