Neighborhood
The park made the district.
Eighty-five houses, one boulevard, twenty acres of trees. National Register since 1984.
Why it is a district
Colonel Melvin Grigsby platted the Boulevard Addition in 1883 and an 1885 advertisement called it the coming fashionable residence quarter. Almost nobody built. Only five percent of the district's houses predate 1910. After the park opened and the surrounding additions were platted in 1909, sixty-five percent of the houses went up between 1910 and 1929. Bank presidents, judges, physicians and business owners built eclectically: Georgian, Tudor and Dutch Colonial Revival, Prairie School, Mediterranean, late Arts and Crafts cottages, stucco the common finish.
The 1983 survey counted 28 landmark buildings, 43 contributing and 15 intrusions. Architects include Perkins and McWayne, Hugill and Blatherwick, Joseph Livermore and Harold Spitznagel. Twenty-first Street is the city's only surviving residential boulevard. Listed June 6, 1984, reference 84003359; expanded 2003.
Seven houses to look for
Private homes. Please look from the sidewalk.
The district's oldest building, Italianate, home of Mayor Burre Lien. A later owner turned the front door to the boulevard; the hitching post is still on 2nd Avenue.
Robert Perkins's early commission for his brother Edwin, the physician at Helen McKennan's deathbed and a founder of the hospital.
Perkins and McWayne. Stucco and red tile; the nomination's rare Sioux Falls Mediterranean example.
A bank president's Tudor Revival, among the finest in the city.
Leonard Boyce. Tudor Revival facing the park's east side.
Lieutenant Governor Sioux K. Grigsby's home 1928 to 1976, across from the site of his father's house inside the park.
Harold Spitznagel. Flemish-bond Georgian Revival with oversized quoins and an eyebrow window.
Friends of McKennan Park
Formed in 2014. Restores the 1940s floral nameplate each May, funded a flagpole and replacement trees, placed three markers, runs the June rummage sale, and each November hangs lighted garlands on the boulevard and park poles. The Friends page