Loring Park has 14 historically designated buildings as well as the Harmon Place Historic Auto District. Some of the designated buildings include the Minneapolis Woman's Club, the Basilica of St. Mary, the Loring Theater, the Wesley Methodist Church, Swinford Apartments and the former site for the MacPhail Center for Music.
Harmon Place Auto District, which was dedicated in 2001, includes the area from Hennepin Avenue to 11th Street south along both sides of Harmon Place. The Leslie Fawkes building (1911) now known as Café Lurcat was the first automobile showroom in Minneapolis. Mr. Fawkes built and sold bicycles and used his skills to hand make one of the first cars in Minnesota. One mansion, the home of H. Alden Smith (1886), now called the Wells Family Center on the Community College Campus is the last of the grand mansions that lined Loring Park from the late 1800s until approximately 1910 when "Automobile Row" began to develop. After WWII, the suburbs began to be the place to sell cars. The area then began to attract notable historic figures such as Billy Graham and Curtis L. Carlson who both started their organizations on Harmon Place.
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H. Alden Smith Residence (now called the Wells Family Center), 1403 Harmon Place, circa 1974
Image Source: Minnesota Historical Society. Photographer Charles W. Nelson. Photograph Collection 6/1974. Text Source: Minneapolis Historic Commission and Landscape Research.
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