The Mississippi River passes through Minneapolis.
The Twin Cities sit where the last bit of eastern deciduous forest touches the edge of the great tallgrass prairie that sweeps south and west. It is a city on the edge—not quite within the great American Heartland but opening the door to it. Minneapolis is known as the “first city of the West” and St. Paul as the “last city of the East.” The Mississippi River, which divides the two, does not do so cleanly. Instead, its north-south course makes a giant sideways S as it passes through the area, cradling neighborhoods of St. Paul that are bounded by the river on three sides. It also divides both cities and the suburbs into rough north and south areas, with much of the wealth and most of the professional opportunities concentrated in the south.
The Mississippi River passes through Minneapolis.
The Twin Cities are located almost precisely in the middle between the East and West Coasts and also lie right on top of the 45th parallel, exactly halfway between the North Pole and the Equator. A plaque in Minneapolis’s Theodore Wirth Park (look for it near the intersection of Wirth Parkway and Golden Valley Road) marks this point.
True to its flatland reputation, Minneapolis sits at 830 feet above sea level and St. Paul at 702 feet.
Three rivers pass through the Twin Cities. The Minnesota River meets the Mississippi just south of St. Paul at Fort Snelling, and the St. Croix River flows south from Lake Superior, forming the border with Wisconsin for much of its length before meeting the Mississippi southeast of the cities near Hastings.
Retreating glaciers left the area a tremendous gift: nearly 1,000 lakes within the metropolitan area. And when Lake Agassiz, the massive glacial lake that covered much of northern Minnesota and the Dakotas, drained about 13,000 years ago, the water spilling out of it cut the Minnesota and St. Croix River valleys even deeper.
Historically, the Twin Cities’ most important geologic feature is St. Anthony Falls, the only waterfall along the length of the Mississippi River. The falls originated well downstream of its present location near downtown Minneapolis and moved upstream, first slowly then more quickly, as the soft underlying sandstone eroded and the limestone overlayer collapsed. The waterfall was fixed in place in the late 1800s when, after the city had come to rely on its considerable waterpower, engineers built a massive wood apron (later replaced by concrete) to protect it. Had it moved a short distance farther upstream, the falls would have disappeared altogether.
Minnesota’s climate is characterized by warm, wet summers and cold, dry winters, with some of the greatest temperature variations in the country. While the Twin Cities have the coldest average annual temperature of any major U.S. metropolitan area (45°F), they also on occasion see record-setting temperatures even higher than those in far more southerly parts of the country.
The Twin Cities are usually just a smidge warmer than the rest of the state, thanks to the warming effect created by all those paved streets and tall buildings trapping heat. January is the coldest month, with an average high of 22°F, and July is the warmest, with an average high of 83°F. The first frost tends to come in early October, the last frost in early May. Below-zero temperatures have been seen in the Twin Cities as early as November 4, on one record-setting occasion in 1991, although that is not common at all.
During the winter, especially, temperatures can swing wildly. On one memorable day in 1996, the low temperature was -32°F. A week later, the high was 39°F. While Minneapolis averages just four nights below zero each year, in the winter of 2013-2014, the cities endured 53 below-zero nights.
Snow does fly in October and November, but it rarely sticks on the ground. A “permanent” winter snow cover of an inch or more tends to form in December and lasts, on average, three months. An average year sees about 60 inches of snow. To the surprise of some out-of-towners who associate March with spring, March is the snowiest month, averaging 13.5 inches—and damp, heavy stuff at that. (The explanation locals give for this strikes fear in the hearts of many: January and February are often just “too cold for it to snow.” Meteorologists quibble, saying it’s never actually too cold for snow to form, but colder air does hold less water vapor than warmer air, making large snowfalls less likely.) The infamous Halloween Blizzard of 1991 set the record for the largest single snowfall, with 28.4 inches falling on the Twin Cities over the course of two days.
The Twin Cities get about two-thirds of their annual precipitation in the summer, with much of it coming in the form of torrential summer storms, rather than slow drizzles. June, the rainiest month with 4.34 inches of rain, sees an average eight days of thunderstorms. Total average rainfall is about 30 inches a year.
Although they were not the first humans to inhabit the area that is now the Twin Cities, people of the Hopewell tradition, a flourishing culture that spread across much of eastern North America between 200 BC and AD 500, left the most visible mark on the area: clusters of massive burial mounds that now make up Indian Mounds Park near downtown St. Paul.
