Minneapolis, MN
Stuck in Minneapolis for spring break? Try this on for fun
Mall of America
What: If my 9-year-old were in charge of our family’s spring break trips, we’d never stray far from home. Ask her “Florida or Mall of America?” and a staycation at the goldang MOA wins her vote every time.
Offerings: The surprisingly difficult Amazing Mirror Maze (Level 3, North Garden, $9.95 a ticket) had all four of us clutching hands to make it through. Other faves: the revolving sushi at Kura Sushi (Level 3, North Garden) and cheese fries at Shake Shack (Level 3, North Garden $4.89).
Fun for: Tots, tweens and teens.
Flipflop factor: While there’s no beachy vibe, you can pick up a pair of cushy sandals at the Crocs store (Level 1, North Garden), get pedicures (L.A. Nails, Level 3, West Market) and go to Margaritaville (Level 3, East Broadway).
New additions: The trippy infinity rooms at the new Wink World, the brainchild of Blue Man Group co-founder Chris Wink (Level 3, North Garden, $20 for 13+, $15 for kids. On Tuesdays, kids are free with a paying adult) and Fly with Appa at Nickelodeon Universe.
An add-on: If you want to add an indoor pool to the mix, you can go all out and stay at the connected Radisson Blu (spring break packages that include MOA attraction tickets start around $370 for a family of four).
Photo op: Get Slimed at Nickelodeon Universe ($45 for one, $55 for two, ages 8 and up, tix.mallofamerica.com/get-slimed).
Signature drink: Uni Uni bubble tea (Level 1, East Broadway).
ERICA PEARSON
Can Can Wonderland
What: Alumni of the Soap Factory’s Haunted Basement and the Walker’s artist-designed mini-golf transformed an old can factory into an indie, indoor amusement park.
Offerings: A massive collection of arcade games from various eras, some more than 100 years old. (Unlimited play for $11-$14 admission.) There’s also an artist-designed mini-golf course (an extra $13-$15) and live entertainment, from music performances to burlesque to a robot-themed fashion show. There’s been “Tappy-Hour” dance instruction and, on the first Thursday of the month, participatory “drumeoke” (like what it sounds). Overstimulation is your only real risk.
Fun for: Anyone old enough to work a joystick.
Flipflop factor: The closest you’ll get to channeling a beach in Mexico is the unexpectedly delicious Elote Brussels Sprouts, which are fried and served street-corn style with an addictive dressing.
Best bit: Relieve your childhood at the arcade, scoring home runs on a baseball-themed 1960s pinball machine or destroying cities in the classic 1980s video game “Rampage.” I had fun introducing my kids to the joy of electronic competitions, especially the one that involves shooting hoops, whacking crocodiles and driving motorcycles. My fave was the Japanese racehorse simulator, which had us standing up in our saddles! My 6-year-old maxed out on Can Can after a couple of hours, but the 8-year-old could have stayed there for days.
An add-on: Mini-golf tee times are reserved on arrival, so come early if you want to avoid a long wait.
Photo op: You trying to defeat the animatronic arm wrestler. (Good luck! We couldn’t budge it.)
Signature drink: The Fruity Unicorn is a blend of vanilla ice cream and Fruity Pebbles that’s topped with edible glitter and a tuft of pink cotton candy that looks like a Troll doll’s hair.
755 N. Prior Av., Suite #4, St. Paul, cancanwonderland.com
RACHEL HUTTON
Watershed
What: A communal bathhouse and spa in Minneapolis with a hot soaking pool, steam room, sauna and cold plunge pools and tanks.
Offerings: The basic $54 experience gets you up to three hours, where you can cycle through the hot bath, sauna and cold plunge as many times as you like, or just chill out in a lounge chair.
Fun for: Adults of all ages. You have to be at least 18. Not recommended for people who are pregnant or have cardiovascular issues.
Flipflop factor: You have to wear a swimsuit. They provide towels and flipflops. But you may have to leave your beach novel behind. It’s a little too wet for that and the lighting is set at candlelight level.
Best bit: The opposite of a loud, boozy hotel hot tub, Watershed prohibits public displays of affection while soaking and asks that customers leave their phones in the lockers and keep their voices low. (Staff members will hit a gong if the noise level creeps up.) Plan on a phone-free couple of hours to contemplate the tonal soundtrack and the serene images projected on the walls while you’re soaking and sweating.
An add-on: There’s a menu of spa experiences you can add to your bathing, including salt scrubs, facials, massages and cupping.
Photo op: Because you have to leave your phone in the locker, it’s a no-selfie space.
Signature drink: Water. You probably will want to rehydrate after all that schvitzing. There’s also some dried fruit you can nibble on in the lounge area.
514 SE. 2nd St., Mpls, watershedspa.com.
RICHARD CHIN
Smash Park
