This week in Whittier
Nothing on Whittier’s calendar for the next two weeks yet.
About Whittier
In 1849 John Blaisdell came from Maine and settled on land just south of downtown, and his family's log house became the Blaisdell School, later renamed Whittier after the poet John Greenleaf Whittier; families came to call the neighborhood by the school's name. In the late 1800s wealthy families built grand houses around Fair Oaks, the Washburn family estate, and today that area is the Washburn-Fair Oaks Mansion District, with the Minneapolis Institute of Art, opened in 1915, just south of the park. Streetcar lines on Nicollet and 4th avenues filled Whittier with homes, and in the 1990s Nicollet Avenue's Vietnamese, Chinese, Mexican and German restaurants were branded Eat Street. Today neighbors visit the free art museum, the Children's Theatre and the Hennepin History Museum, eat their way along Nicollet, and bike the Midtown Greenway.