The Hopewell peoples disappeared, but the Dakota people, who were here when the first European settlers arrived, are very likely the descendants of another ancient culture, the Mississippian, which reached into the southeast corner of what is now Minnesota.
The Dakota are also sometimes known as the Sioux, a shortened form of the Ojibwe word nadouessioux (poisonous snake). The Dakota and Ojibwe (sometimes known as Chippewa) have been fierce rivals, often fighting bloody battles, since the Ojibwe first began arriving in the area around 1700. European settlers’ westward expansion pushed the Ojibwe out of their homes in the east. The rough and volatile line dividing the territories of the two groups settled more or less across the present-day Twin Cities, and the area saw its share of skirmishes.
What is now St. Anthony Falls, in downtown Minneapolis, was an important landmark for both the Dakota and Ojibwe people. Because they had to portage their canoes there as they came up- or downstream, it was a natural spot for a campground. The Dakota called the falls mnirara (curling waters), and the Ojibwe called it kakabikah (severed rock).
The first European to see the falls was Father Louis Hennepin in 1680. Hennepin, a Belgian-born Franciscan priest, had been dispatched along with a band of explorers to seek out the headwaters of the Mississippi by the French government. (Many others would be sent on this errand before the American geographer Henry Schoolcraft fixed the source of the river at modern-day Itasca, well northwest of the Twin Cities, in 1832.) Hennepin was captured by the Dakota and spent several months with them before escaping. He headed downriver and came upon the waterfall, which he named after his patron saint, St. Anthony of Padua. While the waterfall was indeed impressive—about 16 feet—in his enthusiasm he exaggerated its size to a massive 40 or 50 feet high.
Word of the falls spread, attracting explorers and even early tourists, but the U.S. government didn’t show much interest in the area until well after the Revolutionary War. After the Louisiana Purchase brought what is now Minnesota—along with all the land from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains—into U.S. territory in 1803, the U.S. government sent army lieutenant Zebulon Pike out to explore the northern reaches of it. Pike himself identified the promontory at the junction of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, just south of the two present-day downtowns, as the perfect spot for a military fort. Pike bought a large tract of land from the Dakota in exchange for promises of better prices on furs, 60 gallons of whiskey, and $200 in trade goods.
In 1819, looking for a way to protect the upper Mississippi River area from British and French fur traders, the U.S. Army ordered a fort built on the spot Pike had chosen. Soldiers and their families arrived to build Fort Snelling, a limestone fortress high above the Mississippi. Out in the hinterlands, far from the cities of the East Coast, the new settlers were largely on their own when it came to meeting their basic needs. They built the first sawmills and cultivated fields alongside the Mississippi.
By August 1848, fewer than 4,000 Europeans lived in what is now Minnesota, far below what the law required for territorial status. But the lumber companies were eager for Minnesota to have some sort of official status after Wisconsin had achieved statehood and left them in limbo, no longer part of the Wisconsin Territory. A group of settlers met in Stillwater, chose Henry Sibley as their representative, and sent him off to Congress, essentially with their fingers crossed that he would be seated. He was, and in March 1849, President Zachary Taylor named Alexander Ramsey the first territorial governor.
Minnesota would become a state in very short order, but in the meantime, affairs needed to be settled with the large Native American tribes in the area. The Treaty of Traverse des Sioux in 1851 would be one of the darker days in the history of Minnesota’s native peoples. At a gathering place in the southwest corner of the present-day metropolitan area, 35 chiefs signed a treaty giving up 24 million acres to the United States. Immediately after signing, each sat down at a separate table and signed another paper giving up the rights to the annuity payments they had just been promised to repay debts to white traders. The tribes would get little or nothing in return for their land.
When Minnesota became a territory, St. Paul was named as its capital. In 1857, there was a drive to move the capital to the town of St. Peter, which was a little more centrally located. The law passed the territorial legislature and only needed the governor’s signature. But an opposing legislator, Joseph Rolette, decided to take matters into his own hands. He absconded with the bill and then hid in a hotel drinking and playing cards until the clock ran out on the legislative session and the bill expired, leaving the capital in St. Paul.
Minnesota became a state in 1858 and quickly found itself embroiled in two wars. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Governor Alexander Ramsey happened to be in Washington, D.C., and responded immediately to President Lincoln’s call for troops. Thanks to some new technology—the telegraph—the nation’s first volunteers were lined up at Fort Snelling within days. About 1 in 10 Minnesota men fought in the Civil War, in battles from Bull Run to Gettysburg.
