Longfellow

Longfellow is a residential neighborhood in South Minneapolis, roughly bounded by the rail line and Midtown Greenway to the north, Hiawatha Avenue (Highway 55) to the west, East 34th Street to the south, and 38th Avenue South to the east. It counted about 5,100 residents at the 2020 Census. The Midtown Greenway runs along its northern edge, and Lake Street — the commercial corridor that has become one of the most watched stories in urban recovery in the country — runs straight through the middle.

Longfellow is one of five neighborhoods in the city's Longfellow community, along with Seward, Cooper, Howe, and Hiawatha. Locally, "Greater Longfellow" usually means the four the Longfellow Community Council serves: Longfellow, Cooper, Howe, and Hiawatha. When people in Minneapolis say "Longfellow," they sometimes mean the specific neighborhood and sometimes mean the whole cluster, which runs south along the river all the way to Minnehaha Falls. This guide is about the neighborhood itself.

The land that is now Longfellow is part of the Dakota homeland, and it mattered to human communities for far longer than Minneapolis has existed. The neighborhood's name came much later, from the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose 1855 epic The Song of Hiawatha made Minnehaha Falls — about two and a half miles south-southeast, at the far end of the Longfellow community — famous around the world. Longfellow never visited the falls. He worked from other writers' accounts, romanticizing and misrepresenting Native culture in ways that are now widely recognized as harmful. That's an uncomfortable origin story for a neighborhood name, but it's an honest one.

The residential neighborhood filled in primarily between 1900 and 1940; about two-thirds of the homes standing today were built before 1940. The housing stock reflected its working-class and middle-class residents — sturdy Craftsman bungalows, modest Foursquares, and simple frame houses built for the families of railroad employees, tradespeople, and workers in the industrial corridor along the tracks and Hiawatha Avenue. Unlike the grand homes of Kenwood or the carefully planned blocks of Southwest Minneapolis, Longfellow's housing was practical and unpretentious. Many of those original houses — with their deep front porches and narrow lots — still stand.

Hiawatha Avenue (Highway 55) runs down the neighborhood's western edge, and with the rail line beside it, it separates Longfellow from the neighborhoods to its west — a barrier that still defines the area's geography. The neighborhood aged through the mid-twentieth century. But it never hollowed out the way some urban neighborhoods did — the housing stock, while modest, was solid enough to reward those who stayed.

The opening of the Hiawatha Light Rail Line (now the Blue Line) in 2004, with a station at Lake Street just across Hiawatha, brought new transit access and new development pressure. The Midtown Greenway — a bike and pedestrian trail built in a former railroad corridor running east-west across South Minneapolis — reached the Mississippi in 2006, its final stretch running along Longfellow's northern edge, making Longfellow one of the best-connected neighborhoods in the city for human-powered transportation. These two infrastructure investments, more than anything else, set the stage for the neighborhood's twenty-first century transformation.

Longfellow is not one thing. That's the first thing to understand about living here, and the thing that makes it different from many of the more uniform neighborhoods in Southwest Minneapolis or the suburbs. Walk a few blocks in any direction and the texture changes — the bungalow block gives way to a stretch of duplexes, which gives way to a newer apartment building, which gives way to a community garden, which gives way to a taco truck. The residential streets are quiet — almost surprisingly so, given how much has happened here — with mature trees, modest houses, and the kind of porches that people actually sit on.

The demographic mix is genuinely diverse by Minneapolis standards. The neighborhood has long been home to working-class white families, and since 2000 it has grown more diverse: Latino residents have gone from under 10 percent of the population to about 15 percent, the Black share has grown as well, and about one in seven residents was born outside the United States. Lake Street, the major commercial corridor that runs through the middle of the neighborhood, is one of the most ethnically diverse commercial strips in the state — a place where you can get Vietnamese pho, Somali sambusa, Mexican barbacoa, and Ethiopian injera within a few blocks of each other. This diversity isn't performative or curated — it's the result of decades of immigration, affordability, and the way transit corridors shape settlement patterns.

Community organizing runs deep here. The Longfellow Community Council has been active for decades, and the neighborhood has a strong tradition of block clubs, mutual aid networks, and civic engagement that predates 2020 but intensified dramatically after it. When Lake Street burned, it was neighborhood residents — not outside organizations — who showed up first to clean debris, board up buildings, and set up food distribution. That organizing energy hasn't dissipated. If anything, it's become part of the neighborhood's identity in a way that attracts a certain kind of person — the kind who wants to live somewhere where showing up for your community isn't optional.

The vibe, to use a word that Longfellow residents would probably resist, is DIY and unpretentious. Artists live here — not because it's been branded an "arts district," but because the rent has historically been manageable and the community tolerates weirdness. Young families live here because they can afford a house with a yard and still bike to work. Retirees who've been in their bungalow since the 1970s live next door to grad students renting a duplex. The neighborhood doesn't have a single dominant personality. It has several, and they coexist with surprising grace.

