Woodlawn Boulevard
Jonathan C Slaght looks out for flashes of nature in Minneapolis, as part of our series 'There's a street in my neighbourhood'
I sit at a hundred-year-old rolltop desk made of oak, a behemoth inherited from my father. It traveled the world with him, a diplomat’s accessory, occupying space in apartments from Montevideo to Moscow. Now the desk is in my home, in Minneapolis in the United States, next to a ground-floor window overseeing Woodlawn Boulevard.
Street names only sometimes reflect reality but the name here is apt: Woodlawn does in fact adjoin a wooded lawn — a neatly-mowed expanse of short grass interspersed with a scattering of native and ornamental trees. Beyond it, just over a hundred meters from where I write, is a lake called Nokomis. This is a waterbody about three kilometers around, with walking and bicycle paths and a small swimming beach of white sand on its western side. In winter, people ice skate on the cleared surface and ski where it’s covered in snow.
I am often at my desk at sunrise, working, as the watery reflection of skyscrapers from downtown Minneapolis gleams orange like a distant bonfire as the rising sun finds them. I sometimes see coyote in the growing light, graceful streaks of grey among the trees, and also fox, rabbit, and wild turkeys. On rare occasion I hear owls. The ice is off the lake now and soon loons will arrive: stout, hefty waterbirds that patrol the lake like surfaced submarines, calling plaintively as they wait for ice further north, where they breed, to succumb to spring as well. I am not by nature a city person, preferring the mud and stillness of uncultivated landscapes, but my street and its flashes of fur and feather offer a worthy compromise.
More than a century ago, about the time my desk was crafted, Woodlawn Boulevard was part of a wetland complex: soaked earth and shallow lakes fringed by cattails and carpeted by tufts of wild rice poking from the shallow water. One of the largest waterbodies in this marsh, at 120 hectares and only a meter-and-a-half deep, was called Amelia; later renamed Nokomis.
In 1910 Minneapolis sketched plans to dredge Lake Amelia as part of an ambitious effort to control the wetland and ‘beautify’ the city with a system of parks. Over the ensuing years, the lake’s depth increased to ten meters at its center, pulling water from surrounding wetlands and reducing the area of the lake by a third. Dredged earth and sand were hauled ashore to level and further dry adjacent lands. A 1912 map referred to Woodlawn as “County Road,” in 1923 simply “OId Road.” The earliest mention of Woodlawn Boulevard I could find dates to 1928. With the land dry and — I can confirm — beautiful views of parkland and lake, homes started to appear along Woodlawn, mine in 1934. The new construction likely caused distress for the residents of adjacent Shoreview Avenue to the east, a street name suddenly rendered meaningless.
In 2014, heavy rains flooded Lake Nokomis, pushing the water up and over its banks to creep within 50 meters of my front door. Green shoots of cattail and other wetland plants emerged from the saturated earth after the waters receded, their seeds brought there by flood or, perhaps, from the dry, wetland seedbed where they’d been dormant for a century. Instead of eradicating these vulnerable colonists the city incorporated them into the park’s design, providing new breeding habitat for skulking sparrows and gaudy blackbirds. It’s a good look for the city, and a handsome view from my window, this manicured landscape with an accent of its wild past.
Jonathan C. Slaght is an expert on endangered species of north Asia and the Regional Director of Temperate Asia for the Wildlife Conservation Society. His first book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, was named The Times Nature Book of the Year in 2020