Within the year, Minnesota had another war on its hands, this time right at home. The harvests had been bad for several years, and the U.S. government had not been paying its annuities to the Dakota. Unrest grew and the situation exploded in the summer of 1862, when four young Dakota men killed a farming family. Brutal battles raged for two months, with horrors committed on both sides. After the Dakota surrendered, thousands of men, women, and children were imprisoned in a camp outside Fort Snelling, where nearly all perished from disease or starvation. More than 300 men were sentenced to hang. President Lincoln personally reviewed the cases and reduced most of the sentences, but the settlers were calling out for blood and 39 Dakota men were hanged.
After the Civil War, the nation looked westward again and the Twin Cities boomed. It became a center for the lumber industry and then the flour industry, connected to the rest of the country by “the Empire Builder” James J. Hill’s railroads. All this growth was fueled by immigration not just from the rest of the country, but from Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, and Eastern Europe as well. By the late 1870s, well more than one-third of Minnesota’s population had been born in another country.
Minneapolis rode the milling wave until 1930, when production dropped off sharply and the city of Buffalo took over as the leading producer. But by that time, other industries were already on the rise. Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M) introduced a wide range of industrial, military, and consumer products (including Scotch tape) that helped it thrive through the war years. Medtronic rose to the top of the biotech field with the first implantable pacemaker. And a number of growing companies in a variety of fields kept Minnesota’s diversified economy strong: Honeywell in defense manufacturing, Cargill in grain trading, Control Data and IBM in computers, and General Mills and Land O’Lakes in food production. An enterprising developer built the nation’s first indoor shopping mall, Southdale, in the first-ring suburb of Edina in 1956.
By the 1970s, Minnesota had a reputation for a sound economy, a strong education, and a high quality of life. Minnesota governor Wendell Anderson, grinning and holding a walleye on a fishing hook, was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1973, under the title “The Good Life in Minnesota.” Anderson is largely credited with the successful restructuring of funding for municipalities and public schools that helped bring about the Minnesota Miracle.
Anderson, however, left the governor’s office in 1976 when he appointed himself to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Walter Mondale, who had been elected vice president. This didn’t go over well with Minnesotans, who punished the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in subsequent elections and helped usher in an era of moderate Republican leadership in Minnesota, including governors Al Quie and Arne Carlson, U.S. Senator Dave Durenburger, and, later, U.S. Representative Jim Ramstad.
The governor most famous to those outside of Minnesota was surely Jesse Ventura, who was elected on a wave of disgust with the two major parties (or, possibly, in a massive public game of chicken) in 1999. Ventura made himself a reputation for antagonizing both the press and Minnesota’s bicameral legislature—and for governing fairly effectively simply by getting out of the way. He left office in 2003 and was replaced by Republican Tim Pawlenty, a more conservative model of Republican than previous Minnesota leaders. Democrat Mark Dayton, local department store heir and former U.S. senator, was elected the state’s 40th governor in 2010 and reelected in 2014.
In recent years, Minnesota (and the Twin Cities in particular) has been shaped by new waves of immigrants, as the Latin American, South Asian, and East African communities have grown. St. Paul sent the nation’s first Hmong American to a state legislature in 2002, when Mee Moua was elected to the Minnesota Senate, and Minneapolis elected the first Somali-American legislator in 2018, sending Ilhan Omar to the state House of Representatives. Although the percentage of foreign-born citizens is at 7 percent, rather than around 40 percent as it was in the late 1800s, there are shades of that earlier turbulent time of change and growth.
Both Minneapolis and St. Paul are strongholds of the Democratic Party—or the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as it is known here. Minneapolis has not elected a Republican mayor since 1973, and St. Paul hasn’t since 1952 (although Norm Coleman switched to the Republican Party in the middle of his term as St. Paul mayor in 1996). Both the 13-member Minneapolis City Council and the 7-member St. Paul City Council are typically made up almost entirely of DFLers, with a Green Party member or independent or two thrown in for variety.
Another characteristic the cities share is strong neighborhood control. St. Paul’s 17 districts are governed by independent district councils. Each has control over its own budget and has a say in vital land-use questions. Minneapolis’s neighborhood councils also control significant budgets used for neighborhood revitalization programs, from housing to scholarships to landscaping and more.
