Prince’s 10th anniversary sparks new Minneapolis pilgrimage trail, Paisley Park events

Prince’s death 10 years ago has become more than a memorial date in Minneapolis. It is now a civic itinerary, with the city packaging his legacy into a self-guided Purple Path downtown and a larger anniversary celebration built to draw fans back into the neighborhoods, stages and buildings that shaped his rise.

The Purple Path launched in 2025 with 20 temporary sidewalk markers and decals at Prince-linked sites including First Avenue, the Dakota Jazz Club, the Schmitt Music Mural, IDS Center, the Orpheum Theatre and the former Glam Slam location. Each marker carries a QR code that explains why the stop matters, turning a walk through downtown into a guided history lesson for visitors who want to follow Prince’s footprint through Minneapolis.

The trail is a joint effort by Meet Minneapolis, Paisley Park and the Downtown Improvement District, a sign that the Prince story is being treated not only as cultural memory but as tourism infrastructure. For a city that still sells itself through music history, the project makes that history easier to navigate, especially for fans arriving from outside Minnesota who may know Prince’s songs better than the geography behind them.

Paisley Park, Prince’s private estate and production complex in Chanhassen, remains the other anchor of the anniversary year. It opened to the public for guided tours in October 2016, months after Prince died on April 21, 2016, at age 57, and it has since become both shrine and museum for the artist’s work. The estate is again central to the calendar: Prince Celebration 2026 is scheduled for June 3-7 and will span Paisley Park, downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The scale of that programming reflects how deeply Prince still drives the city’s identity. In 2024, local coverage of the 40th anniversary of Purple Rain, released June 25, 1984, described hundreds of fans gathering in Minneapolis to mark the milestone. Two years later, the anniversary machine is larger and more organized, with a mapped trail in the center city and a five-day celebration built around one of the most recognizable artists the Twin Cities ever produced. For Minneapolis, Prince is no longer only part of the past. He is part of the city’s economic future, its visitor strategy and its public image.