Gold Medal Park
Gold Medal Park opens on the riverfront. Minneapolis got a brand new 7.5-acre park this month, right next door to the Guthrie Theater. The $5 million Gold Medal Park has 20 10-foot-long benches on three paths and features more than 300 trees, including maples, oaks, basswoods and an alley of lindens.
Designed by landscape architect Thomas Oslund of the Minneapolis firm Oslund and Associates, Gold Medal Park sits on the site of a former train shed, which left the land polluted. The contaminated soil remains, in the form a three-story mound, topped with a four-foot layer of "clean fill". "The idea is to create some soft ground, as some might say, within the city itself and to let this be an impetus to perhaps do other things elsewhere in the city," said park donor William McGuire, former chairman and CEO of UnitedHealth Group.
Read More
View of the park with the Guthrie in the background.
