About the neighborhood
The story of Bryant Park.
Tucked into the northeast corner of Bloomington — between Lyndale Avenue and I-35W, from 80½ Street down to 90th — Bryant Park is a small place with a long story. Here's a bit of it.
How the neighborhood got its name
Our name comes from Bryant Avenue South, the street that runs through the heart of the neighborhood beside the park. And Bryant Avenue has a story of its own: it's part of a long run of Minneapolis avenues laid out in alphabetical order — Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Dupont, Emerson — and named, poetically, after poets and writers.
Bryant honors William Cullen Bryant, the 19th-century poet and editor — and a few blocks over, Emerson tips its hat to Ralph Waldo.
The street names came first, back in the 1800s, and the park and neighborhood grew up around them decades later. (The line from the avenue's name to the park's is the best-supported account we've found — though the local records don't spell it out, so treat it as well-founded neighborhood lore rather than settled fact. If you can help pin it down, we'd love to hear from you.)
From farm fields to front yards
For much of its early life, this was farm country — Bloomington spent about a century raising produce for the growing cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul just to the north. Then came the great postwar suburban boom. In a single decade, Bloomington grew from roughly 9,900 residents in 1950 to more than 50,000 by 1960, and the blocks between Lyndale and what would soon be Interstate 35W filled in with the ramblers and split-levels that still line our streets today.
Our eastern edge, Lyndale Avenue, is one of the oldest roads around — reputedly the oldest county road in Hennepin County, tracing the old route up from the Minnesota River steamboat landing. It was also where Bloomington installed its very first traffic signal, at 98th & Lyndale, back in 1953. Our western edge, Interstate 35W, came later and drew the boundary that still defines the neighborhood.
The park at its heart
Bryant Park, at 1001 West 85th Street, has anchored the neighborhood for generations — a version of it (“Lower Bryant Park”) turns up in Bloomington's records by the mid-1940s, among the township's very first dedicated parks.
In 2025 it was rebuilt from the ground up and reopened as Bloomington's first fully inclusive, accessible playground — with a new shelter, a skate spot, resurfaced courts, a cricket pitch, ball fields, a winter ice rink, and restored wetlands and prairie. Old bones, new life.
Who lives here today
About 3,900 neighbors share this roughly square-mile patch — and it's a place of real range. On any given block you'll find young families and long-time residents side by side, neighbors born down the street and neighbors born across the world. It's exactly the mix that makes the work of a neighborhood association — connecting people across ages and backgrounds — feel worth doing.
Figures from the U.S. Census, Census Tract 1255.
Help us tell it
This is a living history, and the best history is the kind neighbors carry themselves. Have a memory, an old photo, or a story about the neighborhood or the park? We'd love to include it — reach out through the Get Involved page.
Sources & further reading
- City of Bloomington — Bryant Park and Bloomington history.
- Minnesota Historical Society / MNopedia — on the alphabetical Minneapolis avenues and their namesakes.
- U.S. Census Bureau — Census Tract 1255 profile (population, age, households).
- University of Minnesota — Historic aerial photographs of Hennepin County (1940s onward).
- Bloomington Historical Society — local photos and records (buildout-era photography).
Some details on this page are still being verified with the Bloomington Historical Society and county records; we'll update as we confirm them.