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 (83 km) route of the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway.
Theodore Wirth is credited with the development of the parks system that brought a playground within the reach of most children, the city's canopy of trees, and a park within six blocks of each home. Today 15% of the city is parks and there are 770 square feet (71 m²) of parkland for each resident.
Parks are interlinked in many places and the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area connects regional parks and visitor centers. The country's oldest public wildflower garden, the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary is near Theodore Wirth Park which is shared with Golden Valley and is about 60% the size of Central Park in New York City. Site of the 53-foot (16 m) Minnehaha Falls, Minnehaha Park is one of the city's oldest and most popular parks, receiving over 500,000 visitors each year. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow named Hiawatha's wife Minnehaha for the Minneapolis waterfall in his The Song of Hiawatha, a bestselling and often-parodied 19th century poem.
Runner's World ranks Minneapolis America's sixth best city for runners. The Twin Cities Marathon run in Minneapolis and St. Paul every October draws 250,000 spectators. The 26.2 mile (42 km) race is a Boston and USA Olympic Trials qualifier. The organizers sponsor three more races: a Kids Marathon, a 1 mile (1.6 km), and a 10 mile (16 km). Minneapolis is home to more golfers per capita than any major U.S. city. Five golf courses are located within the city, with nationally renowned Hazeltine National Golf Club, Bearpath Country Club, and Bunker Hills Golf Course in nearby suburbs. The state of Minnesota has the nation's highest number of bicyclists, sport fishermen, and snow skiers per capita. Hennepin County has the second-highest number of horses per capita in the U.S. While living in Minneapolis, Scott and Brennan Olson founded (and later sold) Rollerblade, the company that popularized the sport of inline skating.
(Source: Wikipedia.org)
