Beautiful Minnetonka Coming into its own

BEAUTIFUL MINNETONKA COMING INTO ITS OWN AS A PLACE FOR PERMANENT OR SUMMER HOMES WITH ITS LOVELY SHORES MADE STILL MORE BEAUTIFUL BY ARTISTIC GARDENS AND WITH QUICK TRANSPORTATION TO EVERY POINT, THE LAKE IS ENTERING UPON A NEW ERA.

PROPERTY AT MINNETONKA IS 'GOOD' JUST ABOUT NOW

Wonderful Activity in Improvements, Together with Increasing Transportation Facilities Have Made Minnetonka Investments Most Desirable '—With Supply Necessarily Limited and Demand Strong, Prices Show Inevitable Result.

LAKE MINNETONKA is in the full tide of its transition from a purely pleasure resort to a region of permanent suburban homes. It is passing from the ephemeral to the lasting. Minnetonka used to close up like a summer flower at the end of the tourist season. Its shores are now being built up with cottages and houses that are constructed for occupancy the year round. The Minnetonka region was not long ago a succession of wild spots with occasional settlements, a few big hotels on the lake shore and rows of bare summer cottages of desolate type of architecture, the monotony or their appearance being made effective by the same color of brown paint on every cottage and the same kind of up and down battens, to close the cracks.

Today every style of architecture is represented. Tiresome sameness in exteriors has been avoided and homes costing as much as $40,000 are no longer unique. While the modest cottage is still numerous, the typical comfortless shack built in the camping out days of twenty years ago is no longer considered respectable. The large hotel is disappearing fast and is being replaced by comfortable boarding houses, really hotels, but more homelike and less cosmopolitan than the famous hostelries of the class represented by the old Lafayette, long since destroyed by fire, and the Hotel St. Louis, about to be razed.

Large Estates Established

Another phase of the transition is the transformation of the orchard and truck farms which lie in close proximity to the lake, into large country estates, and the making over of great lengths of water front into sweeping sites for magnificent country mansions. While Lake Minnetonka is still a great transient resort and its hotels have their proportion of the liberal southern patronage, it has had to share its fame of twenty years ago with the countless new northwestern resorts. This loss has been made up many times in the permanent growth of the popularity of the beautiful lake among the citizens of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The lake colony has grown in the same ratio as Minneapolis. When the city was laying its foundations and its citizens were making their fortunes, the lake received little attention. The immediate surroundings of the city were too rural for the call of the wilder lake region to be heeded. As the population increased, grew richer, had time for play, it was inevitable that the lake received more attention as a outing resort. City life palling on its citizens homes. they began to seek country.

Trading for Lake Minnetonka Homes

Better traveling facilities brought the lake nearer to Minneapolis and made it easier to get acquainted with its charms. The substitution of the motor line for the team drive made it more feasible for the people to live at the lake and work in the city. The extension of the steam lines farther along the lake shores made travel easier and  shorter than by the old rail and boat. Finally the trolley line has invaded the transportation field with its frequent service.

Since the two electric-lines have been built to the lake, interest in lake property has increased by leaps and bounds. A sudden impetus has been given to the upward trend of values, and the demand for property has become greater than the supply. Townspeople are apparently crazy to trade their city property for homes at the lake. One real estate office has exactly 100 offers for trade on file. At the rare shore frontage is being taken up, the water line on the main lakes will soon be out of the market, and the country back from the lake will be the next point of attack of the buying trade, and land on the numerous -arms. In fact the cheaper customers will have to content themselves, in time, with the lots which have no lake frontage. Already, however, some of the capitalistic class also is beginning to recognize the fact that the back-lying building sites on the highlands, with broad views of the lake are very choice.

The scarcity of cheap shore lots is due largely to the springing up of exclusive settlements, which aspire to the seclusion of Tuxedo park and London West End, where prices are held high enough to maintain the neighborhood tone. The acquisition of large estates on the shore of the upper lake by" single individuals helps to make the scarcity of cottage shore line lots.

Country Life Attractive.

A whole lot of circumstances are contributing to demand for Minnetonka property. The fresh air crusade which has swept the country has had a hand in it. Country life at short distances from work is having a permanent rage, and Lake Minnetonka is the nearest point to afford the combined requisites of country and water. The heavy excursion business maintained by the railroads the last few years has introduced the country life "bug " in many systems that never, otherwise, would have known the hunger for the water wild. Old lake habitues know tha t the lake fever is as sure in the spring as the hay fever in the summer, once it is acquired. The contagion of this pleasing disease has increased tha sale of lake and the annual inquiry for summer cottages is becoming enormous.

