Minneapolis, MN

701 1st Ave N, Minneapolis, MN

Last updated 9/12/2026

Koko Score: not enough votes yet

Minneapolis is known as the "City of Lakes," with thirteen lakes located within the city limits itself, and the Chain of Lakes park system connecting several of the largest of them via a continuous public trail has made lake access — for swimming, running, biking, and paddling — a defining part of daily life for residents in a way few other major American cities can match. The city built one of the most extensive enclosed pedestrian skyway systems in the world beginning in the 1960s, connecting dozens of downtown buildings via climate-controlled second-story walkways specifically to make the notoriously cold Minnesota winters more livable for downtown workers and residents — a practical piece of urban infrastructure that's become one of the city's most distinctive physical features. Minneapolis's arts and music scene has produced an outsized cultural footprint relative to the city's size — the Guthrie Theater is one of the most respected regional theater companies in the country, and First Avenue, the downtown nightclub where Prince recorded much of the concert footage for Purple Rain, remains an active and celebrated music venue decades after the film's 1984 release. Functioning as one half of the Twin Cities alongside neighboring Saint Paul across the Mississippi River, Minneapolis's combination of extensive lake access, genuinely functional cold-weather urban design, and a music and theater scene with real national reach has made it a consistent presence on "best cities to live" rankings despite a climate that's, by most measures, among the coldest of any major US metro area.

Own this business? Log in to claim this listing.

