Suburban Spotlight: Jason Heads To Plymouth
PLYMOUTH, Minn. (WCCO) -- We love our cities and we love getting a chance to meet the interesting people and visit the cool places in our suburbs too.
This week in our Suburban Spotlight series, Mike Augustyniak went to Inver Grove Heights, Jamie Yuccas checked out Eden Prairie and Natalie Nyhus headed east to Grant. To finish up the series, Jason DeRusha was no stranger to where his dart landed: Plymouth.
The suburb just west of Interstate 394 is the third-largest in the Twin Cities with nearly 73,000 people living there. There are four school districts: Wayzata High School is in Plymouth. There's also Osseo Schools, Robbinsdale and Hopkins.
One of the more famous athletes to come from Plymouth is former Gophers start running back Marion Barber III, who grew up in Plymouth, attended Wayzata and played in the NFL.
But we start our tour of Plymouth at the original Town Hall. Gary Schiebe's great-great-grandfather bought a hotel here in 1872.
"The people of Plymouth didn't like the name Plymouth," Schiebe said.
In 1858, the town council voted to change the name to Medicine Lake, but Schiebe said they never actually made the change.
The Plymouth Playhouse has been around for 40 years and it's in the basement of a hotel off I-394.
Plymouth has a lot of small businesses, like the custom varsity clothing shop run for a decade by Kristin Williams.
"We've done jackets and sweaters for Broadway, TV, film recording artists," Williams said.
Plymouth has six big lakes, including the lake at French Regional Park. And there's the local shop Honey & Mackie's, where they pair ice cream with French fries. Amy Albert and her husband named Honey & Mackie's for their two boys.
"We wanted an ice cream shop in Plymouth because we live near here. And we tried to think of something to put with ice cream that would be warmer for winter, so fries just made sense," Amy said.
They make all the flavors in the shop. Fresh cut the fries every day.