What: A suburban restaurant/bar, sports and entertainment hub. If Punch Bowl Social or the Burrow added pickleball, you’d end up with a Smash Park.
Offerings: Reserve a pickleball court for $25 to $40 an hour, depending on day and time. (Courts fill up fast, but you can book them up to two weeks in advance.) You can also sign up for ax-throwing (14+), karaoke in a private “sing suite” (21+ except Sundays), darts (21+) and duckpin bowling.
Fun for: Pickleballers, of course, but dinking is far from necessary. I saw birthday gatherings, families with kids, large groups, and young and middle-aged people alike who were seeking activities with their Saturday night libations. An abundance of TVs makes it a fine place to watch sports, as well.
Flipflop factor: It’s not hard to find an island vibe if you want one. Skip the urge to order the “pickleballs” (fried cream cheese balls loaded with pickles and bacon bits) and try the tasty bang bang shrimp appetizer ($15) or the Caribbean shrimp bowl ($16), which comes with coconut-infused quinoa.
Best bit: If you’re here mostly for pickleball and a bite to eat with friends, consider dining in the pickleball hall while you wait for your court. There’s good energy, but it’s not as noisy. If you’re on a budget, free activities include cornhole, giant Connect 4 and foosball, as well as all-ages bingo on Sundays from 10 a.m.-noon. (Sundays are best for families, since some of the age restrictions do not apply.) Sign up for the rewards program and you’ll get a $15 game card for the arcade.
An add-on: New to pickleball? No problem. Paddles and balls are available to rent.
Photo op: If the Instagram-able rooftop patio is open by the time your spring break commences, you’re in luck. Just know it’s 21 and over on most days.
Signature drink: The Sociabowls are tropical-themed cocktails that arrive in fishbowl-like, 46-ounce mugs. Ask for a few straws and share with friends.
1721 W. County Road C, Roseville. https://smashpark.com/location/roseville/
LAURA YUEN
Minneapolis, MN
BWCA wildfires continue to escalate, peacetime emergency extended
Minneapolis, MN
Walking All the Streets of Western Northeast Park
Editor’s Note: Max Hailperin is walking each of Minneapolis’ 87 neighborhoods, in alphabetical order. He chronicles his adventures at allofminneapolis.com, where the original version of this article was published July 4, 2026.
The Northeast Park neighborhood is arguably the northeasternmost in Minneapolis. Those that extend somewhat further east are nowhere near as far north, and those that are further north don’t extend as far to the east. Of course, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. I’m not trying to pick a fight with Waite Park, for example.
What’s inarguable is that the neighborhood divides into two quite distinct areas. West of Johnson Street, there’s a nearly square portion, bounded on its other three sides by Broadway Street, Central Avenue, and 18th Avenue. (I’ll omit the direction indicator NE, which applies to all streets and avenues in this area.) This western portion was the focus for this first walk in the neighborhood. Unlike the irregularly shaped area east of Johnson, it has a grid-based layout, albeit with substantial gaps.
The main loop of my walk began and ended at the southwest corner, the intersection of Broadway and Central. The building on that corner, The Broadway, presents a low-profile facade toward Broadway, which is the uphill side of a sloping lot. The main tenant on this side is Spyhouse Coffee, which makes the most of the timber and brick interior. I chose to wait until the end of the walk to see other parts of the building.
Heading east on Broadway, the next building I passed was the National Guard armory, described more fully by the sign out front as the “Minnesota Army National Guard N.E. Minneapolis Training and Community Center.” A sprawling one-story structure built in 1992, it has none of the romance of the earlier castle-like armories or the vaulted art deco structure in downtown Minneapolis. Together with its parking lot, it occupies the entire triple-sized block from Tyler to Fillmore, with Polk and Taylor being absent in this area.
East of Fillmore, I continued in a forward-and-back spur two blocks to Buchanan, with a side spur north on Pierce. This reflects the fact that Pierce doesn’t cross the diagonal railroad tracks, one of the many ways in which the street grid of this area gives way to the realities of land use.
I rather like how commercial, residential and recreational uses are mixed together, leading to buildings of widely varying age, style, and size. Some of them have also gained a new look and new purpose over time. For example, a concrete-block building on the corner of Broadway and Pierce, which looks like it started life as an automotive business in the 1970s, now has a sharp paint job and signage announcing its repurposing as Abra Kadabra Environmental Services: “When nature creeps in, call us.”