With the trolley incursion has come a new phase. That is the sudden rooting in the minds of the the cottagers that it is just as well to live at the lake the year round instead of only 'thru the summer. For this reason Minnetonka, especially in its villages, is growing in population and a property boom in on. The Minnetonka market is experiencing the same history that city real estate has been making. The snaps are being taken up so rapidly by the people whom the lake craze has seized, that property is getting on a substantial value basis. Inasmuch as these low-price opportunities have about disappeared, it is not regarded inadvised by the real estate men for them to declare that values have raised 50 per cent this year over 1905, and that further increases are inevitable.

Wage Earners are Buying

It will be a surprise to even the well informed on lake matters, as i t is to the real estate dealers, that wage earners are among the most eager buyers of Lake Minnetonka lots. Altho the distance from the city and the expense of travel to and from work would seem prohibitive to the laborer and artisan who depends on daily earnings to maintain his family, laboring men are buying lake homes and are repeating the many benefits of their wisdom in taking up country life.

The gradual settling of civic conditions at Lake Minnetonka has removed one of the great barriers to popular approval of lake life. Liquor selling has been closely restricted. Beer picnics have been eliminated by the railroads. Reform elements have taken control of the different town governments. Large excursions now restrict their destinations to a few points. Increase in the amusement attractions will take care of the growing excursion business. The Tonka Bay picnic ground in the lower lake and the Spring Park pavilion grounds and Mound bowling alley in the upper lake are about the only remaining advertised excursion resorts. This year the eastern end of Big Island will be the rendezvous of thousands of picnickers, as the street railway company will push the advertisement of its attractions there. These three points, with the Baptist and the Methodist Summer assembly grounds, will take up the increased influx of single-day excursionists, and will relieve the regular residents of fear that improved transportation facilities from the city would ruin the privacy of private life at the lake. The overflow from these resorts will be absorbed by the roller skating and dancing pavilion at Tonka Bay and the various attractions which Excelsior and Wayzata afford. Town life, as opposed to country life, is gradually taking form about the few villages that have arisen on the lake shore. Those who prefer the regular town life can easily make choice of a home. Others wijl find the country districts as distinctly outlined. Hotel centers are being well defined also, so that people who wish to have the country life and hotel board at the same time can easily find the points on the lake which will suit their fancy. All sorts and diversity of wants and likes can now be supplied and the settling of conditions and the determination of district boundaries have, therefore, much to do with the growth of the lake habit.

Excelsior probably stands first in the list of lake villages. It has the largest population and is the most metropolitan. It has all sorts of shops, two banks and a town organization. It is the terminus of the street railway main line from the city and is the principal lake port. Wayzata, at .the other end of the lower lake, stands well to the front among the lake settlements. Its clientage comes from the exclusive neighborhood of Ferndale, as well as from the town itself and the surrounding country. Minnetonka Beach and Deephaven have each town governments and many Minneapolis leading business men are proud to have their directory address read at one place or the other, but these are not towns in the popular sense. Tonka Bay is also a village, but it is particularly a summer district and is not in the class of the first two named. In the upper lake Spring Park and Mound are the leading points and have each a colony of stores, a post office, telephone office and other requisites of city life. The hotel districts are more numerous. Hotel Keewaydin at Cottagewood is the real rendezvous of the neighborhood, including Deephaven, since the Hotel St. Louis has been out of the running for several seasons. Northland Inn, near the old Wayzata station, is another center of cottage life. Hotel del Otero at Spring Park and Maple Heights Inn and Woolnough's are the nuclei of upper lake colonies, while at Mound several of the older hotels are still in commission. Lines are closely drawn at the lake . It was formerly "north shore " or "south shore " when it came to rivalry between residents of the lower lake. Of late the unknown regions of the upper lake have been explored and settled, and it is now "upper lake " and "lower lake. " In turn the two lakes have been divided into "main lake " or "bays, " and now the final analysis has reduced the distinction to districts. Anyone who wishes to buy a home at the lake first determines whether he wants north or south shore, still somewhat determinable in the upper lake according to transportation facilities desired. Then he must eliminate either the upper or lower lake. The next selection lies between the main lake and the cheaper property on the arms and bays. All of these considerations having been duly settled, the choice then lies with districts. This is particularly true of the lower lake, as the upper lake is distinctively one of large estates, particularly on its south shore. If ultra-exclusive, the choice will probably lie between the Beach or Ferndale. When the exploitation of the new west end on the Hotel St. Louis site is completed this Tuxedo will be a worthy rival of the first.

Minneapolis Sunday Journal - May 27 1906