The original routing of the freeways appeared on maps in 1939, long
before Humphrey was mayor. I no longer recall when the specific changes
were made from original mapping, and I've long since recycled the file
from my 1992 story marking the 25th anniversary of 35W's completion in
south Minnepaolis. But below is an excerpt that may bear on the
Mork-Gaardner discussion: Steve Brandt, Star Tribune
The advent of the freeway was decades in the making. Congress,
inspired by Germany's limited-access autobahns, directed a study of
a national system of super highways. Two of Minnesota's interstate
highways - 35 and 94 - first appeared on a 1939 map. World War II
interrupted, but the postwar period ushered in the
age of the automobile. Nationally, traffic nearly doubled between
1940 and 1954. Congress got serious about freeways in 1956, pledging
90 percent of the cost of a 41,000-mile system. Meanwhile,
Minneapolis planners began to struggle with
maintaining mobility in the face of increasingly longer commutes
between downtown offices and factories and the expanding
subdivisions of east Bloomington, Richfield, Edina, St. Louis Park,
Crystal and Robbinsdale. Early sketches depict a number of
expressways radiating from
downtown Minneapolis and ringing it. Eventually, 13 limited-access
routes were drafted, including one freeway along Washington Av.
through downtown. In south Minneapolis, initial plans emphasized
Hiawatha Av. and a southwestern link passing between Lake of the
Isles and Lake Calhoun. The first depictions of a north-south
freeway appeared in 1949, aligned along Lyndale Av. S. Pressure for
faster traffic movement was building. Traffic on
Lyndale, Portland, Park and Hiawatha Avs. all exceeded the ability
of those streets to carry it efficiently. Assuming that Hiawatha
would be upgraded, planners looked
farther west for a north-south corridor located west of Wood Lake in
Richfield but east of the Minneapolis lakes. Lyndale was penciled
in. Park planners backed Lyndale, arguing that it would divert
traffic from crowded parkways and best follow neighborhood
boundaries. But a Lyndale route complicated the Lyndale-Hennepin
bottleneck. Moving the freeway east better served the south
Minneapolis street grid. By 1956, highway planners were suggesting a
corridor between Stevens and 2nd Avs., but that clipped the west
side of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and complicated traffic
near the Minneapolis Auditorium. A year later the route, between
28th St. and downtown, was shifted a few blocks east and the process
of buying and razing homes began. In an era when large public
projects almost invariably create
opposition, it's startling to look back with several decades of
perspective on the relative paucity of protest against 35W. Although
there were large public meetings, the issue was not so much whether
to build, but where. One antifreeway meeting drew only 80 people.
"The general civic consensus was that unless the city built
freeways, it would be choked in its growth," said Richard Heath, a
former city planner. Another former planner, Weiming Lu, recalled,
"The highway resources were so strong, with the backing of the
federal government, that it was hard to resist." That would change
by the 1970s, when the highway planning
process began to incorporate citizen review and more formal
neighborhood organizations took root.
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