When Christopher and Rushika Hage moved back to Minnesota in 2007, they saw that on the sizable shelf of local-history books devoted to individual Twin Cities neighborhoods, one notable neighborhood was missing: Minneapolis' Nicollet Island.
The Hages have since filled that gap, twice over. Their "
Nicollet Island" installment in Arcadia Publishing's "Images of America" photo-book series appeared earlier this year. And in July local publisher
Nodin Press released their second book on the subject, "
Nicollet Island: History and Architecture."
It's an in-depth survey that takes readers from the time when Dakota people made the island a birthing place, through its Gilded Age heyday as home to the city's early elites, to its current status as a showcase park on Minneapolis' downtown riverfront.
Rushika Hage calls the tale "a history of Minneapolis in miniature." Nicollet Island lies upstream of St. Anthony Falls--the only true waterfall on the Mississippi River and the reason Minneapolis came into being as a city.
After voters in the 1860s rejected a chance to buy the island as a central park, its 40 acres developed along the same pattern as the city as a whole: water power-based factories nearest the falls, then tiny zones of commerce, high-end townhouses, mansions, and residences for the middle and working classes.
The Hages devote a chapter to the island's residential and industrial architecture--a 19th-century time capsule, preserved thanks to countercultural residents who fought off bulldozers in the 1970s.
A special find is a boyhood photo of Franklin Griswold, an inventor of railroad and traffic signals used the world over who grew up on the island, riding a homemade four-wheeled cycle.
Sources: Christopher and Rushika Hage
Writer: Chris Steller (who lives on the island and gave some information to the Hages for their books)