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Minneapolis is the largest city in the U.S. state of Minnesota and is the county seat of Hennepin County. The city lies on both banks of the Mississippi River, just north of the river's confluence with the Minnesota River, and adjoins Saint Paul, the state's capital. Known as the Twin Cities, these two cities form the core of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the sixteenth largest metropolitan area in the United States, with about 3.2 million residents. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated the city's population at 369,051 people in 2006.

The city is abundantly rich in water with twenty lakes and wetlands, the Mississippi riverfront, creeks and waterfalls, many connected by parkways in the Chain of Lakes and the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway. Minneapolis was once the world's flour milling capital and a hub for timber, and today is the primary business center between Chicago, Illinois, and Seattle, Washington.  America's most literate city, Minneapolis has cultural organizations that draw creative people and audiences to the city for theater, visual art, writing and music. The community's diverse population has a long tradition of charitable support through progressive public social programs and through private and corporate philanthropy.

The name Minneapolis is attributed to the city's first schoolmaster, who combined mni, the Dakota word for water, and polis, the Greek word for city.^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis%2C_Minnesota - cite_note-8}  Minneapolis is nicknamed the City of Lakes and the Mill City.

History

Dakota Sioux were the region's sole residents until explorers arrived from France in about 1680. Nearby Fort Snelling, built in 1819 by the United States Army spurred growth in the area. Circumstances pressed the Mdewakanton band of the Dakota to sell their land, allowing people arriving from the east to settle there. The Minnesota Territorial Legislature authorized present day Minneapolis as a town on the Mississippi's west bank in 1856. Minneapolis was incorporated as a city in 1867, the year rail service began between Minneapolis and Chicago, and joined with the east bank city of St. Anthony in 1872.

Minneapolis grew  around Saint Anthony Falls, the only waterfall on the Mississippi. In early years, forests in northern Minnesota were the source of a lumber industry that operated seventeen saw mills on power from the waterfall. By 1871, the west river bank had twenty-three businesses including flour mills, woolen mills, iron works, a railroad machine shop, and mills for cotton, paper, sashes, and planing wood. The farmers of the Great Plains grew grain that was shipped by rail to the city's thirty-four flour mills where Pillsbury and General Mills became processors. At peak production, a single mill at Washburn-Crosby made enough flour for twelve million loaves of bread each day.

Geography and climate

Glacial meltwaters formed Saint Anthony Falls near Fort Snelling about ten thousand years ago. Rushing water undercut sandstone and collapsed limestone, moving the falls eight miles to the northwest.

Minneapolis history and the city's economic growth are tied to water, the city's defining physical characteristic, which was sent to the region during the last ice age. Fed by receding glaciers and Lake Agassiz ten thousand years ago, torrents of water from a glacial river undercut the Mississippi and Minnehaha riverbeds, creating waterfalls important to modern Minneapolis.^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis%2C_Minnesota - cite_note-22} Twelve lakes, three large ponds and five unnamed wetlands are within Minneapolis.

Minneapolis has a continental climate typical of the Upper Midwestern United States. Winters can be cold and dry, while summer is comfortably warm although at times it can be hot and humid. The city experiences a full range of precipitation and related weather events, including snow, sleet, ice, rain, thunderstorms, tornadoes, and fog. The warmest temperature ever recorded in Minneapolis was 108 °F in July 1936, and the coldest temperature ever recorded was -41 °F, in January 1888. The snowiest winter of record was 1983–84, when 98.4 in of snow fell.

Economy

The economy of Minneapolis today is based in commerce, finance, rail and trucking services, health care, and industry. Smaller components are in publishing, milling, food processing, graphic arts, insurance, and high technology. Industry produces metal and automotive products, chemical and agricultural products, electronics, computers, precision medical instruments and devices, plastics, and machinery.

Five Fortune 500 headquarters are in Minneapolis proper: Target Corporation, U.S. Bancorp, Xcel Energy, Ameriprise Financial and Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. Apart from government, the city's largest employers are Target, Wells Fargo, Ameriprise, Macy's, Star Tribune, U.S. Bancorp, Xcel Energy, IBM, Piper Jaffray, RBC Dain Rauscher, ING Group and Qwest.

