The recent hot weather, along with school letting out, had me thinking of summers as a kid growing up in North Minneapolis…
Hot days often meant a trek to Glenwood Lake. You probably know it as Wirth Lake, but back in the 1950s and early ‘60s when I was a kid, everyone still called it Glenwood Lake. Way back in the 1800s and early 1900s, it was called Keegan’s Lake.
Going to the beach required finding someone else who could go too because you couldn’t go swimming without a buddy. The “buddy rule” is still a good idea to this day. We would walk along Glenwood Ave to the beach, no one got a ride to the beach in those days. My family only had one car and my dad drove it to work. You’d find a spot on the sand to put your towel down and then head for the water. There was a buoyed area where the water wasn’t too deep. If you were a good swimmer, there was a platform for diving farther out in the lake.
Besides swimming, we would sometimes go looking for turtles. Right near the beach there was a perfect structure for turtles to sun themselves on. It was the area that was fenced off with snow fencing that held the amphitheater, diving towers, pool and bleachers for the Aqua Follies. The Aqua Follies was an aquatic revue show that took place each summer during the Minneapolis Aquatennial. It had stunt divers, comics, professional dancers and synchronized swimmers. There would be up to 5,000 spectators for each performance. The Aqua Follies were there from 1941 to 1964. The current playground is a nod to the old Aqua Follies structure. We would hold our breath and carefully go under that snow fencing and look for turtles. There were both painted turtles and snapping turtles there. Of course if you brought home a turtle, your mom was likely to make you take it back.
We would also sometimes walk around to the other side of the lake to Glenwood Parkway (Wirth Parkway now). On the other side of the street were artificial rocks that we would climb on and occasionally crawl into. These artificial rocks were the remnants of the Loring Cascade which was a waterfall that was built in 1920 by Charles Loring and was fed by water piped from the lake. There are still pieces of the Loring Cascade and the plaque is still visible on the west side of Theodore Wirth Parkway just north of Glenwood Ave. Other times we might walk down the parkway to the Birch Pond to see the domestic geese. Sometimes we’d bring stale bread with us to feed them but you had to be careful so you didn’t get bit. The park board had domestic water fowl that were taken in each winter and put back out in the summer – geese at the Birch Pond and swans at Loring Park.
On our way back home we would often stop and sit for a bit at the streetcar shelter that was down the hill from the picnic pavilion near the tennis courts. Those tennis courts are gone, but the streetcar shelter, which was built in 1916, is still there! It is the only one left in Minneapolis. As we walked home along Glenwood Ave, we would sometimes stop on the bridge and watch the trains leaving Fruen’s Mill and we would almost always walk down the driveway down to the Glenwood Inglewood plant to get a cone shaped cup of water to drink. Fond memories of simpler times.
If you want to see a bit about the Aqua Follies, check out TPT’s Lost Twin Cities III: pbs.org/video/the-aqua-follies-23621.