Waite Park

Waite Park is a residential neighborhood in the far northeast corner of Minneapolis, roughly bounded by St. Anthony Parkway to the south, 37th Avenue NE to the north, Central Avenue NE to the west, and Stinson Boulevard to the east. About 5,600 people live on its 0.88 square miles. More than half of its edge is the city limit; its only Minneapolis neighbors are Audubon Park, across the Parkway, and Columbia Park, across Central.

The neighborhood shares its name with Waite Park, the city park at its center, which the Park Board named in 1949 for Edward Foote Waite, a Hennepin County juvenile court judge. Like most of Northeast, Waite Park is primarily residential, but it filled in later than the neighborhoods closer to the river: most of its houses date from 1940 to 1969. Commercial life is thin — a handful of storefronts on Central Avenue, a meat market on Johnson Street — and the bigger draws are green: Waite Park, Cavell Park, and Deming Heights, the hilltop on St. Anthony Parkway that is the highest point in the Minneapolis park system.

What distinguishes Waite Park from the rest of Northeast is how settled it is. According to Census estimates, 86 percent of its housing units are owner-occupied, very little has been built since 1970, and about three in ten households have been in place since before 2000. It is the kind of neighborhood people move to and stay in.

As far as we can tell, Waite Park 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 that is now Waite Park lies within the traditional homeland of the Dakota people, specifically the Mdewakanton band, whose relationship with the Mississippi River corridor and its surrounding prairies sustained their communities for centuries before European contact. The Dakota lost this land through treaties: Minneapolis sits on land ceded in 1805, and in 1837 Dakota leaders were pressured into ceding all their land east of the Mississippi. That dispossession opened the way for the settlement that would eventually become Northeast Minneapolis.

The oldest public piece of the neighborhood is the hill. The Park Board bought the land for Deming Heights in 1913, as part of St. Anthony Boulevard, because at 963 feet it was the highest point in the park system. The parkway was built through it between 1921 and 1924, climbing from Central Avenue at an 11 percent grade. The board called the land Grandview Park in 1923 and renamed it in 1930 for Portius Deming, a Northeast businessman and park commissioner who had proposed the St. Anthony Boulevard name.

Most of the houses came later. About a third of today's homes predate 1940, according to Census estimates, and most of the rest were built between 1940 and 1969. In 1944 a survey of park and playground needs flagged the fast-growing northeast corner of the city as short on parks. The answer was the Park Board and school board's first joint development of a park and school from the ground up. The Park Board bought the land in 1947, and at a 1949 community meeting more than 300 people voted to pay the property assessments for it. When a federal ban on recreation construction during the Korean War threatened the project in 1950, the park superintendent and Mayor Eric Hoyer went to Washington and came back with an exemption. Waite School opened that September, and the park was finished in 1953. Waite and Armatage were, the Park Board noted in 1951, the only two Minneapolis schools named for living people.

A few blocks west, the site of the old Edith Cavell School — named for the English nurse executed in 1915 for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium — had also been eyed for a joint park and school, but the boards built at Waite instead. The Park Board acquired the Cavell site from the school board in 1968 and rebuilt it as Cavell Park in 1977. The recreation center attached to Waite School was finished in 1979.

Living in Waite Park means living at the edge of the city in the literal sense. On the north, 37th Avenue is the line with Columbia Heights; on the east, Stinson Boulevard is the line with St. Anthony, with a pair of cemeteries just across the street. The west edge is Central Avenue, with Columbia Golf Course on the other side, and the south edge is St. Anthony Parkway. Johnson Street is the main north–south street through the middle of the neighborhood, and a freight rail line crosses it east to west.

The residential streets are quiet — mostly single-family houses on modest lots, like the rest of Northeast, but younger. Census estimates put 60 percent of the homes in the 1940–1969 range, and almost nothing has been built since. Renters are rare. About one household in five has children at home, and about one in five includes someone 65 or older.

The terrain surprises people who think of Northeast as flat. Deming Heights, on the southern edge, sits 963 feet above sea level, and Cavell Park is built into a hillside near it. The Parkway climbs hard from Central Avenue up into Deming Heights, and cyclists notice.

Waite Park — the park — serves as the neighborhood's common ground. The recreation center is attached to Waite Park Elementary, and many of the park's programs are run with the school. On summer afternoons the action is at the playground, the ballfields, and the wading pool.

Waite Park doesn't have much of a food scene of its own. Its stretch of Central Avenue, from St. Anthony Parkway to 37th Avenue NE, faces Columbia Golf Course and has only a handful of storefronts, and the interior is almost entirely residential. The one destination inside the neighborhood is a meat market on Johnson Street. For more, residents head a few blocks south on Central past the Parkway, or north across 37th into Columbia Heights.

For a neighborhood its size, Waite Park has a lot of parkland: its namesake park, Cavell Park, most of Deming Heights, and its side of St. Anthony Parkway. Across Central Avenue, Columbia Park and the Park Board's Columbia Golf Club run along most of the western edge.

Waite Park Elementary, at 1800 34th Ave. NE, is the neighborhood school, and it has been tied to the park since the two were built together around 1950. The school shares its building and park space with the Park Board, holds family events through the year, and has a special education team that provides emotional, behavioral, and academic programming.

Northeast Middle School is just across St. Anthony Parkway in Audubon Park, and Edison High School is farther south, in Holland. School assignments in Minneapolis depend on the address, so families should confirm which schools serve a specific home with Minneapolis Public Schools.

Families in Waite Park also have access to charter schools and the Minneapolis Public Schools magnet system.

Waite Park's housing market is priced right about at the city median. The median sale price was $352,000 in 2025, according to Minneapolis Area REALTORS, against $350,000 citywide — up from $305,250 in 2021. Homes sell quickly: in 2025 they spent 26 days on the market by the REALTORS' measure, and sellers received, on average, 102.7 percent of their original list price.

Waite Park is a driving neighborhood: according to Census estimates, about two-thirds of working residents drive to work and fewer than one in fifty take transit. Residents on the western side have the shortest walk to Central Avenue, but there isn't much to walk to, and most errands mean a car or a bike.

Cycling benefits from quiet residential streets and the St. Anthony Parkway trail, though the hills around Deming Heights are real. The ride to downtown Minneapolis is about half an hour via Central Avenue, longer on the riverfront trails.

Three Metro Transit routes serve the neighborhood. Route 10 runs on Central Avenue between downtown Minneapolis and Northtown Transit Center, by way of the Columbia Heights Transit Center. Route 4 runs on Johnson Street, with a stop at Johnson and 37th Avenue, north to Silver Lake Village and south through downtown and down Lyndale Avenue. Route 25 runs up Stinson Boulevard on the eastern edge, with a stop at 33rd Avenue, between downtown and Silver Lake Village. Off those streets, it can be a walk to the bus.

For drivers, Central Avenue provides a direct route to downtown and to the northern suburbs; downtown is roughly 15 to 20 minutes away. Interstate 35W is a few minutes east, through St. Anthony. MSP Airport is about 25 to 30 minutes without traffic. Parking is easy; the residential streets are uncrowded.

Waite Park changes slowly. The houses are old, owners stay put, and very little new housing has been built here in half a century. What is moving is prices, and the avenue along the western edge.