Appears on

Top 6 Cities in the United States
Currently #4 · score 0

Reviews

Barks

Similar places

Austin, TX
Austin has served as the capital of Texas since 1839, and over the past three decades it's transformed from a mid-sized state-government and university town into one of the fastest-growing major metro areas in the country, driven substantially by a technology-sector boom significant enough that local boosters and national media alike have taken to calling the area "Silicon Hills." The city's live-music identity is formalized rather than just informal marketing — Austin's city council officially designated it "The Live Music Capital of the World" in 1991, a claim backed by a genuinely dense concentration of music venues along Sixth Street and beyond, and reinforced every March by South by Southwest, the sprawling music, film, and technology festival that's grown into one of the most significant industry gatherings in the country since its 1987 founding. The University of Texas at Austin, with an enrollment of roughly 50,000 students, anchors both the city's population and its research and startup ecosystem, feeding a steady pipeline of talent into the tech and biotech firms that have increasingly relocated or expanded operations to the metro area over the past two decades, including major corporate campuses from national technology companies. That rapid growth has come with real strain — Austin's home prices and overall cost of living have climbed dramatically since the 2010s, a tension local residents and city officials have openly debated even as national surveys and relocation data continue to rank the metro area among the most desired destinations for movers within the United States.
Battle Compare
Denver, CO
Denver's nickname, "the Mile High City," is precise rather than approximate — the fifteenth step of the Colorado State Capitol building is marked at exactly 5,280 feet above sea level, a detail the city has embraced as a literal point of civic identity rather than just a loose figure of speech. The city functions as the primary gateway to the Rocky Mountains for both residents and visitors, and that proximity to world-class skiing, hiking, and outdoor recreation within roughly an hour or two's drive has become one of Denver's single biggest draws for the wave of remote workers and outdoor-recreation-focused movers who relocated there in significant numbers through the 2010s and early 2020s. Denver's economy has diversified substantially beyond its historical roots in mining and energy, building genuine strength in aerospace, technology, and craft brewing — the metro area has one of the highest concentrations of breweries per capita of any major American city, anchored by the annual Great American Beer Festival, one of the largest beer competitions and festivals in the country. That rapid growth and diversification have made Denver one of the most consistently cited "best cities to live" picks in national rankings over the past decade, even as the city, like Austin, has faced real housing-affordability pressure and rising cost of living as a direct consequence of that same sustained population growth.
Battle Compare
Charleston, SC
Charleston occupies a peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers on South Carolina's coast, and its historic district — one of the largest and best-preserved collections of pre-Civil War architecture in the country, including the iconic pastel row houses of Rainbow Row — has made it one of the most photographed and visited historic city centers in the United States. The city has topped Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler readers' polls for "best city in the United States" more times than almost any other American city over the past two decades, a sustained run of recognition built substantially on that historic architecture, a nationally regarded restaurant and culinary scene, and a walkable, cobblestone-street downtown scaled for pedestrians rather than cars. Charleston's history is genuinely complex and increasingly reckoned with directly rather than glossed over — the city was a major point of entry for the transatlantic slave trade, and the International African American Museum, which opened on the Charleston waterfront in 2023 at the site of a former slave-trading wharf, has become a significant addition to how the city presents its own history to visitors. The College of Charleston, founded in 1770, is among the oldest institutions of higher education in the country, and the city's combination of deep colonial and antebellum history, an increasingly candid public reckoning with that history's darker chapters, and a consistently top-ranked culinary and hospitality scene has kept Charleston one of the most nationally celebrated mid-sized cities in the United States.
Battle Compare
Raleigh, NC
Raleigh, named directly for English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, was founded in 1792 specifically to serve as North Carolina's state capital, and it forms one corner of the Research Triangle alongside Durham and Chapel Hill — a name coined in the 1950s around the deliberate creation of Research Triangle Park, a large research and technology campus built specifically to anchor the region's universities to private-sector employers. That triangle of institutions — North Carolina State University in Raleigh itself, Duke University in Durham, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — has fed a sustained, decades-long pipeline of research talent into the technology, biotech, and pharmaceutical firms clustered in and around Research Triangle Park, giving the metro area an economic base built substantially around higher education and applied research. That foundation has translated into consistently strong job growth over the past two decades, with Raleigh regularly appearing near the top of national rankings for tech-sector and biotech employment growth, and rankings, drawing a steady wave of relocating professionals from higher cost-of-living metro areas along both coasts. Raleigh's combination of a genuine research-university economic base, comparatively lower cost of living than many coastal tech hubs, and a growing downtown restaurant and arts scene has made it one of the more consistently recommended mid-sized American cities for movers specifically seeking Sun Belt job growth without the highest-tier housing costs of Austin or Denver.
Battle Compare
Portland, OR
Portland's unofficial civic slogan, "Keep Portland Weird," reflects a genuine and long-cultivated civic identity built around independent business, eccentric public art, and a resistance to homogenized national chain culture — one the city has largely succeeded in preserving even as it's grown substantially over the past three decades. The city was among the first in the country to adopt a formal urban growth boundary, established in 1979 under Oregon's statewide land-use planning law, deliberately limiting suburban sprawl and concentrating development within a defined area — a policy choice credited with helping preserve the region's surrounding farmland and forest while also being blamed, by some critics, for contributing to rising in-city housing costs over subsequent decades. Portland has built one of the most bike-friendly infrastructure networks of any major American city, with an extensive network of dedicated bike lanes and one of the highest rates of bicycle commuting in the country, complementing a food-cart culture so extensive that entire city blocks are sometimes organized as semi-permanent food-cart "pods" rather than traditional storefronts. Powell's City of Books, occupying an entire city block downtown, is one of the largest independent bookstores in the world by inventory, and its continued success alongside a broader culture of independent coffee shops, breweries, and record stores has made Portland one of the most frequently cited examples nationally of a mid-sized American city building an identity deliberately around independent, small-scale local business rather than national chains.
Battle Compare

