South Minneapolis is where you'll find the city's real life. The neighborhoods south of Lake Street — Nokomis, Longfellow, Standish, Hiawatha — were developed from the 1880s through the 1930s as streetcar suburbs, dense grids of craftsman bungalows and two-story American foursquares built for the people who worked in the mills, the packinghouses, the railroad shops, and the commercial districts of downtown. The streetcar lines that built them are gone — the last line ran in 1954 — but the neighborhood scale they created remains: blocks of houses with front porches and backyard gardens, corner stores every few blocks, Lutheran churches every few more.
The Norwegian and Swedish immigrants who settled here in the late nineteenth century left their mark in the churches, the fraternal lodges, the Scandinavian bakeries and delis that still operate. Leif Erikson Park on Minnehaha Parkway is named for them. Minneapolis has been a profoundly Scandinavian city in ways that shaped its political culture — cooperative economics, labor solidarity, social democratic politics — as much as its food.
The DFL, Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, is itself a product of that Scandinavian cooperative tradition fused with farm-state populism.