St. Anthony West

St. Anthony West sits on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Northeast Minneapolis, roughly bounded by the river to the west, Broadway Street NE to the north, Washington and 5th Streets NE to the east, and the river's east channel and the railroad tracks to the south. Across Broadway is Sheridan; across the tracks and the channel is Nicollet Island - East Bank. Its sibling, St. Anthony East, runs from Washington and 5th over to Central Avenue, and while the two are officially separate neighborhoods, they share a name and a history, and plenty of people who live here just call the whole area St. Anthony.

With roughly 2,400 residents on just under half a square mile, St. Anthony West is small by Minneapolis standards — small enough that neighbors recognize each other. Its defining feature is the Mississippi. The river forms the whole west edge, and most of the riverfront is parkland: Boom Island and B.F. Nelson, which give the neighborhood the largest share of Central Mississippi Riverfront Regional Park, and Graco Park, part of Above the Falls Regional Park. Inland, University Avenue NE, Main Street NE, Marshall Street NE, 2nd Street NE and 4th Street NE carry traffic through blocks of older houses and apartment buildings.

Today, St. Anthony West is a neighborhood of layers: older houses alongside newer apartment buildings, riverfront parks a block or two from busy arterials, Nicollet Island just across the east channel, and Graco's headquarters on the riverfront near the north end. It is increasingly popular with people who want river access and a short trip to downtown — about a mile from the neighborhood's southern end — without paying North Loop rents across the water.

As far as we can tell, St. Anthony West doesn’t have a neighborhood welcome sign — at least, nobody has documented one that we can find. If you’ve seen one, tell us where it is — we’d love to be wrong about this.

The land around St. Anthony Falls is the ancestral homeland of the Dakota people, for whom the falls, called Owámniyomni, are a sacred site. People gathered there for thousands of years — Dakota, Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe people all camped near the falls — long before any European set eyes on them. Father Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan friar traveling with a French expedition, saw the falls in 1680 and named them after his patron saint, St. Anthony of Padua — a colonial renaming, though the Dakota name is in use again today. The falls sit about half a mile downriver from St. Anthony West's southern edge, and almost everything about the neighborhood's early history traces back to them.

In 1838, Franklin Steele claimed land on the east bank of the river beside the falls, and a settlement grew up around the sawmills that harnessed their power. St. Anthony was platted in 1849 and incorporated in 1855. The settlement on the west bank of the river, which would become Minneapolis, grew up alongside it and eventually outgrew it.

The two cities merged in 1872, and St. Anthony became part of Minneapolis rather than an independent municipality. The name survived on the east bank, and today two Northeast neighborhoods, St. Anthony West and St. Anthony East, carry it.

The river shaped this stretch of the east bank as working land. Boom Island got its name from the booms used to separate logs floating down the Mississippi to the sawmills at the falls; men working from the island read the stamp on each log and steered it to the right mill. Silt and sawdust eventually filled in the channel behind it and turned the island into a peninsula. Just downriver, Benjamin Franklin Nelson's paper mill and roofing materials business operated from the 1880s on the site that now carries his name, and upriver, Scherer Bros. Lumber ran a lumberyard for decades on the land that is now Graco Park.

The riverfront's turn from industry to parkland came slowly. The Park Board bought the Boom Island land in 1982, and the first phase of Boom Island Park was dedicated in 1987. The B.F. Nelson site had been acquired by the state in the 1970s for a planned I-335 freeway that was never built, and in 1987 MnDOT offered to sell it to the Park Board. The Park Board bought the Scherer Bros. lumberyard in 2010, agreements reached with Graco in 2018 brought more than $3 million from the Graco Foundation toward a park there, and the first phase of Graco Park opened in September 2024.

Living in St. Anthony West mostly means living near the river. The blocks between University Avenue and the water are a few minutes' walk from Boom Island, B.F. Nelson or Graco Park, and the East Bank Trail is how a lot of residents start or end the day. The neighborhood is mostly residential, with a few long-running businesses — a Lebanese deli, a bowling alley, a pizza place on Broadway — rather than a main street of its own. Graco's headquarters near the north end is a reminder that this was an industrial riverfront before it was a park.

The residential mix has shifted significantly over the past two decades. The neighborhood was historically working-class and middle-class — mill workers, tradespeople, small business owners, the kind of people who built solid houses on modest lots and stayed for generations. That population is still here. But increasingly, St. Anthony West is also attracting young professionals who work downtown and walk or bike over the river, couples who want riverfront living without North Loop rents, and empty-nesters downsizing from the suburbs who want walkability and the river close by.