With two major cities sitting cheek by jowl, not to mention the surrounding suburban areas, there’s bound to be some redundancy in government functions. In the seven-county Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area (including Hennepin County, which contains Minneapolis, and Ramsey County, which contains St. Paul), there are as many as 182 cities, from tiny New Trier, population 113, to Minneapolis, population 400,000.
The Minnesota State Legislature foresaw the problems this could cause as disparities grew and municipalities battled for ever scarcer resources as early as 1967. Lawmakers created the Metropolitan Council to centralize planning and coordinating powers in one body. The council is charged with creating an evolving framework for growth and vetting the growth plans of member communities to be sure they fit that framework.
Today the powerful Met Council (390 Robert St. N., St. Paul, 651/602-1000, www.metropolitancouncil.org) has an annual budget of about $1 billion and a staff of 3,700. It is governed by a board of 17 members appointed by the governor and approved by the Minnesota Senate. Each member represents a geographic district within the seven-county area.
In its five-decade history, the council has taken on operating responsibilities beyond its original role as planner and coordinator. It operates the Metro Transit bus system, serving Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the surrounding communities, as well as the light rail systems between the Mall of America and downtown Minneapolis and connecting the two downtowns. It also operates the sewer and wastewater treatment programs for 100 communities and funds a system of 49 regional parks.
While the bulk of the council’s budget comes from legislative funding, sewer treatment fees, and transit fares, it also serves another important function in the area: redistributing the wealth. Communities have given the council 40 percent of the growth in their commercial-industrial tax base since 1971. That money is then redistributed to member communities based on population and the market value of homes.
One of Minnesota’s most telling political quirks is the existence of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, the DFL. That’s right, Minnesota doesn’t have just any old Democratic Party; it has its very own. The DFL was formed in 1944, when Minnesota’s Democrats merged with the Farmer-Labor Party. The Farmer-Labor Party had a presence in other states but had been particularly strong in Minnesota, producing three governors and four U.S. senators between its founding in 1918 and the merger. Two national Democratic nominees for president, Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968 and Walter Mondale in 1984, have been DFLers, though both lost to their Republican opponents.
The Mississippi River drove the early economic development of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Long before the railroad reached the new West, waterways tied the new cities to the whole of the eastern seaboard and the burgeoning frontier. St. Anthony Falls powered two boom times in Minneapolis in particular: From 1848 to 1887, Minneapolis sawmills turned out more boards than in any other city in the nation. And from 1884 to 1930, Minneapolis led the world in flour production.
Today the Twin Cities area is a hub for biotechnology, and Minnesota has 19 Fortune 500 companies, more per capita than any other state. The metro area had a gross metropolitan product of nearly $250 billion in 2016, representing about two-thirds of Minnesota’s gross state product (and about the same proportion of the state’s population).
The Twin Cities also rank first in the nation among major metropolitan areas in labor force participation (82 percent of working-age adults) and employment (77 percent). Minnesota has the country’s highest labor-force participation rate for women (72 percent). Unemployment falls below the national average, at 3.3 percent in 2018. Workers enjoy a median household income of $66,000 and relatively short average commute times (25 minutes in 2015). The cost of living sits just above the national average, with a median home price of $246,000.
These factors—and, of course, the cultural amenities—no doubt are some of the reasons that the Twin Cities regularly land on national lists of best places to live.
Minnesota has the fastest-growing population in the Midwest, and much of that growth is happening in the Twin Cities metro area, if not in the central cities themselves. The seven-county metro area had a population of 3.03 million in 2016—about two-thirds of Minnesota’s total population—with just over 400,000 people in Minneapolis, the state’s largest city, and roughly 300,000 in St. Paul, the capital. The metro area includes 182 cities, many of which are growing at a faster rate than both Minneapolis and St. Paul, while the two central cities’ share of the region’s population continues to shrink. The Metropolitan Council, which oversees planning for the area, predicts that the population will reach 3.7 million by 2030.
Residents of the Twin Cities are, on average, well-educated middle-class people. Thirty-six percent of adults in the metro area have bachelor’s degrees, putting Minneapolis-St. Paul fourth among U.S. metropolitan areas. The metro area ranks first in the percentage of population in the middle-income bracket (at 46 percent).