White U.S. Bancorp towers reflected in the Capella Tower

Arts

The region is second only to New York City in live theater per capita^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis%2C_Minnesota - cite_note-McClatchy-52}  and is the third-largest theater market in the U.S., supporting the Theatre de la Jeune Lune, Illusion, Jungle, Mixed Blood, Penumbra, the Brave New Workshop, the Minnesota Dance Theatre, Skewed Visions, Theater Latté Da, In the Heart of the Beast Theatre, and the Children's Theatre Company. French architect Jean Nouvel designed a new three stage complex for the Guthrie Theater, the prototype alternative to Broadway founded in Minneapolis in 1965. Minneapolis purchased and renovated the Orpheum, State, and Pantages Theatre vaudeville and film houses on Hennepin Avenue now used for concerts and plays. In 2007, a fourth renovated theater will join the Hennepin Center for the Arts to become the Minnesota Shubert Performing Arts and Education Center, a home to twenty performing arts groups and a provider of Web-based art education.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, built in 1915 in south central Minneapolis is the largest art museum in the city with 100,000 pieces in its permanent collection. The Walker Art Center sits atop Lowry Hill, near downtown, and doubled its size with an addition in 2005 by Herzog & de Meuron and is continuing its expansion to 15 acres with a park designed by Michel Desvigne across the street from the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The Weisman Art Museum, designed by Frank Gehry for the University of Minnesota, opened in 1993. An addition, also designed by Gehry, is expected to open in 2009.

Sports

Professional sports are well-established in Minneapolis. First playing in 1884, the Minneapolis Millers baseball team produced the best won-lost record in their league at the time and contributed fifteen players to the Baseball Hall of Fame. During the 1940s and 1950s the Minneapolis Lakers basketball team, the city's first in the major leagues in any sport, won six basketball championships in three leagues before moving to Los Angeles.

The Minnesota Vikings and the Minnesota Twins arrived in the state in 1961. The Vikings were an NFL expansion team and the Twins were formed when the Washington Senators relocated to Minnesota. Both teams played outdoors in open air Metropolitan Stadium in the suburb of Bloomington for twenty years before moving to the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, where the Twins won the World Series in 1987 and 1991. The Minnesota Timberwolves brought NBA basketball back to Minneapolis in 1989, followed by the Minnesota Lynx WNBA team in 1999. They play in Target Center. The NHL ice hockey team Minnesota Wild, National Lacrosse League team Minnesota Swarm, and USL-1 soccer team Minnesota Thunder play in St. Paul.

The downtown Metrodome, opened in 1982, is the largest sports stadium in Minnesota. The three major tenants are the Vikings, the Twins and the university's Golden Gophers football and baseball teams. The Metrodome is the only stadium in the country to have hosted a Major League Baseball All-Star Game, the Super Bowl, the World Series, and NCAA Basketball Men's Final Four.

Parks and recreation

The Minneapolis park system has been called the best-designed, best-financed and best-maintained in America.  Foresight, donations and effort by community leaders enabled Horace Cleveland to create his finest landscape architecture, preserving geographical landmarks and linking them with boulevards and parkways.  The city's Chain of Lakes is connected by bike, running, and walking paths and used for swimming, fishing, picnics, boating, and ice skating. A parkway for cars, a bikeway for riders, and a walkway for pedestrians run parallel paths along the 52 mile route of the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway. Theodore Wirth is credited with the development of the parks system.  Today 15% of the city is parks and there are 770 square feet of parkland for each resident.

Minnehaha Falls is part of a 193 acre city park.

Education

Minneapolis Public Schools enroll 36,370 students in public primary and secondary schools. The district administers about one hundred public schools including forty-five elementary schools, seven middle schools, seven high schools, eight special education schools, eight alternative schools, nineteen contract alternative schools and five charter schools. With authority granted by the state legislature, the school board makes policy, selects the superintendent, and oversees the district's budget, curriculum, personnel, and facilities. Students speak ninety different languages at home and most school communications are printed in English, Hmong, Spanish, and Somali. ^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis%2C_Minnesota - cite_note-99} About 67% of students in the Minneapolis Public School system graduate, an increase over recent years when only 53% completed high school.  Besides public schools, the city is home to more than twenty private schools and academies and about twenty additional charter schools.

Minneapolis' collegiate scene is dominated by the main campus of the University of Minnesota where more than 50,000 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students attend twenty colleges, schools, and institutes.^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis%2C_Minnesota - cite_note-102} The graduate school programs ranked highest in 2007 were counseling and personnel services, chemical engineering, psychology, macroeconomics, applied mathematics and non-profit management. A Big Ten school and home of the Golden Gophers, the U of M is the fourth largest campus in the U.S. in terms of enrollment.

Minneapolis Community and Technical College, the private Dunwoody College of Technology, and Art Institutes International Minnesota provide career training. Augsburg College, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and North Central University are private four-year colleges. Capella University, Minnesota School of Professional Psychology, and Walden University are headquartered in Minneapolis and some others including the public four-year Metropolitan State University and the private four-year University of St. Thomas have campuses there.

MSP

Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) sits on 3,400 acres southeast of the city between Minnesota State Highway 5, Interstate 494, Minnesota State Highway 77, and Minnesota State Highway 62. The airport serves three international, twelve domestic, seven charter and four regional carriers and is a hub and home base for Northwest Airlines, Mesaba Airlines, Sun Country Airlines and Champion Air.

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