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Uni ue Attributes 4 "I feel as though I'm living in a small town" Falcon Heights resident Falcon Heights is a very small but truly unique community. With virtually no privately owned vacant land for development, it is an urban community very much like its neighbors, St. Paul and Roseville, and yet it has a distinctive rural appearance due to the wide expanses of University of Minnesota research fields which border Larpenteur Avenue. Falcon Heights has an urban/rural identity, unlike any other first tier suburb of the Twin Cities. Falcon Heights is an inner suburb with a small town character: It has awell-defined retail core, two major traffic arteries crossing and dividing it, and a dominating agricultural presence -albeit in the core of the city instead of the surrounding land. On one hand, it is residentially fragmented by the separation created by University of Minnesota lands, Snelling Avenue and elementary school boundaries. On the other, it is a community that is connected by some of these same factors. It is a stable community where the housing is of good quality, the location is convenient, and changes have been slow and relatively small in scale over the last ten years. Falcon Heights is the host city for one of the State's largest and most important outdoor events, the Minnesota State Fair (288 acres), which attracts more than one and one-half • million people per year to the city and inundates city streets and parking lots with a flood of automobiles for twelve days each summer. Falcon Heights is also home to the Les Bolstad University Golf Course, which frames the western entrance to the city. History The City of Falcon Heights was originally part of Rose Township, established in 1850 in Ramsey County and named after early settler Isaac Rose. Rose Township also included the Cities of Lauderdale, Roseville and parts of Minneapolis, St. Paul and St. Anthony. Heman Gibbs settled just west of Cleveland Avenue in 1849 on lands situated north and south of Larpenteur Avenue. There he built a sod house that was replaced in 1854 by the present Gibbs Farm. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is currently owned by the Ramsey County Historical Society. Heman Gibbs also built the first schoolhouse in Rose Township. It operated until 1959 and still occupies the southwest corner of Larpenteur and Cleveland Avenues. Owned by the University of Minnesota, the old school was extensively remodeled in 1930 by the WPA. The schoolhouse site is expected to become the home of the Bell Museum of • Natural History in the next ten years. The fate of the schoolhouse building is undecided. Falcon Heights Comprehensive Plan 2008 Draft -January, 2008 Section I: Background, Page I-6