Minnesota has a reputation as a pretty white place. And, according to statewide statistics, yes, it is. But the picture changes depending on where you look. In the central cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul proper), 66 percent of the population is white, while in the first-ring suburbs that number is 89 percent, and in the outer burbs it’s 95 percent. Seven percent of residents in the metro area are foreign-born. Many visitors are surprised to learn that the Twin Cities are home to large Hmong, Somali, Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Liberian populations.
About 50,000 Hmong live in Minnesota, immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants from Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos. The largest number—more than half—live in St. Paul. Outside of Asia, only California’s Hmong population is larger. The Hmong started arriving in Minnesota after the Vietnam War, where many had fought on the United States side in the “secret war” against the communists in Laos. The population grew again in 2004 when thousands of Hmong refugees from the Wat Tham Krabok camp in Thailand arrived.
Minnesota’s Somali population, the largest in the United States, is estimated by some at 74,000, by others much higher than that. The population grew explosively in the 1990s, after the civil war in Somalia resulted in the total dissolution of a functioning government there. Most of the Somali population is centered in Minneapolis, where Somali-owned businesses and cultural centers are flourishing.
The University of Minnesota predates the state of Minnesota itself. It was chartered in 1851 and began enrolling students in 1857, the year before Minnesota became a state. It became a post-secondary institution in 1869. Today it is the fourth-largest in the nation, with more than 50,000 students, and boasts a number of top-ranked graduate programs, including chemical engineering, health-care administration, geography, applied economics, psychology, and more.
The Twin Cities metro area, in fact, is home to about two dozen colleges and universities. St. Paul alone ranks second in the nation in the number of higher-education institutions per capita. A number of them, including the University of Minnesota itself, attract many students from out of state who stick around to join the local workforce after they finish their education.
Minnesota has long had a reputation for excellence and innovation in public education. It was the first state to mandate full interdistrict school choice (any student can enroll in any school anywhere in the state, as long as there’s room) and the first to introduce charter schools, in 1991.
It goes against all the stereotypes—the hardworking, no-nonsense Scandinavian ancestors; the cold weather; its location smack dab in between two coasts that both view themselves as the center of the universe—but the Twin Cities are a place where serious artists do serious art: on stage, on the page, and in their studios. More importantly, this is a place full of happy amateur artists: those who do for the love of doing and love living in a culture that supports that.
Several organizations are working to keep alive some of the Scandinavian folk art traditions that came to Minnesota over a hundred years ago. The American Swedish Institute (www.asimn.org) hosts exhibits and offers classes in woodcarving, bobbin winding, the traditional painting technique known as rosemaling, and other crafts. Ingebretsen’s (www.ingebretsens.com) is a store specializing in Scandinavian foods and crafts and a mini cultural center. Look on its website for classes in cooking, knitting, weaving, carving, and other crafts. Enterprising citizens also teach classes in a very wide range of crafts through Minneapolis Community Education (http://commed.mpls.k12.mn.us) and its St. Paul counterpart (www.commed.spps.org).
Another folk tradition that you are likely to see—one newer to the Twin Cities—is pa ndau, intricate Hmong appliqué work, characterized by concentric squares, often on purses, wall hangings, and pillow covers. A good place to look for pa ndau is at the Nicollet Mall Market, a Thursday farmers market. Keep your eyes out, as well, for the more modern cousin of pa ndau: story cloths, which are appliquéd works of art that tell a story. The style originated in the refugee camps of Thailand in the 1970s.
The Textile Center (www.textilecentermn.org) is a national umbrella organization for textile arts of all kinds that span centuries and cultures, with member organizations dedicated to needlepoint, sewing, spinning, knitting, and more. The center hosts exhibits and has a public library collection. In a similar vein, the Northern Clay Center (www.northernclaycenter.org) is a national organization based here in the Twin Cities that supports ceramicists through grants, exhibitions, publications, and more.
For arts of all sorts, from writing to photography, painting, fabric design, and more, the Split Rock Arts Center (http://cce.umn.edu/splitrockarts) at the University of Minnesota hosts summer workshops in the Twin Cities and retreats at its location in Cloquet, in northern Minnesota.
There’s just something in the water here—that’s sometimes the only explanation people can come up with to explain the Twin Cities’ remarkable literary culture. The two cities regularly appear at the top of the list of America’s most literate cities (as ranked by Central Connecticut State University, which tracks these things based on libraries, bookstores, publishers, and so on). In 2007, Minneapolis was number one and St. Paul number three.
