Park Superintendent John Anfinson Bids NPS Farewell After 20 years
“Moving to the National Park Service felt like coming home.”
The Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (MNRRA) Superintendent, John Anfinson, will retire at the end of the year. We at Mississippi Park Connection will miss his personal and professional dedication to this park, but we are excited for him to start a new chapter! We take comfort in knowing that no matter what he pursues after this, he will remain a passionate steward and advocate for the Mississippi River.
In June of 2000, John left the St. Paul District Corps of Engineers, where he was the District Historian and head of the Cultural Resources Unit, to become the park’s Cultural Resources Program Manager. Ten years later, he became head of Resource Management. In 2014, he became the park’s superintendent.
How has working for the National Park Service changed your outlook on life?
While the Corps [of Engineers] was very good to me and my work there made my career shift possible, moving to the National Park Service (NPS) felt like coming home. When the Corps ran into an archaeological site on a project, the response was: “Shoot, how will this delay things?” An NPS response would be, “Wow! What can we learn from this and tell the public about?”
At the Corps, the Mississippi became my primary interest, but I had to work on a variety of projects across a 5-state area. MNRRA let me turn my full focus to the Mississippi River.
What were some of the biggest surprises of your National Park Service career?
When I made Asian carp a key focus of the park as head of Resource Management, I had no idea it would lead to the closure of the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock. I didn’t know it would lead to the Corps initiating a process to dispose of not only the upper lock, but the next two downstream as well. The future of the river in the heart of the Twin Cities is now open for one of the most important conversations we could have for the river’s future here.
No one saw how COVID-19 would turn our world upside down. It required an immediate transformation of how we work at a park and as a society. Guiding the park through this crisis has been one of the greatest challenges of my career.
John Anfinson, Superintendent of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, stands in front of the springhouse at Coldwater Spring in Minneapolis, MN.
What are some of your proudest moments?
COVID-19 Response: Many parks threw up their hands and hunkered down, hoping the pandemic would quickly disappear. This park didn’t hesitate to quickly and adeptly pivot to new ways of doing things. Our creativity and can-do attitude—and I include our partner Mississippi Park Connection in this—demonstrated the very definition of resilience.
Coldwater Spring Transformation: After I started with MNRRA in 2000, I watched Coldwater Spring deteriorate from a recently abandoned Bureau of Mines campus into a derelict and dangerous place. The buildings were all tagged, inside and out. All the windows were broken, all the copper stolen. Discarded drug needles littered the entry to the former main building. And water leaking through the roofs of some buildings had caused ceilings to collapse. In less than 10 years, we transformed the campus into a nature sanctuary worthy of NPS status.
Upper Post at Fort Snelling: I began working on saving the Upper Post from my first days with the park, and there were many times we thought there was no chance. Now, we are on the cusp of saving it and bringing it back to life with a whole new community.
I am proud of how our partnership with Mississippi Park Connection has grown to become a key part of all our success, from getting through COVID-19, to Coldwater, our youth education and volunteer programs, PaddleShare, staffing and programming the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam, and so much more.
Mississippi Park Connection Executive Director Katie Nyberg and MNRRA Superintendent John Anfinson kayak on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, MN using the Mississippi River Paddle Share system.
“This park didn’t hesitate to quickly and adeptly pivot to new ways of doing things. Our creativity and can-do attitude—and I include our partner Mississippi Park Connection in this—demonstrated the very definition of resilience.”
What would you have done differently?
I promised that we would be a corridor-long unit of the NPS; that we would engage all 21 cities and towns and four townships. Through our wide variety of programs, we reach most, but Minneapolis and Saint Paul have dominated. I hope the next Superintendent can do a better job of reaching out to the whole corridor.
Far too often, I have found it a challenge to get cities, individuals, developers, and the public to recognize how important the Mississippi River is in the Twin Cities and how special it is to have National Park status. I hope that someday, most will understand.
What do you hope for the future of the park and the community it serves?
The entire MNRRA corridor is a national model of great riverfront development. Unlike the Grand Canyon, Yosemite or Gettysburg, it is not apparent why Congress made us a National Park Service unit. We have to grow into that, and as we were created to guide riverfront development, being the best example of great riverfront development is how we can do that. I want people from around the country and world to say, “If you want to see how to do riverfront development right, you have to go to the Twin Cities, [Minnesota].”
With a major new visitor experience developing at the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam, and a new potential headquarters and River Learning Center at Crosby Farm Regional Park, plus Coldwater Spring and the Mississippi River Visitor Center at the Science Museum of Minnesota, we should break into the top 10 if not top 5 most visited National Park units in the Midwest.
I also hope our name is changed to Mississippi River National Park.
“I want people from around the country and world to say, “If you want to see how to do riverfront development right, you have to go to the Twin Cities.”
Proceeds from the Superintendent John O. Anfinson Fund for the River Learning Center will support the next phase of vision and design to create a new National Park Service headquarters and River Learning Center on the Mississippi River in Saint Paul.