"As it cuts across South Minneapolis, Lake Street reflects the city's diversity and its rich history. ... Lake Street evolved into a major transportation route after the turn of the century. ... But Lake Street's role as a major commercial corridor did not last. Buffeted by the forces of suburbanization after World War II, businesses along the corridor began to close, leaving Lake Street pockmarked with vacant, blighted buildings. Then, starting in the 1990s ... an energetic group of new arrivals to the United States began renovating Lake Street's deteriorating storefronts for their family-owned businesses. Lake Street's rejuvenation has continued into the current century ..."--Back cover

12 stories from the heart of South Minneapolis: Lake Street. Lake Street cuts across Minneapolis from west to east, from the urbane to the urban to the blue-collar. North and south, it is the dividing line between inner-city neighborhoods and tidy bedroom communities. Lake Street is a polyglot of people from all corners of the world mixing with lifelong Minneapolitans. These stories range from people's hope for a new beginning, with the history of what was.

As it cuts across South Minneapolis, Lake Street reflects the city's diversity and its rich history. Initially a narrow dirt road out beyond Minneapolis's early city limits, Lake Street evolved into a major transportation route after the turn of the last century. Spurred by the city's population boom during those early years, the Lake Street corridor soon filled in with retail shops, restaurants, movie theaters, and auto dealers. But Lake Street's role as a major commercial corridor did not last. Buffeted by the forces of suburbanization after World War II, businesses along the corridor began to close, leaving Lake Street pockmarked with vacant, blighted buildings. Then, starting in the 1990s, the seeds of the corridor's renewal were planted when an energetic group of new arrivals to the United States began renovating Lake Street's deteriorating storefronts for their family-owned businesses. Lake Street's rejuvenation has continued into the current century as business and community leaders build on the work begun by those 20th-century urban pioneers.

An architectural tour of some of the finest homes in Minnesota situated around Minneapolis's famed Chain of Lakes.

Lake Street, the cross-town corridor of ethnically diverse South Minneapolis, is home to twenty murals and in 2000 was the exhibition site for 650 photographs of the street and its people. This thesis examines the effect of this public art on the street's place identity. It situates the meanings that the art lends to the street in the context of its public image as part of the inner city and South Minneapolis's social realities. Lake Street's public art constructs it as a place of community and diversity, helping local people by improving perception so their neighborhoods and by fostering community.