To enter limbo, first you must go to the south side of Minneapolis’ Cedar Lake. Cross the beach heading east and toward the stand of trees. Then you just keep walking along the lakeshore.
At first, this is going to feel like strolling in a patch of park near some stranger’s backyard. As you go further, it will start to feel like you are just straight up standing in some stranger’s backyard. This is because you are. But you are also in a park. The growing discomfort really comes to a head as you find yourself at the base of a boulder retaining wall. A path rises up through the middle of the stones, passing a finely landscaped patio just waiting for someone to sit and sip an old fashioned as they watch the sunset. And, technically, I suppose, that someone could be me. Or you. Thanks to ongoing construction at the site, the property line is clearly marked. The path, the patio, the cascading layers of smooth rocks stretching down to the lakeshore — it’s all on land that belongs to the city park board. The homeowners are allowed to build there. But you’re also allowed to be there.
This land is their land. This land is our land. It’s a half mile of lakeshore in a city that tends to favor public ownership and access to the waterfront. But, here, nearly a century ago, the Minneapolis Park Board granted encroachment licenses that have allowed a dozen or so private landowners to develop the parkland around the lake as an extension of their backyards. The public owns the land, but over the years — and despite new plans to eventually put its maintenance back in city hands — the public has all but lost the ability to use it.
Today, it’s nearly impossible to even tell there is a public right of way around the southeast side of Cedar Lake. I tried to make the trek in early October, along with Andrew Tilman, an ecologist who has written about the encroachment licenses and their legacy for MinnPost. When we reached the top of the boulder wall, we had to ope our way between some potted trees to enter the next yard. Because it’s mostly unclear where the border between park and yard sits, we tried to keep toward the shoreline, eventually finding ourselves funneled onto the top of a foot-wide wobbly rock wall. On one side of us was a roped-off VIP lounge of perfect lawn. On the other side, there was a drop into the lake.
“When I look at this, I don’t see a park,” Tilman said, teetering on a rectangle of yellow stone. But I got a different perspective from Charlie Zelle. Zelle is the chair of the Metropolitan Council and also a homeowner on Cedar Lake who opened his door to me the same day I tried to walk the shoreline. Looking down at the lake from his house, he told me, “I think of it as parkland.”
These contradictory views of the same piece of land reflect a much larger disagreement over the functions parks should serve. Is a park meant to make a city more beautiful? Should it be a place for reintroducing nature and ecological health? Are parks meant to be usable by everyone? Most of us would probably say the answer is all of the above. But, as with the proverbial good-fast-cheap construction project, all of the above is usually impossible.
