Minneapolis Hates (or Hated) Its Past

When you live in the Twin Cities, you get used to the fact that you're constantly learning how we've always destroyed buildings we should have saved, and usually destroyed them for the dumbest possible reasons. Architecture writer Larry Millett had a piece in the Star Tribune a few days ago about one such example, the 1904 Cream of Wheat factory in downtown Minneapolis, which I had never heard of until then.

It was five stories, and while its purpose was food production and I'm sure the inside was functionally oriented, its exterior was designed during the City Beautiful movement, and it shows:

In addition to stained glass windows, yellow brick, and terracotta embellishments, it was designed to have an Italian garden on one side for the employees' use. 

Inside, as Millett describes it,

...the actual manufacturing of the company's product — a hot breakfast cereal made from a milling byproduct known as wheat middlings — was accomplished on just one floor of the building, the third. The two floors above, despite their architectural elaboration, were essentially nothing more than bins for storing wheat.

The two lower floors offered an interesting mix of uses. The ground floor contained a large shipping room as well as the company's offices and a richly paneled directors' boardroom. At the rear was a thoughtful touch ahead of its time: a small room for storing bicycles. The second floor included a small cafe that served the company's largely female workforce. A "rest room" next to it provided a place for employees to take breaks.

All of that says the company's owners were ahead of their time in a number of ways. Or maybe that too many companies since then have been behind their times. 

The product was popular and the company outgrew that modest third-floor production facility in about 20 years. They built a new, much larger factory in Northeast Minneapolis, which opened in 1928. 

The glorious downtown factory stood empty for a few years until it was turned into a parking garage in 1931 — Minneapolis already felt a need for parking garages in 1931! — and then was torn down in 1939 to become a parking lot, which is what remains in that spot to this day. It's just one of downtown Minneapolis's many under-utilized surface parking lots.

The "new" Cream of Wheat factory was also nothing to sneeze at when it came to looks, though its location on Stinson Boulevard was far-removed from the dense, walkable parts of the city, as Minneapolis began its post-automobile process of sprawling outward:

The Cream of Wheat Company was bought out in the late 1940s by National Biscuit Company (now Nabisco), but its Northeast factory building still stands today. It was turned into apartments — mostly surrounded by a big parking lot, of course, since it's not near much of anything else, including transit — in 2006. 

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While looking around for information on the buildings, I came across this wonderful lettering on a shipping crate:

 

I also wanted to comment on the nature of wheat middlings. When I first heard the term in Millett's story, it sounded like it was almost a waste product of milling ("byproduct"), but clearly this part of the wheat plant has been used to create food for a long time, since it's also what pasta and couscous are made from.

But given all the white flour that was being churned out of the mills in Minneapolis, driven by the Mississippi River's waterfalls, it was a good place to make a complementary product from the rest of the whole grain.