I grew up close to Bassett’s Creek, one block west and down Fruen’s hill. Even though my parents had forbidden me to go there unless it was frozen over, I still spent a fair amount of time at the creek. As a kid in the 1950s/60s I didn’t know a lot about the creek other than it went through Glenwood Park, past Fruen’s Mill and the Glenwood-Inglewood water plant, into Bryn Mawr and then it ‘disappeared’ near downtown. It would be decades before I learned its history.
Bassett’s Creek runs 13 miles from the south end of Medicine Lake in Plymouth and meanders through Minnetonka, New Hope, Crystal, Golden Valley and Minneapolis where it empties into the Mississippi River. While the Dakota people called it Ȟaȟa Wakpadaŋ which means Falls Creek, it was named for one of the first Europeans to settle on its banks, Joel Bean Bassett, a native of New Hampshire who came to Minneapolis in 1850. He owned a farm and sawmill at the Creek’s confluence with the Mississippi, which he sold to the city in 1856.
Bassett’s Creek began to suffer in the late 1800s. The population of Minneapolis surged and there was also an increasing growth of the railroad, milling companies and factories near the mouth of the creek. Runoff from industry waste, trash and dirt all found their way into Bassett Creek’s watershed, which by 1876 was becoming a hazard issue. In addition, all this construction in the area limited the open areas where storm water could be absorbed, thus creating flooding conditions. In 1903 a serious flood occurred, with another occurring in 1913. Even between floods the ground was soft and unstable. Residential properties on the Northside required filling for stabilization of foundations.
After the 1913 flood there were several efforts to improve the drainage of the Basset’s Creek wetlands. The first was an underground concrete tunnel, which took about 10 years to construct, and ran one and a half miles from what is now the west side of the Minneapolis Farmers Market to the creek outlet.
Over the years there would be several plans to improve the section of Bassett’s Creek within Minneapolis. Two of these public reclamation projects actually came to fruition. First, in 1934 the Fruen Milling Company donated a dozen acres of land to Theodore Wirth Park. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) hired hundreds of individuals to tidy up the creek and straighten the creek’s channel north of Glenwood Avenue. This project had its own issues. A culvert built to connect a straightened channel with the original creek bed was built incorrectly. There was once a 9-foot deep sandy swimming hole at Bassett’s Creek, but for nearly 100 years this old creek bed had been a stagnant body of water, unable to flow through the culvert. It’s this portion of the creek that was closest to my home.
The second of these projects would happen in the 1990s in the area of the Sumner-Field housing projects just west of Interstate 94. The housing was built on top of unstable soils, which led to severe foundational and flooding issues. These issues were exacerbated by runoff from the surrounding freeway, and because the now impermeable surfaces wouldn’t allow flow into the wetlands that once surrounded this portion of the creek. After several years and lawsuits, large portions of this neighborhood were razed and Heritage Park was built, and portions of Bassett’s Creek and surrounding wetlands were retrofitted to see daylight for the first time in over half a century.
For years the underground portion of the creek ran under the Itasca Building at 7th and N1st St just before it flowed into the Mississippi and was visible in the basement of the building. Because of renewed flooding concerns, a new tunnel was constructed, several blocks closer to downtown than the old one and was finished in 1992. Drainage from much of I-94 and I-394 near the downtown area now drains into the new tunnel which begins at approximately Colfax and 2nd Avenue North and outlets into the Mississippi River near St. Anthony Falls. The old tunnel is still maintained and handles local storm sewer drainage as well as occasional overflow from the creek near the new tunnel entrance.
Bassett’s Creek has seen many changes in its history.