Rock the Garden

The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the United States and, together with the adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and the Cowles Conservatory, it has an annual attendance of around 700,000 visitors. The museum's permanent collection includes over 13,000 modern and contemporary art pieces including books, costumes, drawings, media works, paintings, photography, prints, and sculpture.The Walker Art Center began 1879 as an art gallery in the home of lumber baron Thomas Barlow Walker. Walker formally established his collection as the Walker Art Gallery in 1927. With the support of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, the Walker Art Gallery became the Walker Art Center in January 1940. The Walker celebrated its 75th anniversary as a public art center in 2015.The Walker's new building, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and opened in May 1971, saw a major expansion in 2005. Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron's addition included an additional gallery space, a theater, restaurant, shop, and special events space.

Saint Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis is one of two cathedrals in the Episcopal Church in Minnesota. The church was founded in 1858 and designated as a cathedral in 1941. Its current building dates from 1910. In 2020, it reported 764 members, 315 average attendance, and $1,021,278 in plate and pledge financial support.

The Virginia Triangle is the commons of Hennepin and Lyndale Avenues on Lowry Hill, Minneapolis. Until 1967, it was a simple (though congested) intersection, with a small park in the center. Today it contains many on- and off-ramps and a number of large intersections, servicing Hennepin and Lyndale, as well as Interstate 94. Interstate 94 also runs directly under the site, through the Lowry Hill Tunnel. The Walker Art Center and the Basilica of Saint Mary are located adjacent to the Triangle.

Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church is a church across the Virginia Triangle (Hennepin Avenue/Lyndale Avenue) from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Its address is 511 Groveland Avenue.

The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is an 11-acre (4.5 ha) park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States. It is located near the Walker Art Center, which operates it in coordination with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. It reopened June 10, 2017 after a reconstruction that resulted with the Walker and Sculpture Garden being unified as one 19-acre campus. It is one of the largest urban sculpture gardens in the country, with 40 permanent art installations and several other temporary pieces that are moved in and out periodically.The park is located to the west of Loring Park and the Basilica of Saint Mary. The land was first purchased by the park board around the start of the 20th century, when it was known as "The Parade" because it had been used for military drills. It became known as the Armory Gardens after park superintendent Theodore Wirth created a formal design that included a U.S. National Guard armory (Kenwood Armory) for Spanish War volunteers. Working as a civic and cultural center, in 1913 a floral convention transformed the land into floral gardens, which it remained for the next 50 years. In 1934, six years after the Walker Art Gallery opened across the street, the Armory was demolished for its instability, and a new Armory built in downtown Minneapolis, turning the Armory Gardens over to the Minneapolis Park Board. Since 1908 the area of today's Sculpture Garden and land to the west had been used for sport recreation via mildly-improved playing fields and the 1950 construction of the original Parade Stadium. In 1988, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden opened, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and landscape architects Quinnel and Rothschild. Parade Stadium was demolished in 1990, two years later the Garden was expanded, adding 3.5 acres (1.4 ha). Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates, Inc. designed the northward extension to complement the original space with a more open area that features a walkway and the 300-foot-long (91 m) Alene Grossman Memorial Arbor. The centerpiece of the garden is the Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985–1988) fountain designed by husband and wife Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.A pedestrian bridge, the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (1987), designed by Siah Armajani, now crosses Hennepin Avenue, connecting the sculpture garden to Loring Park.

Spoonbridge and Cherry is a sculptural fountain designed by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. It was funded by a $500,000 donation from art collector Frederick R. Weisman and is permanently located in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The piece was completed and installed in 1988 for the Sculpture Garden's opening and consists of a large cherry resting atop a large spoon partially straddling a small pond.