More in Where to Live

Lake Forest, IL
Lake Forest sits on bluffs above Lake Michigan roughly 30 miles north of Chicago, and its Market Square, completed in 1916, is widely credited by architectural historians as one of the first planned shopping centers built anywhere in the United States — a deliberately designed commercial plaza built to serve the surrounding residential estates rather than growing organically along an existing street grid. The city's history as a retreat for wealthy Chicago industrial and business families dates back to its founding in 1857 by Presbyterian church leaders seeking to establish a college town removed from the city, and Lake Forest College, still operating today, traces its own roots directly to that founding mission. Large lakefront and near-lakefront estates, many dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries and set well back from the road on heavily wooded lots, have kept much of Lake Forest's residential character oriented around privacy and scale in a way that's distinct even from other wealthy North Shore communities closer to Chicago. Metra's Union Pacific North Line serves Lake Forest with a commute of roughly an hour into downtown Chicago, a longer ride than closer-in North Shore suburbs like Wilmette or Evanston, reflecting the city's position further up the shoreline — a trade-off many residents have historically accepted in exchange for larger lots, mature wooded landscaping, and a genuinely historic planned commercial center in Market Square.
Hinsdale, IL
Hinsdale sits in DuPage County roughly 17 miles west of downtown Chicago, and its downtown business district and residential streets retain a substantial stock of large late-19th and early-20th-century homes, a legacy of the village's early development as a retreat for wealthy Chicago business families following the city's rapid post-Great Fire growth in the 1870s and '80s. The village's historic train station, built in 1874 and still in active use, anchors a walkable downtown of independent shops and restaurants that's stayed largely free of the big-box and chain-heavy commercial development found in some larger neighboring suburbs. Metra's BNSF Line connects Hinsdale to Chicago's Union Station in roughly 30 minutes, a genuinely fast commute for a suburb of Hinsdale's size and one that's helped sustain consistently high demand for the village's larger, older housing stock even as new construction has driven prices further upward in recent years. Hinsdale Central High School has built a strong reputation for both academics and athletics within Illinois, and that reputation, combined with the village's historic housing stock and fast direct rail commute, has kept Hinsdale one of the more consistently expensive and sought-after western suburbs in the entire Chicago metropolitan area.
Wilmette, IL
Wilmette sits on Chicago's North Shore along Lake Michigan, and it's home to the Bahá'í House of Worship, one of only a handful of Bahá'í temples in the entire world and the oldest surviving one still standing — an architecturally striking domed structure completed in 1953 after more than three decades of construction, drawing visitors and religious pilgrims from across the country regardless of their own faith. The village's North Shore location places it among a cluster of affluent lakefront suburbs extending north from Evanston, and Wilmette's own public beaches and Gillson Park give residents direct Lake Michigan access alongside a well-regarded park district that runs an extensive network of local recreational facilities. Metra's Union Pacific North Line serves Wilmette with a commute of roughly 30 to 35 minutes into downtown Chicago, and the village's public schools, part of the well-regarded New Trier Township High School District along with several other North Shore communities, have long been a significant draw for families prioritizing school quality. Wilmette's combination of a globally significant architectural and religious landmark in the Bahá'í temple, direct Lake Michigan beach access, and strong regional schools has made it one of the more distinctive entries among Chicago's North Shore suburbs, offering a genuine cultural landmark most comparably sized suburban communities simply don't have.
Evanston, IL
Evanston sits directly north of Chicago along Lake Michigan and is home to Northwestern University, whose lakefront campus and roughly 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students give the city a genuine college-town energy layered on top of its identity as a Chicago suburb — a combination that's produced a denser concentration of bookstores, theaters, and independent restaurants than most comparably sized suburbs. The city was also the founding headquarters of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the Frances Willard House, preserved as a museum, commemorates Willard's leadership of the organization and its significant role in both the temperance and women's suffrage movements of the late 19th century — a genuine piece of national reform-movement history tied directly to the city. Evanston's public beaches along Lake Michigan give residents direct lakefront access rarely available in suburbs further from the shoreline, and both the CTA's Purple Line elevated train and Metra's Union Pacific North Line serve the city, putting downtown Chicago within roughly 25 to 35 minutes depending on the service and specific stop. In 2019, Evanston became one of the first cities in the United States to approve a reparations program funded specifically for Black residents affected by historical housing discrimination, a policy that drew national media attention and positioned the city as an early test case for how American municipalities might address the lasting effects of redlining and discriminatory zoning.
Oak Park, IL
Oak Park sits directly on Chicago's western border, and it holds the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings anywhere in the world — more than two dozen structures, including Wright's own Home and Studio, where he lived and worked from 1889 to 1909 while developing the Prairie School architectural style that would go on to influence residential design across the entire country. Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park in 1899, and though he later famously described his hometown as a place of "wide lawns and narrow minds," the village has long since embraced its connection to him, preserving his birthplace as a museum alongside the Wright sites as part of a broader architectural and literary tourism identity. Oak Park is served directly by both the CTA's Green Line elevated train and Metra's Union Pacific West Line, giving residents a genuinely rare dual option for reaching downtown Chicago — the "L" for a roughly 25 to 30 minute ride into the Loop, or Metra for a faster express option — a level of transit access most Chicago suburbs don't come close to matching. The village has also built a strong reputation for racial and economic integration going back to a series of deliberate fair-housing initiatives in the 1960s and '70s, a history that's made Oak Park a frequently cited case study in successful, sustained suburban integration efforts nationally, layered on top of its architectural and literary significance.