Founded in 1972, the Seward Co-op grocery store on Franklin Avenue is one of the oldest and largest food cooperatives in the country, part of a wave of cooperative enterprises that defined the political and commercial culture of the Seward neighborhood and much of South Minneapolis. The cooperative movement that took root here in the early 1970s was ideological as well as practical — a belief that community ownership of essential businesses was both possible and preferable to corporate retail. Minneapolis has an unusually dense network of food cooperatives: Mississippi Market, North Country Co-op, Wedge Co-op, and others have operated here for decades.
The Seward neighborhood itself was developed in the early 1900s as a streetcar suburb and has a characteristic South Minneapolis density — craftsman bungalows, corner commercial blocks, accessible parkland along the river. It has been home to successive waves of immigrant communities, including a significant Hmong American population that arrived beginning in the late 1970s as refugees from the Secret War in Laos. The Midtown Greenway, the converted rail corridor that has become one of the best bike paths in the country, runs through Seward, connecting it to the rest of the city without requiring anyone to ride in car traffic.