The Lowry Hill Tunnel is a tunnel approximately 1500 ft in length accommodating the Interstate 94 (I-94) freeway near downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota that was completed in late 1971. It is placed at a near-right-angle turn in the highway, forcing the three lanes of traffic in each direction to slow down. The advised speed is 40 miles per hour (64 km/h). Although constructed as a tunnel through rock, the surface a few yards above is covered with roadways. The tunnel functions as if it were the underpass under a 0.25-mile-wide (400 m) bridge which carries Hennepin Avenue, Lyndale Avenue, and various ramps over I-94. It is a bottleneck due to its dog-leg turn, and various proposals have been made for dealing with it. In May 2005, one city engineer proposed restriping it to four lanes in each direction. This would not help the slowdown, but would theoretically allow more cars through it at a given time. The tunnel is also a leading contender for a new high-occupancy toll lane using the MnPASS electronic toll collection system. Some believe that Interstate 335, a proposed but never-built freeway north of downtown between I-94 and Interstate 35W, would have alleviated the traffic problems in the tunnel. However, others have noted that the highway would not have benefited many drivers, particularly since the nearby interchange between I-35W and I-94 is missing certain links. There is no connection to carry southbound I-35W traffic to eastbound I-94, or westbound I-94 traffic to northbound I-35W, both of which would have been important flows if I-335 were to be successful. Opened in November 1971, this tunnel was built with $31 million dollars to help fix the congestion of 30,000 vehicles a day. Today, the Lowry Hill Tunnel sees an average of 185,000 vehicles pass through it each day making it one of the worlds busiest tunnels - if not the busiest. For comparison, that is 54% more vehicles than those passing through the Lincoln Tunnel that connects New Jersey to Manhattan.

The Northwestern National Life Insurance Company Home Office, was also known as the Loring Park Office Building, and is now a 75 unit boutique apartment complex known as 430 Oak Grove located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was designed by the architecture firm of Hewitt and Brown in the Beaux-Arts style as the headquarters of the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 16, 2012.

Lowry Hill is a neighborhood within the Calhoun-Isles community in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The neighborhood is regarded as being one of the city’s most upscale and wealthy neighborhoods. It was historically the home of Minneapolis’s most prominent milling and lumber families.The neighborhood is named for the terminal moraine on which it sits, a hill named after late nineteenth century real estate mogul and trolley tycoon Thomas Lowry. Although secluded by trees and parkways up on the hill, its boundaries are Interstate 394 to the north, Interstate 94 to the east, Hennepin Avenue to the southeast, West 22nd Street to the south, Lake of the Isles Parkway to the southwest, and Logan Avenue South and Morgan Avenue South to the west. Lowry Hill is northwest of Lowry Hill East; the two neighborhoods are separated by Hennepin Avenue. The hill was described as swampy and covered in a thick old-growth forest during Minneapolis’s early years. The hill eventually became a small farming area overlooking Minneapolis in the mid 1800s.Many houses in Lowry Hill were built in the Victorian style before 1900. However, the Colonial, Mediterranean, English Tudor, Richardsonian Romanesque, Rambler, and Prairie style make appearances as well. A majority of those homes were constructed shortly after the neighborhood's establishment as a preferred residential area for many of the wealthiest of Minneapolis' citizens. In over 100 years, the look of Lowry Hill has remained almost unchanged, however, some of the large homes built by original owners have been converted to condominia.

Parade Stadium is a former football stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was Minneapolis's first public football stadium. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board built the 16,560-seat stadium at The Parade, a park just west of downtown, in 1951. It was meant for high school, amateur, and small-college games. The stadium was also used for summertime Minneapolis Aquatennial festivities for over forty years.

The Blake School is a private, coeducational, nonsectarian PK–12 college preparatory day school, established in 1900. Blake is located on three campuses around the Twin Cities area of Minnesota: the upper school (9–12) is in Minneapolis; administration offices, middle school (6–8) is in Hopkins, Minnesota, and half of the lower school is also in Hopkins, Minnesota connected to the middle school; and the other half of the lower school is in Wayzata, Minnesota.

Dunwoody College of Technology is a private technology school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It offers Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Bachelor of Architecture (B. Arch) and Associate of Applied Science (A.A.S.) degrees.