The Great Northern Railway Depot in Princeton, on last year’s 10 Most Endangered list, was nominated for inclusion again in 2011. The building’s condition is of more concern than ever, with deteriorated roofing and exterior masonry, inadequate heating and ventilation systems, and overloaded and outdated wiring and plumbing. This building, which is listed in the [...]
Selma’s has been an attraction—for locals and tourists alike—since the early 1900s, when the ice cream parlour was established in an existing nineteenth-century wooden clapboard building. In recent years, the property changed hands several times. The most recent venture went broke, and Selma’s entered foreclosure and was purchased by CorTrust Bank in 2010. The building [...]
As a paragon of the American flour industry, Pillsbury “A” Mill helped to establish the City of Minneapolis as the prosperous Mill City in the late nineteenth century. The mill complex is made up of eight buildings, including warehouses, grain elevators, and machine shops, and also includes a rail corridor and tunnels for channeling river [...]
Situated on two city lots, the Wells Center is owned by the Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC). Originally constructed for the Alden Smith family in 1887 by locally renowned architect William Channing Whitney, this large Richardsonian Romanesque-style residence sat among other prominent family homes near downtown. The house was listed in the National Register [...]
The Barn “Shed” in downtown Willmar is a modest, one-story building, fewer than twenty feet wide. A former drug store, it has subtle curvilinear details typical of the Streamline Moderne style and its 1940s construction date. Now used as ancillary storage for the neighboring Barn Theater, the “shed” has been proposed for demolition in [...]
Between 1925 and 1927, volunteer masons began building this Gothic-Romanesque style church to serve as a place of worship for an Italian immigrant parish that was founded in 1905. The stone facade is crafted of native basalt by the same artisans who built the foundations for most of the city’s East End mansions during Duluth’s [...]
Believed to date from the 1870s, the Greek Revival-inspired Sickler-Newman-Seifert House is associated with three long-time Excelsior families. Each family’s occupancy altered the interior or exterior appearance of the home, which was designated a historic site by the Excelsior Heritage Preservation Commission (HPC) in 1981. After several generations of residential use, the house was purchased [...]
Just north of Moorhead, off U.S. Route 75, is the Queen Anne style house built for John Olness in 1902. As a leading merchant and land speculator, Olness desired a house to reflect his high standings, in contrast to the more vernacular structures in the area. In 1980, the house was listed in the National [...]
The Mitchell Engine House and Machine Shop, the one extant structure at the former Mitchell Yards, was constructed in 1906 by the Duluth Missabe and Northern Railroad just a few miles northeast of Hibbing. The yards served as staging grounds for the train cars loaded with ore from the Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine (now a National Historic [...]
The Minnesota State Capitol building is very much in the public eye, as the home to the primary governing body of Minnesota, and as a collective gathering point for rallies, protests, and ceremonies of state. It may come as a surprise that this historic structure is in desperate need of repair. Designed by the famed [...]