An even more striking example lies in the first block north of Broadway on Fillmore, a house now prominently exhibiting mural art by Yuya Negishi, but upon closer examination showing signs of its origins as the Samuel Moyer Gospel Lighthouse.

Take another look again at that mural-adorned former chapel, this time with an eye toward how its form fits that of its neighbors. To its right and further to its left, there are houses with similarly pitched roofs. But this appearance of consistency is somewhat illusory. The neighbor immediately to the left (or north) only came into view as I walked a bit further.
That immediate neighbor, a flat-roofed two-story structure, was built in 1901 as an apartment building. Today its four rental units are guarded by three metal roosters.

All of these residence are directly across Fillmore from the United States Postal Service’s Vehicle Maintenance Facility, just north of the armory. At the time of my walk, its lot was packed full of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles, which I assume were being readied for their initial deployment.
I walked 13th Avenue east from Fillmore to its dead end just beyond Lincoln Street, where Interstate 35W cuts through. So far as getting anywhere goes, I was wasting my time to go that extra half block beyond Lincoln. But the whole point of this project isn’t to get anywhere, it’s to see what there is to see. And you never know when you’re going to see a giraffe in someone’s back yard.

A few roosters or a giraffe are nothing compared to the lawn ornaments on one of the Lincoln Street houses just south of 12th Avenue. The horizontal lines of flower boxes and whatnot balance out the vertical totem-pole-like collection of cartoon characters (Minnie Mouse, a pig chef, baby Yoda, a cow and I don’t know what else).

With that behind me, you’ll understand why, after wrapping around to Buchanan Street, I was unsure about the turkey resting on a loading dock. Was it like the metal roosters, the giraffe, the pig? I waited. Eventually it swiveled its head, answering my question in the negative.

The very presence of a loading dock amidst residences is not something one would see in more rigidly zoned neighborhoods. The residences vary in age, with my eye particularly drawn to one a couple blocks further north that turns out to be from 1902.

The street grid is interrupted again at 14th Avenue, this time by Northeast Athletic Field Park, the defining feature of the neighborhood. I walked a spur east along 14th Avenue as far as Johnson Street, then turned west to continue my main loop. The athletic fields themselves are just athletic fields, nothing that struck me as out of the ordinary. (I’m notably non-athletic.) But the restroom building in the block between Buchanan and Pierce is a standout for its Creatives after Curfew mural celebrating “the heart of Northeast Park.” It was painted in 2021 by Leslie Barlow, Maiya Lea Hartman, Thomasina Topbear, Maria Robinson and Claudia Valentino, sponsored by the Northeast Park Neighborhood Association.

Once I was headed back northbound on Fillmore, I detoured off to the west on the entrance driveway leading to Sociable Cider Werks. For a pedestrian, it’s actually easier to access this business from the north, but I wasn’t sure yet whether that was blocked off or not, so I took the driveway. I enjoyed a brief rest stop on their patio, consuming a Freewheeler cider and an oil-stained paper bag of seasoned french fries from the resident food trailer, Smashed Patty’s.

The All of Minneapolis project has been an on-and-off part of my life for a decade now, and though there has been change over that time, there have also been constants. One of those constants has been my struggle with how to balance the interesting and the beautiful in my choice of photo subjects.
North of the park on Fillmore, there are two quite similar buildings, each built in the late 19th century by Aaron Carlson as a duplex and then extended by him in the 1920s and subdivided. I decided to photograph the slightly older of the two (1897 versus 1899), even though I can’t count the obscuring of the original facade in the category of beauties. It simply is too interesting a glimpse into the evolution of this Minneapolis housing to be ignored. And that’s even before the name “Aaron Carlson” meant anything to me. (Later in the walk I saw the name on a smokestack and looked it up.)

As I walked by other residential properties, mostly from varying decades of the 20th century, I was frequently as interested by the flowering bushes and trees as by the buildings. Likewise, when I came around to the Johnson Street side of the park, I was as drawn to the daffodils planted around the sign as I was by the water park visible in the background.

After following 16th Avenue along the northern border of the park, I turned north on Buchanan Street and found myself walking alongside a school building for which the playground equipment already signaled that it wasn’t just any school. Yinghua Academy is a Mandarin Chinese immersion school.

Before I turned onto 17th Avenue and saw the front of the school (complete with a fitting Little Free Library), I paused to consider the white duplex at 1709 Buchanan. The horizontal lines and white color made me think of one of the less common styles of modernist architecture, loosely inspired by the Secession Building in Vienna. I don’t know whether that was intentional; the history of the building’s construction and expansion is complex.


