08/20/2026
In 2006, Kraus-Anderson served as general contractor for Gold Medal Park. Building a park might not be a typical project for Kraus-Anderson, but Gold Medal is not a typical park: It was a collaboration among the Guthrie Theater, the city of Minneapolis, and, crucially, the McGuire family. In 2006, the Guthrie Theater relocated to the southeast edge of the downtown Minneapolis riverfront. This is the birthplace of Minneapolis industry, where General Mills used the power of St. Anthony Falls to produce its Gold Medal flour. When water was no longer a viable power source to run the flour mills, the riverfront was gradually opened up for other purposes. Some of the buildings were converted into lofts, and the old structures that weren’t fit to be repurposed provided a gothic touch for the new neighborhood – a sufficiently dramatic backdrop for Guthrie’s start-from-scratch theater complex. William McGuire, who made a fortune as the chief executive of United Health, leased seven acres of land adjacent to the new theater to create an innovative public space. Excepting the belt of grass that followed West River Parkway into downtown in the 1990s, Gold Medal Park was the first substantial green space added to downtown Minneapolis since Loring and Elliot parks were laid out in the 1880s. Creating this new place involved more than just planting trees. A century of industrial use left the soil contaminated. Landscape architect Tom Oslund turned this challenge into the park’s centerpiece. The polluted soil was piled up and covered with a barrier of clean earth. This central mound, influenced, according to Oslund, by “Native-American effigy mounds all along the Mississippi,” is both a focal point and a viewing station.