But there’s more to it than mysterious waterborne substances. A strong history of supporting the arts financially, top-notch educational institutions, and generations of immigrants from book-loving cultures all contribute, along with the snowball effect: A great literary culture attracts more people to contribute to it.
The area is home to a one-of-a-kind literary incubator, Open Book (www.openbookmn.org), where you’ll find the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (www.mnbookarts.org), The Loft Literary Center (www.loft.org), and one of the country’s most successful small nonprofit publishers, Milkweed Editions (www.milkweed.org), all under one roof.
The Twin Cities have also been called a hub of small-scale publishers, comparable to New York’s status as the hub for mega-scale publishing. In addition to Milkweed, several other small presses survive and thrive here, including Coffee House Press (www.coffeehousepress.org) and Graywolf Publishing (www.graywolfpress.org).
Another pillar of the literary community in the Twin Cities is Rain Taxi (www.raintaxi.com), a scrappy quarterly nonprofit literary journal that reviews books nobody else is reviewing but everybody else should be. The folks behind Rain Taxi also organize the annual Twin Cities Book Festival, a well-attended day of readings, talks, and exhibits.
The Twin Cities literary calendar includes another much anticipated event: the announcement of the Minnesota Book Awards, which honor Minnesota-related authors and illustrators in eight categories and often feature writers who get attention on the national scene as well.
When Sir Tyrone Guthrie had a vision of a new sort of theater—one with a resident professional company dedicated to the classics—he looked all over the country for a good home for it. And he settled on Minneapolis. That was in 1963. What drew Guthrie to the Twin Cities—the strong cultural community, the many colleges and universities, the enthusiasm for theater—is still characteristic of the area today.
At any given time during the season, there are as many as four dozen shows running in the Twin Cities, and several theaters run summer shows or have year-round seasons. And the future looks good for theater in the Twin Cities: Younger generations are well-represented among both audiences and theater movers and shakers. The highlight of the year for many adventurous theatergoers, young and old, is the Minnesota Fringe Festival, the largest unjuried theater festival in the United States, with attendance at more than 150 shows topping 40,000.
In addition to the high-profile Guthrie Theater, the Twin Cities have a reputation for strong support of out-of-the-mainstream theaters. Penumbra Theater is one of only three African American theaters in the United States to produce a full season of plays. Penumbra premiered several of playwright August Wilson’s plays when he lived and wrote here in the 1980s. And shows at Mixed Blood Theatre, which is dedicated to diversity of all kinds, regularly fill all the seats.
Supporting all this enthusiasm for the theater is another critical component of healthy cultural life: arts criticism. While grousing about the lack of arts criticism is a popular pastime in the Twin Cities, the truth is both major daily newspapers employ full-time theater critics, a good thing in a time of slashed media budgets.
Some might argue that the best television to come out of the Twin Cities is the cult classic Mystery Science Theater 3000, which ran on Comedy Central and the Sci-Fi channel for 11 years in the 1980s and 1990s, even spawning a feature film. Silhouettes—voiced by local comedians and visible at the bottom of the screen as if they were watching the movie themselves—riffed on science fiction B movies. The series ended in 1999.
People of a certain age will remember that Brandon and Brendan of the 1980s TV hit Beverly Hills 90210 moved from Minnesota to Beverly Hills at the start of the series. Minnesotans of a certain age will remember that the filmmakers apparently threw a dart at the Midwestern portion of the map, looking for an appropriate foil to the Beverly Hills lifestyle. Most mentions of Minnesota places, including Wayzata and the University of Minnesota, were somehow mangled. That’s a big turnaround from the 1970s The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which Minneapolis got to play the part of the big city.
The Twin Cities and Minnesota are often played for laughs in the movies as well. The Mighty Ducks and Grumpy Old Men series were both set in and around the Twin Cities and partially filmed here. The Coen brothers’ 2009 film A Serious Man was filmed in a local synagogue and seemed to use the whole of the local Jewish community as extras. In 1995’s Mallrats, Eden Prairie Center mall, south of Minneapolis, stood in for the locus of universal teenage ennui. And the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport was a Midwestern airport in distress in the filming of the 1970 disaster movie Airport. And who could forget how Prince burst onto the scene in the 1984 iconic hit Purple Rain? It was filmed almost entirely on location in the Twin Cities and is virtually a cinematographic tour of many Minnesotans’ young adulthood.