Nicollet Avenue
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nicollet Avenue is a major street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and some of its suburbs. It passes through a number of locally well-known neighborhoods and districts, notably the restaurant-heavy Eat Street [1] in south Minneapolis and the traffic-restricted Nicollet Mall in the city's downtown. It began as a military road between St. Anthony Falls and Fort Snelling.
Nicollet Avenue was named for early 19th-century French explorer and mapmaker Joseph Nicollet, who led three expeditions in what is now Minnesota. The oldest section of the avenue is actually the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. Before 1968 (when the mall was constructed) Nicollet Avenue stretched from the Mississippi River to the Minnesota River
Technically, the avenue begins at E Grant Street and continues in a north/south direction to W. 29th Street/Cecil Newman Lane, where it is interrupted by a controversial K-Mart store, and begins again at Lake Street, continuing through Richfield and Bloomington to 107th Street just north of the Minnesota River. Across the river, Nicollet begins again at Cliff Road West and goes a shorter distance to Eagan Drive.
One block of the street between 29th Street and Lake Street was removed in the 1960s to build a K-Mart store which covers two city blocks, detouring southbound traffic to Blaisdell Avenue and northbound traffic to First Avenue South (both one-way thoroughfares). The resulting traffic difficulties have led many residents of the city to refer to the project as "The Mistake on Lake."
The Metro Transit route 18 bus goes down almost all of Nicollet Avenue.