Once I was back to 18th Avenue, I headed west from Pierce Street to Central Avenue, with southward spurs down Taylor, Polk and Tyler Streets. This is a rhododendron-enhanced residential area dead ending at the railroad-adjacent industrial zone that now contains Sociable Cider Werks and the former Industrial Machinery Company building, fancifully called “The Alamo.” I saw the front of that building once I turned onto Central Avenue.


To access the part of this industrial area that is south of the tracks, I turned east on 14th Avenue. Extending south of there on Tyler Street is the former Crown Iron Works, redeveloped by Hillcrest Development. Today it is the Crown-Arts Center, billed as a “Creative Office Campus.” Sadly, one of the tenants I visited, Bauhaus Brew Labs, has closed in the interval between my walk and completing this writeup.



Tyler Street also brought me back to The Broadway building, where I had begun my walk. Across the parking lot from it is a 2023 apartment building featuring a mural by Chuck U. The parking lot also provides a good view of the historical signage (“The Land-O-Nod Co., Bedding Manufacturers”) and is the site for a sculpture by Zoran Mojsilov.)



The parking lot also provides access to the side of the building opposite Tyler Street, where there is a sheltered area between the building itself and the retaining wall of Central Avenue, which ascends to Broadway. That area contains a stone amphitheater and a patio served by Padraigs Brewing. There I capped my walk off with an N.E. Porter and a Potter’s Pasty.



All photos by Max Hailperin
Related
Minneapolis, MN
Feds release key evidence in Minnesota ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti
MINNESOTA (TNND) — Federal prosecutors have turned over key evidence in the fatal ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti to Minnesota investigators after months of legal battles, marking a major breakthrough in the state’s effort to investigate the deaths.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Monday that the evidence was released by U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen’s office after a lengthy dispute over access to the materials. The transfer includes previously withheld hard drives containing witness statements, police body-camera footage and Good’s damaged SUV.
“The wonderful thing now is we have all the evidence,” Moriarty said in a video statement. “Any time the government is responsible in whatever way for taking the life of a community member, we need to have a full and thorough investigation.”
The Minneapolis immigration crackdown, dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” ended in February after being billed as the largest immigration enforcement operation ever.
A private autopsy found that Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot three times by a federal immigration agent during a Jan. 7 traffic stop, including a fatal gunshot wound to the head.
Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was shot and killed during a Jan. 24 protest. The medical examiner ruled he died after being struck multiple times by federal agents.
At least nine people have been killed nationwide in encounters involving ICE agents since the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign began last year. No one has been charged in connection with the deaths, and the federal government has argued that state prosecutors lack jurisdiction to investigate federal officers.
The latest development also comes as questions continue to surround other recent fatal ICE shootings. An ICE agent fatally shot a motorist in Maine on Monday, while prosecutors in Houston said federal officials are still withholding key evidence in their investigation into another deadly shooting involving an ICE officer last week.
New video of Minneapolis ICE shooting from agent’s perspective (CNN Newsource)
Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration in March, accusing federal authorities of refusing to provide evidence needed for the state investigation.
Court filings suggest the breakthrough came after federal prosecutors sought evidence gathered by state investigators in a separate case involving ICE agent Christian Castro.
Castro, 52, has been charged with assault and falsely reporting a crime in connection with the Jan. 14 nonfatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Prosecutors allege Castro fired through the front door of a Minneapolis home while pursuing another man, striking Sosa-Celis in the thigh.
State and local prosecutors told federal officials they would share evidence in Castro’s case only if the federal government agreed to reciprocate in the investigations into the deaths of Good and Pretti.
“We are willing to share evidence with you if the exchange is reciprocal,” Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans wrote in a court filing.
Lawyers for Good’s family called the evidence transfer “an important and meaningful step toward justice and accountability.” The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which has taken custody of the materials, said “great strides have been made” to ensure a “thorough and complete review” of both shootings.
But an attorney for Pretti’s family said Rosen’s office still declined during a Monday meeting to confirm whether any formal cooperation agreement exists between state and federal investigators.
“No family should be required to beg federal authorities to do their job,” attorney Steve Schleicher said in a statement. “Without a public commitment by federal authorities to cooperate with the state, it is difficult—if not impossible—to pursue justice that holds the individuals accountable for Alex’s death.”
The evidence transfer marks the first significant cooperation between state and federal investigators since Minnesota filed its lawsuit, potentially allowing the long-stalled investigations into both fatal shootings to move forward.
_____
Editor’s note: The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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