MINNEAPOLIS (CN) — Frank Lloyd Wright began calling his idealized vision of an American community “Usonia” in the 1930s and the Usonian homes he built then were affordable and simple, and showcased the influential architect’s utopian vision.
From 1948 to 1956, Wright designed an entire suburban community in Usonia, New York. Forty-seven homes were built, three of them designed by Wright; the last three homes completed in 1963.
In “Usonia, New York: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright,” Roland Reisley and John Timpane wrote that the owners of those homes became so attached to their houses, land and community that when life changed and their needs in a home changed, they built additions instead. The Usonians “enjoyed a remarkable quality of life, the sense of living in an extended family in beautiful homes particularly related to their natural surroundings,” the authors wrote.
In Minnesota, Wright completed the Frieda and Henry J. Neils House in 1951. The Usonian-style home sits on half an acre in the Cedar-Isles-Dean neighborhood in Minneapolis, overlooking Cedar Lake. The home was listed in the U.S. Register of Historic of Places in 2004 and includes some of Wright’s signature features, such as oversized windows, use of stone and wood and a floating cantilevered roof, mirroring the wooded landscape surrounding the home. It’s Wright’s only home to use marble walls.
A three-minute walk southeast from the Frieda and Henry Neils House is Kenilworth Trail.
The 1½-mile trail is popular with neighborhood hikers, cyclists and runners, partly because it connects to the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes Regional Park, with seven parks, two gardens, a plethora of shorelines and paved scenic paths. It also connects to the Grand National Scenic Byway, 50 miles of roadway that link to other parks throughout the city, built as part of a public works relief program during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It’s the largest system of public urban parkways in the United States and is heavily used year-round, even during Minnesota’s frozen winters.
The semi-congested area, however, has become an issue for many Cedar-Isles-Dean residents in recent years. In 2010, the Metropolitan Council applied to the Federal Transit Administration for approval to add a light rail route from downtown Minneapolis through the communities of St. Louis Park, St. Louis Park, Hopkins, Minnetonka and Eden Prairie.
The Southwest Light Rail project is to include 16 new stations, with connections to other light rail routes and bus routes. The $2 billion project is the state’s largest public works project and is funded by county, state and federal governments, with the federal government contributing 46 percent of the cost.
The Metropolitan Council estimates that 34,000 commuters will ride some portion of the train’s 14½-mile route to and from the suburbs each work day. It will run through the affluent Cedar-Isles-Dean neighborhood, which includes some of the city’s most expensive homes. The Frieda and Henry J. Neils House, for example, is on the market for $2.95 million.
Opponents of the project have been trying to bring it to a halt since its start. Claiming that the environmental review process was inadequate, the nonprofit Lake and Parks Alliance of Minneapolis, created to preserve the Kenilworth Trail, sued the Metropolitan Council in 2014, saying the route was negotiated before an environmental study had been completed, in violation of The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.
The Metropolitan Council and the city reached a memorandum of understanding that year, agreeing that existing freight rails would continue to operate in Kenilworth corridor, a narrow strip of land between Lake of the Isles and Cedar Lake, and that a shallow tunnel for part of the corridor would be made for the light rail trains. That is the current plan.
