Four Churches on One City Block

Nestled in the residential bowels of Northeast Minneapolis, on a sleepy little parkside block, four churches stand.

What makes this particularly unusual is that this block is one of the only blocks in the entire world known to be home to four churches, one on each corner, at least according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Though as MinnPost’s Andy Sturdevant points out, “This is one of those civic booster boasts—like the one about Minneapolis having more theater seats than any city but New York—you often hear repeated but rarely see hard documentation about.” In other words, it might be wise to take this corner’s distinctiveness with a grain of salt—but it is absolutely the case that four different churches reside here. 

The largest of the four churches, Emanuel Lutheran, was built in 1899 in Gothic Revival style. Around that same time, Elim Baptist went up, followed by St. Peter’s Lutheran and Strong Tower Parish, a Pentecostal congregation.

It’s said that Emanuel Lutheran and St. Peter’s were apparently built for “dueling Norwegian Lutheran congregations.”