🏢 Hennepin County Library — Minneapolis, Minnesota

Walker Library

In the heart of Uptown at Hennepin and Lake, Walker Library is one of the few Minneapolis branches to have reinvented itself twice — from a Beaux-Arts Carnegie-era building to a rare underground library and finally to today's light-filled 2014 glass building.

📖 About Walker Library

Walker Library sits at 2880 Hennepin Avenue in the Uptown neighborhood of south Minneapolis. Its current home, designed by the firm VJAA, opened on April 26, 2014, replacing one of the most unusual libraries in the country. From 1981 until 2012 the branch occupied an earth-sheltered, largely underground building — the first earth-sheltered structure built by the City of Minneapolis — where returned books famously slid down a long spiraling metal chute to the lower floor. The original 1911 building on the site was a Classical Revival design with Ionic columns; T.B. Walker, then president of the library board, had donated the land. The current building trades the buried design for a high-ceilinged main room full of daylight above an underground parking garage. It is part of the Hennepin County Library system, giving cardholders access to the shared county collection and digital resources.

⭐ What makes this branch special

• Opened in April 2014 as a light-filled, above-ground replacement for the branch's earlier underground building
• From 1981 to 2012 it was one of the country's few underground public libraries, complete with a spiraling metal book-return chute
• The original 1911 Classical Revival library on this site featured Ionic columns and land donated by library board president T.B. Walker
• Located at Hennepin and Lake in Uptown, one of the busiest neighborhoods in Minneapolis

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