Bohemian Flats

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"Bohemian Flats" is the informal name given a residential area of what is now Minneapolis, Minnesota. The area was the low lying west bank of the Mississippi River, a short distance southeast of St. Anthony Falls. About the time Minneapolis was incorporated (1867), immigrants seeking employment in the city or at the mills at St. Anthony settled there. In 1884, the Washington Avenue Bridge was constructed over the area, linking central Minneapolis with the campus of the University of Minnesota, on the east bank of the river.

Although initially populated by Scandinavians, the Flats soon included families of Slovaks, Bohemians, and Germans. The homes they built there were little more than shacks, and utilities were primitive. There was also the problem of ice forming on the river in winter, and flooding in the spring. Still, the settlement eventually came to include about 500 families.

For many, the Flats provided a first step in establishing themselves, and they worked their way up to more comfortable accommodations elsewhere in the expanding city of Minneapolis. Nevertheless, many of the settlers loved life in the Flats, and resisted efforts to evict them. Complicated ownership, "eminent domain" exercised by the city, and changing expectations of immigrants eventually led to the extinction of the Bohemian Flats in 1932. A municipal port was then established for barges bringing coal into the city, supplying a nearby manufactured gas plant. After an extensive period of environmental remediation in the mid-1990s, the Flats became part of the large Minneapolis park system.