Heidi Hohmann
2020 Fitch Mid-Career Fellow
The Minneapolis Lakes: Mediating History & Ecology in Urban Park Management
This project will examine the intersection between historic preservation and ecological management in the Minneapolis park system, specifically addressing the system’s lakes. Though generally believed to be natural features, these lakes—which include Cedar Lake, Lake of the Isles, Bde Mkaska (formerly Lake Calhoun), Lake Nokomis, and Lake Hiawatha—in fact comprise a highly manipulated, designed landscape. As part of the American Park Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, park managers transformed a series of marshy sloughs aligned on a pre-glacial route of the Mississippi River into sparkling sheets of water that now define Minneapolis as the “City of Lakes.”