Riverside Plaza

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Two of the taller buildings at Riverside Plaza

Riverside Plaza is a modernist and brutalist apartment complex designed by Ralph Rapson that opened in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1973. On the edge of downtown Minneapolis in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, and next to the University of Minnesota's West Bank, the site contains the 39-story McKnight Building, the tallest structure outside of the city's central business district. Initially known as Cedar Square West, the complex was featured on television as the residence of Mary Richards in later seasons of the Mary Tyler Moore show.

Today, the imposing concrete structures are usually considered to be visually unappealing, particularly with their multi-colored panels (attempting to emulate Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation design) which strongly date the period of construction. Interstate 94 and I-35W both pass nearby, giving good highway transportation options for occupants, but the corridors also act as barriers to pedestrians. Despite these drawbacks, the complex has been successful in maintaining a high occupancy rate, rarely dipping below 90% in three decades.

It is composed of six buildings and has 1,303 residential units, making it the main feature of the city's Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. Each building has a different height, intended to reflect the diversity of its population. Rapson was inspired by the time he spent in European cities where people of different ages and levels of wealth coexisted in close quarters. The area was developed with support from the U.S. federal government's "New Town-In Town" program, and was originally planned to be part of a utopian design that would have seen 12,500 units spread across four "neighborhoods", housing a total of 30,000 people.

About half of the complex is reserved for subsidized housing, much more than the 20% Rapson had originally planned. The low-income nature of the site has led to derisive nicknames such as the "slum in the sky," "ghetto in the sky," and the "crack stacks". A string of homicides in the early 1990s also contributed to a negative image. University student residents have been a declining portion of the population, while East African immigrants have dominated in recent years. More recent nicknames include "Little Somalia" and "Vertical Africa", reflecting the modern makeup.

A major complaint by residents of Riverside Plaza is the lack of elevators: The 408-unit McKnight Building currently has five (it was built with three), and other structures are also "under-elevated". Ground transportation has improved since the 2004 addition of the Cedar-Riverside light rail station on the Hiawatha Line.