Are those really LBJ's footprints in concrete at Minnehaha Falls?

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The footprints are easy to miss.

But at Minneapolis' Minnehaha Falls — right at the spot across from Sea Salt Eatery where visitors often stop to look out at the rushing water — the imprints of two men's dress shoes are there in the sidewalk.

Scrawled next to them in the concrete: "President Johnson's Footsteps."

Karen Steiner recently got into a friendly disagreement with a fellow falls visitor about the footprints.

He "was totally convinced that the footprints were really LBJ's," she said. "I think they look amateurish and they seem to be small for a guy as tall as LBJ."

Steiner, who lives in St. Paul, reached out to the Strib's reader-powered reporting project, Curious Minnesota, to find out the truth.

The short answer: She was right.

A misimpression

President Lyndon B. Johnson did make a short visit to the falls more than 60 years ago, as a marker near the footsteps explains.

But he did not stop to leave his footprints in wet concrete, said Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board Archivist Angela Salisbury.

"They are not his," confirmed Salisbury, who looked through files and talked with longtime staff about the sidewalk impressions.

When LBJ visited in 1964, that part of the park looked very different. The concrete walking paths in front of the park's refectory building (which now houses Sea Salt) to the stone wall looking over the falls are relatively new.

That whole area was "realigned" in the late 1990s, said park historian David C. Smith, author of "City of Parks: The Story of Minneapolis Parks."

"The site was a street at the time he visited," Smith said.

The prints (and the nearby historical marker) were added in the early 2000s as part of efforts to share history with the public, according to former park Superintendent Jon Gurban.

The idea was for visitors to feel like they were standing in LBJ's shoes, not to give folks the impression that he actually made the prints himself. A staffer called the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, to find out Johnson's actual shoe size (14) before making the prints in concrete, according to Gurban.

Though made decades after LBJ's Minnehaha photo op, the prints do end up fooling plenty of visitors and locals. They often are described as legitimate in places like the Facebook group "Quirky Minnesota Places."

Dried up falls?

The presidential visit that is commemorated in concrete happened on June 28, 1964.

During that summer, pulling off a photo op by the city's lovely waterfall was no easy feat. It was so hot and dry that the falls had dried up.

As President Johnson's campaign stop approached, the Park Board came up with a plan to open fire hydrants upstream and fill the creek with water.

The board asked the city to donate the water, which cost $600. The City Council voted against the idea after a lively debate, according to an account in the Minneapolis Tribune.

While one alderman suggested that the Park Board couldn't afford it, others countered that there was no room in their own budget.

"Do you think President Johnson would support this use of taxpayers money?" an alderman named John Johnson asked.

Others pointed out that if the city wanted to soak up some good publicity from the presidential visit, the falls "should make a good impression" because pictures of them were going to be transmitted all over.

To that, an alderman named Frank Moulton had a quick rejoinder: "Yes, it'll go all over the country that we have a phony falls."

In the end, the Park Board ponied up. City children splashed in the hydrants' gushing water as workers tested the hydrants' flow.

By the time Johnson arrived, the creek would rise enough for the falls to flow for six hours.

23½ hours in Minneapolis

The president spent 23½ hours in the Twin Cities, according to the Minneapolis Tribune, giving speeches, attending services with his wife at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church and greeting crowds at the annual Svenskarnas Dag (Swedish Heritage Festival) in Minnehaha Park.

("There must have been at least a thousand Swedes named Johnson there," the Minneapolis Star wrote, "plus a Johnson who gave a speech with a Texas drawl.")

Afterward, the president made a stop at the falls.

"Leaving the grandstand, Mr. Johnson was taken across the street to view Minnehaha Falls, whose waters by now were crashing with presidential splendor," the Minneapolis Tribune wrote.

Tribune staff photographer Duane Braley's photo of Johnson at the falls ended up on the paper's front page the day after the visit.

In it, LBJ appears to be standing right where the footprints are now marked in concrete. And then he was off, the Tribune wrote:

"After two minutes, he went back to his car."

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Correction: This story was updated to correct how long it has been since LBJs visit. It was more than 60 years ago.