Place:Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, United States

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NameMinneapolis-St. Paul
Alt namesTwin Citiessource: Wikipedia
TypeCity
Located inMinnesota, United States


the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Minneapolis–Saint Paul is a metropolitan area centered around the confluence of the Mississippi, Minnesota and St. Croix rivers in the U.S. state of Minnesota. It is commonly known as the Twin Cities after the area's two largest cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Minnesotans often refer to the two together (or the seven-county metro area collectively) simply as "the cities". It is Minnesota’s economic, cultural, and political center.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul are independent municipalities with defined borders. Minneapolis sits mostly on the west side of the Mississippi River on lake-covered terrain. Although most of the city is residential neighborhoods, it has a business-dominated downtown area with some historic industrial areas, the Mill District and the Warehouse District. Minneapolis also has a popular uptown area. Saint Paul, which sits mostly on the east side of the river, has quaint tree-lined neighborhoods, a vast collection of well-preserved late-Victorian architecture, and a number of colleges. Both cities and the surrounding areas are known for their woods, lakes, hills and creeks.

Originally inhabited by the Ojibwe and Dakota people, the cities were settled by various Europeans. Minneapolis was strongly influenced by early Scandinavian and Lutheran settlers, while Saint Paul was settled predominantly by the French, the Irish, and German Catholics. Today, both urban areas are home to new immigrant communities, including Somalis, Hmong, Oromo, Cameroonians, and Liberians.

"Twin Cities" is sometimes used to refer to the seven-county region governed by the Metropolitan Council regional governmental agency and planning organization. The United States Office of Management and Budget officially designates 15 counties as the "Minneapolis–St. Paul–Bloomington MN–WI Metropolitan Statistical Area". It is the 16th-largest metropolitan statistical area and third-largest metropolitan area in the Midwest, with a population of 3,690,261 at the 2020 census. The larger 21-county Minneapolis–St. Paul MN–WI Combined Statistical Area, which also ranks as the 16th-largest, had a population of 4,078,788 at the 2020 census.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

The first European settlement in the region was near what is now the town of Stillwater, Minnesota, about from downtown Saint Paul and on the western bank of the St. Croix River, which forms the border of central Minnesota and Wisconsin. Another settlement that fueled early interest in the area was the outpost at Fort Snelling, which was constructed from 1820 to 1825 at the confluence of the Minnesota River and the Mississippi River.

The Fort Snelling military reservation bordered both sides of the river up to Saint Anthony Falls. The town of Saint Anthony grew just outside the reservation on the river's east side. For several years, the only European resident to live on the west bank of the river was Colonel John H. Stevens, who operated a ferry service across the river. When the military reservation was reduced in size, settlers quickly moved to the land, creating the new village of Minneapolis. The town grew, with Minneapolis and Saint Anthony eventually merging. On the eastern side of the Mississippi, a few villages such as Pig's Eye and Lambert's Landing grew to become Saint Paul.


Natural geography played a role in the two cities' settlement and development. The Mississippi River Valley in the area is defined by a series of stone bluffs that line the river. Saint Paul grew up around Lambert's Landing, the last place to unload boats coming upriver at an easily accessible point, seven miles (11 km) downstream from Saint Anthony Falls, the geographic feature that, due to the value of its immense water power for industry, defined Minneapolis's location and its prominence as the Mill City. The falls can be seen from the Mill City Museum, housed in the former Washburn "A" Mill, which was among the world's largest mills in its time. The phrase "St. Paul is the last city of the East, Minneapolis the first city of the West" alludes to the historical difference.

The state's oldest farms are in Washington County. The county borders the St. Croix River and Wisconsin on the eastern side of the metropolitan area. Joseph Haskell was Minnesota's first white farmer, harvesting the first crops in the state in 1840 on what is now part of Afton Township on Trading Post Trail.


