Minneapolis

Minneapolis is a city in Minnesota, on both banks of the Mississippi River at Saint Anthony Falls, next to the state capital of Saint Paul. Its name joins the Dakota word for water, minne, with the Greek word for city, polis.

The falls powered sawmills and later flour mills from the 1850s, and the town of Saint Anthony on the east bank and Minneapolis on the west bank merged in 1872. Cadwallader Washburn and Charles Pillsbury built large flour mills beside the falls, and Minneapolis became the center of American flour milling, earning the name Mill City. The companies that grew from these mills became General Mills and Pillsbury. The city drew immigrants from Sweden, Norway and Germany, and its lakes were linked by parkways in a park system planned in the late 19th century.

Target, which began as a discount store of the Dayton department store company, has its head office in downtown Minneapolis. Xcel Energy, which supplies electricity and gas to much of the upper Midwest, is also based in the city, and its agents work from their own homes across the country.

The Mill City Museum, built in the ruins of the Washburn A Mill, tells the story of flour milling beside the falls. The Stone Arch Bridge, a curved railway bridge built for James J. Hill in the 1880s, carries walkers and cyclists across the river below the falls. The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden holds Spoonbridge and Cherry, a giant spoon with a cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. First Avenue, a nightclub downtown, was where Prince played and filmed scenes of Purple Rain in 1984.