Crystal Lake

In the Shades of Robbinsdale

I have seen some beauty spots while traveling to and fro Through the biggest part of the USA And through Canada also but now my rambling days are o’er by water and by rail I … Read more

Our Neighbors: 100 Years Ago in Robbinsdale

On a high shelf under a stack of age-old maps and scrapbooks, we came across a little old album. There were just under 50 photos neatly arranged on black paper, framed by captions and comments … Read more

McNair Manor

McNair Manor is rapidly developing! Building is active and improvement work is to be completed within a month. The history of this new subdivision tract is startling. Placed on the market only a year ago … Read more

Girling Gets There Cheaper than Train Fare

Thomas H. Girling was born in Nottingham, England in 1865. He came to America with his parents in 1872. Thirty years later he opened a small printing business and began publishing a weekly called Picturesque … Read more

A Typical Home?

“Typical Hone- Home owning is Robbinsdale’s major “industry”. Many beautiful homes such as this one owned by Reuben Katz adorn residential avenues.” The photo at the top of the post is from a Sunday Minneapolis … Read more

Crystal Lake

The relationship between Robbinsdale and the sparkling lake in the center of town has never been an easy one. In the 1880s, Crystal Lake Avenue (West Broadway) was used by farmers to bring produce into Minneapolis. The steep hill on the west side of the lake caused teams and carts to line up in caravans twenty deep.In 1893, a couple months after Robbinsdale was incorporated at a village, the council decided to use to use $1000 from the “Saloon Fund” to cut down the hill. The fill from the project was used to shrink the lake. William Randall and George “Don” Johnson started Robbinsdale Ice and Fuel Co. and began cutting ice on Crystal Lake in the 1890’s. A couple years later the Crystal Ice Company the Cedar Lake Ice Company began staking out territory on Crystal Lake. In 1903 Thomas Girling’s Picturesque Robbinsdale newspaper reported that the number of parties cutting ice on Crystal Lake was due to the “extreme clearness and purity, this ice is considered the best that can be had around Minneapolis.” Andrew B. Robbins believed Crystal and Twin would one day rival the popular chain of lakes in Minneapolis. Enthusiastic about the possibilities of Robbinsdale’s lakes, He claimed that “Crystal Lake in size would compare with the better known Lake Harriet of Minneapolis, while Twin Lake is twice that size. Its mate, upper Twin Lake connects with a chain of several lakes.” A canal between Crystal and Twin Lakes was proposed on a number of occasions.

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Jay Nash Comes to Crystal Lake

After partaking in twenty battles, being captured by the enemy and wounded twice, Civil War veteran, Jay E. Nash found his way to Minnesota from Massachusetts in 1869. He purchased forty acres on the east … Read more

The Crystal Bath

  Floyd E. Nash opened his bath house in 1916. The Crystal Bath opened with 24 lockers, 12 for women and 12 for men. In 1923 a larger building was built. Business boomed and Nash … Read more

Souvenir Robbinsdale

cover

It can be conservatively predicted that within a few years the village of Robbinsdale, located just north of the city limits of Minneapolis will be noted as the choicest of its suburban beauty spots, remarkable for splendid residences, situated amid picturesque surroundings of woodland and lake.

Already the certainty that Minneapolis is destined to become a great metropolis has enhanced the values of land adjacent to the chain of lakes within its limits. Calhoun, Harriet, Lake of the Isles and Cedar to the extent that only people of considerable means feel they can afford home in their vicinity. Soon it will be only the rich whose mansions will mark the sites of the present pretty bungalows and the modest dwellings.
Today the conviction is being forced upon those who desire to enjoy the delightful combination of city and rual life, made possible by electric roads and the automobile, that location of their homes to insure permanency, must be in a new direction and where too, there will be more exclusiveness than along the boulevards and driveways which constitute the playground of the city.
The village of Robbinsdale, which nestles between two gem-like lakes, with dells and groves just off its main street, possesses just this ideal location, coupled with the same charm of natural scenery which is now beguiling to the Calhoun and Harriet district. In time Robbinsdale too will become the home of millionaires, but this period is farther remote. This is certainly foreordained as it is that the business district of Minneapolis is to be doubled, tripled and quadrupled in area.
It requires no stretch of imagination to prophesy this. The present rate of growth of Minneapolis and the natural distribution of its population will bring these changes about. The man is not infrequently met who can tell when he could have bought business sites now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few hundreds; who recollects when there were frame dwelling houses where now are sky scrapers, mammoth department stores and splendid office buildings. Most of these changes have come within ten years, with in which time too, whole districts of suburban property have been built up from farms and pasture lands…what then of the future…the next ten years or even five?

-Robbinsdale Souvenir, Suburban Minneapolis
1911