The Grand Excursion, a trip into the Upper Midwest sponsored by the Rock Island Railroad, brought more than a thousand curious travelers into the area by rail and steamboat in 1854. In 1855, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published The Song of Hiawatha, an epic poem based on the Ojibwe legends of Hiawatha. A number of natural area landmarks appear in the story, including Lake Minnetonka and Minnehaha Falls. Tourists inspired by the coverage of the Grand Excursion in eastern newspapers and those who read The Song of Hiawatha flocked to the area in the following decades.

At one time, the region also had numerous passenger rail services, including both interurban streetcar systems and interstate rail. Due to the river's width at points further south, the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area was briefly one of the few places where the Mississippi could be crossed by railroad. Much commercial rail traffic also ran through the area, often carrying grain to be processed at Minneapolis mills or delivering other goods to Saint Paul to be transported along the Mississippi. Saint Paul was long at the head of navigation on the river, until a lock and dam facility was added upriver in Minneapolis.

Passenger travel hit its peak in 1888, with nearly eight million traversing to and from Saint Paul Union Depot. This amounted to approximately 150 trains daily. Soon, other rail crossings were built farther south and travel through the region began to decline. In an effort by the rail companies to combat the rise of the automobile, some of the earliest streamliners ran from Chicago to Minneapolis/Saint Paul and eventually served distant points in the Pacific Northwest. Today, the only vestige of this interstate service is Amtrak's Seattle/Portland to Chicago Empire Builder route, running once daily in each direction. It is named after James J. Hill, a railroad tycoon who settled on Summit Avenue in Saint Paul in what is now known as the James J. Hill House.

Like many Northern cities that grew up with the Industrial Revolution, Minneapolis and St. Paul experienced shifts in their economic base as heavy industry declined, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. With the economic decline of those decades came population decline in the central city areas, white flight to suburbs, and, in the summer of 1967, race riots on Minneapolis's North Side. But by the 1980s and 1990s, Minneapolis and Saint Paul were often cited as former Rust Belt cities that had made successful transitions to service, high-technology, finance, and information economies.

In May and June 2020, the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area became a focus of international attention after MPD officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for almost ten minutes. The murder sparked local, nationwide and international protests against racism and police brutality, bringing considerable attention to the MPD. Minneapolis–Saint Paul was the site of the second-costliest act of civil disobedience in U.S. history, after the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Local protests and riots caused an estimated $550 million in damages and affected around 1,600 businesses.

Rivalry

Minneapolis and Saint Paul have competed since they were founded, resulting in some duplication of effort. After Saint Paul completed its elaborate cathedral in 1915, Minneapolis followed up with the equally ornate Basilica of St. Mary in 1926. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rivalry became so intense that an architect practicing in one city was often refused business in the other. The 1890 United States Census even led to the two cities arresting and/or kidnapping each other's census takers, in an attempt to keep each city from outgrowing the other.

The rivalry occasionally erupted into inter-city violence, as at a 1929 game between the Minneapolis Millers and the St. Paul Saints, both baseball teams of the American Association. In the 1950s, both cities competed for a major league baseball franchise (which resulted in two rival stadiums being built), and there was a brief period in the mid-1960s when the two cities could not agree on a common calendar for daylight saving time, resulting in a few weeks when people in Minneapolis were one hour "behind" those in Saint Paul.

The cities' mutual antagonism was largely healed by the end of the 1960s, aided by the simultaneous arrival in 1961 of the Minnesota Twins of the American League and the Minnesota Vikings of the National Football League, both of which identified themselves with the state as a whole (the former explicitly named for both Twin Cities) rather than either city (like the earlier Minneapolis Lakers). Since 1961, it has been common practice for any major sports team based in the Twin Cities to be named for Minnesota as a whole. In terms of development, the two cities remain distinct in their progress, with Minneapolis absorbing new and avant-garde architecture while Saint Paul continues to carefully integrate new buildings into the context of classical and Victorian styles.[1]

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This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Minneapolis-St. Paul. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.