Midtown Phillips
For folks in Midtown Phillips, the practice of neighboring is the practice of gardening. For decades, residents have tended to strong roots: not only in the neighborhood’s many urban farms and gardens, but through murals, storytelling, meals, ancestral lifeways, and shared cultural traditions. These roots carry histories, resources, lessons, and hopes from Chicago Avenue to Bloomington Avenue, 24th Street to Lake Street, a network of mycelia that strengthens the residents, organizations, and businesses that call Midtown Phillips home. As one of the poorest and most racially diverse neighborhoods in Minneapolis, Midtown Phillips’ identities are frequently commodified by outside observers, packaged and flattened for consumption. Yet in the face of persistent under-resourcing, extractive development, and the violence and trauma that arise from those harms, Midtown Phillips’ residents have resisted this flattening, seeking out complexity rather than easy definition: tension, rather than harmony. Neighbors are unafraid to hold different, often conflicting voices, opinions, and ideas, in equal value; lingering in the messy middle with each other, and building solidarity across lines of difference, not in spite of them. This is made possible in part through the community organizations, gardens, arts collaboratives, restaurants, and shops that dot the neighborhood: from debates over park picnics to meals shared in hole-in-the-wall restaurants along Bloomington Avenue; from harvest in the greenhouse at Tamales y Bicicletas—warm and full of light, even on the darkest days of winter—to chance weekend run-ins at the shops and stalls at the Midtown Global Market. Here, reciprocity is resistance. Here, gardeners know the soil is richer when the plant life is diverse; that deep roots feed thriving gardens. Here, neighbors never pass each other without a warm greeting, a recognition that there is always time and space to stop for someone in your community: that in fact, it is through those interruptions, pauses, and exchanges that a neighborhood is built.
Midtown is your go-to for:
Diversity: Influenced by many generations of immigrant entrepreneurs, Midtown’s businesses reflect Minneapolis’ diversity.
Markets: Small grocers and convenience shops means that your essential needs are always within reach including the Midtown Farmers Market
History: With two unique museums, the Somali Museum of Minnesota and American Swedish Institute, Midtown holds a lot of Minneapolis' history.