Longfellow's food scene is eclectic, immigrant-driven, and fiercely independent. This is not a neighborhood of polished restaurant concepts with PR teams — it's a neighborhood of family-run spots, converted gas stations, and places where the owner is also the cook. Some of the best restaurants here survived the 2020 unrest; some were destroyed and rebuilt; some are new arrivals filling the gaps. The turnover has been real, and the losses were painful. But what remains — and what has emerged — is a food scene with more character per square foot than almost anywhere in the metro.

Longfellow has no lake, no creek, and no river frontage of its own. What it has is one park inside its borders, its namesake park just across 34th Street, the Greenway along its northern edge, and the Mississippi less than a mile east, on the far side of Cooper. For a neighborhood of less than a square mile, that's plenty.

Schools in Longfellow reflect the neighborhood's diversity and its position within the broader Minneapolis Public Schools system. The picture here is more complex than in wealthier Southwest Minneapolis neighborhoods — test scores are generally lower, resources are more stretched, and families often navigate the district's open enrollment system to find the right fit. But the schools that serve this area are deeply community-connected, and for families who value diversity and neighborhood embeddedness, they offer something that higher-scoring schools in more homogeneous neighborhoods cannot.

Two district schools sit inside the neighborhood: Anishinabe Academy, a pre-K–5 citywide school at 3100 East 28th Street that teaches through an American Indian lens, with Ojibwe and Dakota language built into the school day, and Longfellow Alternative High School on East 31st Street. The nearest other district schools are just outside the lines. Sanford Middle School and Howe Elementary are to the southeast in Howe. South High School — across Hiawatha in Corcoran — is known for its diversity, its strong music program, and its engaged student body. South earns mixed ratings from standardized metrics, but its community culture and breadth of programming make it a genuine point of pride for many neighborhood families. Which school a given address is assigned to depends on MPS attendance areas, so check with the district.

Minneapolis Public Schools' open enrollment system means that Longfellow families are not limited to neighborhood schools. Many families access magnet programs and specialty schools across the district. Charter schools in the area provide additional options. The school landscape here rewards engaged parents who are willing to research and navigate options — it is less automatic than the pipeline in, say, Fulton, but it is far from devoid of good choices.

Longfellow is one of the more affordable neighborhoods in Minneapolis that still offers genuine walkability, park access, and neighborhood character — and that combination has not gone unnoticed. The median home sale price was $330,000 in 2025, according to Minneapolis Area REALTORS — a little below the citywide median of $350,000 and roughly half the medians of Southwest Minneapolis neighborhoods like Fulton, Linden Hills, or Lynnhurst, all of which topped $650,000. For buyers priced out of those areas, Longfellow has become an increasingly attractive option.

Prices have moved modestly. The neighborhood median was $307,500 in 2021, $330,000 in 2022, about $315,000 in 2023 and 2024, and back to $330,000 in 2025. The market is small — 43 sales in 2025 — and homes went quickly, at 27 cumulative days on market against 55 citywide, and at about their original asking price.

Longfellow is one of the better-connected neighborhoods in Minneapolis for people who don't want to rely entirely on a car — and the infrastructure keeps getting better. The neighborhood is walkable and exceptionally bikeable, thanks to a combination of dedicated cycling infrastructure, proximity to commercial corridors, and a trail network that rivals any in the country.

The Midtown Greenway is the headline act — a bike trail that runs the width of South Minneapolis along Longfellow's northern edge, connecting the neighborhood to Uptown, the Chain of Lakes, and points west. For bike commuters, it's transformative. The trail is plowed in winter (a rarity), lit at night, and connects to the paths along the Mississippi at its eastern end.

The Blue Line light rail runs along Hiawatha Avenue on the neighborhood's western edge. The Lake Street/Midtown station sits just across Hiawatha at Lake Street, and the 38th Street station is a little farther south; trains run directly to downtown Minneapolis, the airport, and the Mall of America. The METRO B Line runs the length of Lake Street through the neighborhood, from the Lake Street/Midtown station east into St. Paul. Route 7 runs on Minnehaha Avenue, Route 9 stops at 36th Avenue and Lake Street, and Route 27 ends at 27th Avenue and Lake.

By car, downtown is 10–15 minutes depending on traffic. MSP International Airport is approximately 10–15 minutes via Highway 55. Street parking is generally available on residential blocks, though Lake Street parking can be competitive during business hours.

Any honest guide to Longfellow has to address 2020. Not as a footnote, not as a disclaimer, but as the defining event of the neighborhood's recent history — a rupture that changed the physical landscape, the community's identity, and the way residents relate to their city. What happened here was not an aberration. It was the result of forces that had been building for decades. And the way the neighborhood has responded tells you more about its character than any description of the housing stock or the Walk Score ever could.