Where Hennepin Avenue meets Lake Street you are at the commercial heart of Uptown, the creative and countercultural center of Minneapolis for fifty years. The name Uptown was a real estate invention — the neighborhood sits south of downtown, not above it — but by the 1970s it had accumulated enough bookstores, coffeehouses, used record shops, art theaters, and affordable apartments to become genuinely distinct. The Uptown Theatre, opened in 1939 as a neighborhood movie house and converted to an art cinema in the 1970s, anchored a cultural scene that included the Walker Art Center nearby and the music venues that were incubating what would become the Minneapolis Sound.
The neighborhood has gentrified substantially since the 1980s, with coffee prices and rent both rising accordingly, but it has retained more of its original character than many similar neighborhoods in comparable cities. The Uptown Art Fair each August is one of the largest outdoor art fairs in the country. Lake Street itself, running east-west through here, is one of the most diverse commercial corridors in the Twin Cities, with Latin American, East African, and Asian businesses alongside the Uptown stalwarts.