Minneapolis's newest park officially opened to the public on May 16, 2007. Gold Medal Park work begins on riverfront. In November, Minneapolis will get a brand new 7.5-acre park right next door to the brand new Guthrie Theater. Many a park has been named for a flower. But for flour? Come Thanksgiving, downtown Minneapolis will have a new public amenity along the Mississippi River: Gold Medal Park. Construction crews began working Tuesday in the former milling district to convert surface parking lots into an urban oasis whose name honors a dominant flour brand in the area's history. When the $5-million project is completed in November, it will add 7.5 acres of green space alongside the new riverfront Guthrie Theater. "The idea is to create some soft ground, as some might say, within the city itself and to let this be an impetus to perhaps do other things elsewhere in the city," said park donor William McGuire, chairman and CEO of UnitedHealth Group. Designed by landscape architect Thomas Oslund of the Minneapolis firm Oslund and Associates, Gold Medal Park will sit on the site of a former train shed, which left the land polluted. The contaminated soil will remain, in the form a three-story mound, topped with a four-foot layer of "clean fill."The mound is influenced by the native-American effigy mounds all along the Mississippi," said Oslund. "This is a very contemporary park that nods to history and the future." Gold Medal Park also will have 19 10-foot-long benches on three paths and will feature more than 300 trees, including maples, oaks, basswoods and an alley of lindens. Oslund drew inspiration for his design from other urban green spaces, including Chicago's Millennium Park. The original idea for the Minneapolis park called for a bandshell, but noise-abatement requirements made that part of the project prohibitively expensive. (Information obtained from the Star Tribune Website)