In the 1960s, the Grandview area centered around the crossroads of Highway 100 and Vernon Avenue looked vastly different than it does today.
Edina’s Village Hall, built in 1954, stood on today’s City Hall parking lot. In the woods to the east, next to Highway 100, park employees chopped firewood for stoves that heated skating rink warming houses. Edina farmers still met at Minnehaha Grange Hall in the woods, and servicemen from World War II gathered at the American Legion just south of the village hall.
Where Perkins restaurant now stands, Halla Nursery sold bedding plants and trees. Having begun in 1942, when Selmer and LaVina Halla sold produce out of the trunk of their car, the Edina nursery became one of the largest garden centers in the Midwest by the 1950s.
On the west side of the highway, popular WCCO broadcaster Cedric Adams opened a white tablecloth restaurant in the same building that houses Washburn-McCreavy Funeral Chapel today. Gus Young ran a bowling alley next door.
The area was in transition, just as the entire village was as it grew from a rural community to a modern suburb. A property once owned by the Yanceys, one of Edina’s pioneer African-American families, still stood near Eden Avenue, as machinery to the north cut down a large hill that once provided the “grand view” of Edina.
By the late 1960s, traffic had grown so much that a cloverleaf interchange replaced the lone traffic signal, ushering in a new chapter in Edina’s history.
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A citizens’ committee is envisioning the next chapter of the Grandview area’s history. For more information about the Grandview project, see their website.
