🎪 Wonderland Amusement Park opened 120 years ago today

The morning of May 27, 1905, brought gorgeous spring weather to Minneapolis. It was a welcome relief after a rainy week, which threatened not just to cramp people's Memorial Day weekend plans, but also nearly delayed one of the most hotly-anticipated events in the young city's history: Opening day at the Wonderland Amusement Park, a high-tech destination for merriment situated on the southern outskirts of the rapidly expanding city.

At 31st and Lake, to be exact.

The opening of the state's first amusement park would draw hundreds of thousands in its opening days and keep the new Lake Street streetcar line swamped all summer. It was yet another feather in the cap of a city that felt itself ascending from a sleepy frontier town to a regional economic power and, increasingly, a proper city with many of the quality-of-life trappings of its larger and older peers. And though Wonderland was ultimately short-lived and left but one building behind, it permanently shaped the trajectory of the neighborhood that would soon grow up around it.