The result is a neighborhood that feels more economically diverse than it probably is. Older houses sit next to newer apartment buildings. Kramarczuk's, just across the tracks on East Hennepin, still sells sausage by the pound to customers who have been coming for decades, and Emily's, on University Avenue, has been serving homemade Lebanese dishes since 1973. These layers coexist, sometimes uncomfortably, but the river and the parks give the neighborhood a pull that holds things together even as the demographics shift.

St. Anthony West doesn't have a restaurant row. What it has is a handful of long-running places on its own streets — a Lebanese deli, a bowling alley with a kitchen, a wood-fired pizza place on Broadway — and a short walk to more. Kramarczuk's and Surdyk's are just south of the railroad tracks on East Hennepin, and the rest of Northeast's bars and restaurants start across Broadway. This is not Uptown or the North Loop, but what's here tends to have been here a while.

St. Anthony West is, first and foremost, a riverfront neighborhood. The Mississippi forms its entire west edge, and most of that riverfront is park. The neighborhood holds the largest share of Central Mississippi Riverfront Regional Park — more than any of the other neighborhoods it touches — and residents who choose St. Anthony West over other Minneapolis neighborhoods almost always cite the water as a primary reason.

Only a few percent of St. Anthony West households include children, by Census estimates, against about one in five citywide. Minneapolis Public Schools serves the area, and families navigate the same system of neighborhood schools, magnet programs, and open enrollment that operates citywide. Check the district's school finder for the current assignments for a specific address.

Webster Elementary, at 425 5th Street NE, sits just across 5th Street NE in St. Anthony East. Pillsbury Elementary, farther northeast, and Las Estrellas Dual Language Elementary, on University Avenue NE just across Broadway in Sheridan, are also among the options St. Anthony families consider. Edison High School, on 22nd Avenue NE, is the nearest comprehensive high school, and families who prioritize school rankings often explore the citywide magnet system or consider charter and private options — several parochial schools in Northeast Minneapolis draw on the area's Catholic heritage.

The honest assessment: St. Anthony is not yet a neighborhood where families move specifically for the schools — that distinction still belongs to the southwestern neighborhoods and the suburbs.

St. Anthony's housing market reflects a neighborhood in the middle of a long, slow transformation from working-class and middle-class to upper-middle and affluent. The process is further along here than in most of Northeast Minneapolis — the riverfront parks and the short trip to downtown have made St. Anthony West one of the more desirable addresses in Northeast for over a decade. But it is not yet the North Loop, directly across the river, where median rents run higher, and that gap creates an opportunity for renters who value the river over prestige.

St. Anthony West is one of the more navigable neighborhoods in Minneapolis, benefiting from its compact size, proximity to downtown, and the bridges and trails that connect it to the rest of the city. The Walk Score of 78 reflects a neighborhood where parks, transit and a handful of local businesses are a short walk away, with more just outside its edges. The Bike Score of 96 is among the highest in the city and more accurately captures how most active residents get around: the East Bank Trail and the river bridges make cycling to downtown and to adjacent neighborhoods fast, flat, and scenic.

The main walking route downtown runs south across the railroad tracks to East Hennepin Avenue, then over Nicollet Island and the Hennepin Avenue Bridge — a 20- to 30-minute walk or 10-minute bike ride to the heart of downtown Minneapolis. The Plymouth Avenue Bridge, which lands at 8th Avenue NE, and the Broadway Avenue bridge on the neighborhood's north edge cross to the west bank, and the pedestrian bridge from Boom Island leads onto Nicollet Island. For commuters, the combination of bridge access and riverfront trails means that a car is optional for anyone who works downtown.

Transit service is adequate but not exceptional. Metro Transit's Route 11 runs along 2nd Street NE toward downtown, and Route 30 crosses Northeast on Broadway, stopping at Broadway and 2nd Street NE. The Transit Score of 56 is honest — transit works here, but most residents rely on biking or walking for daily trips and use transit as a supplement rather than a primary mode.

For drivers, University Avenue NE (Highway 47) runs north–south through the neighborhood, and the Broadway and Plymouth Avenue bridges are the quick ways across the river. Parking is generally manageable — most residential streets have free on-street parking. During summer weekends and events, parking near Boom Island and the other riverfront parks can be competitive — biking is the better option.

St. Anthony West sits at the intersection of several tensions that are reshaping the neighborhood in real time. These are not abstract policy debates — they are arguments happening at neighborhood meetings, on Nextdoor, over fences between neighbors, and in the decisions that builders and buyers and renters make every day.