Another wino high-rise at the end, but for a time - maybe two times - it was one of the city’s best..
It was a mid-block hotel that filled its lot; straight up, no indentations. It was the first in the city to offer private baths in each rooms. Unfortunately, when it opened in 1909, it had stern competition just a few blocks away - the Radisson, which was bigger and flashier. (And designed by the same firm as well.) If you can judge a building’s life by its appearance in newspaper archives, it lived a quiet life; there are no fire photos, for example. There’s a thick sheaf of yellowing promotional photos from the early 60s, when the hotel unaccountably went French: pseudo-Parisian decor, faux modern-Gallic decorations, wandering violinists, etc. Its doom came when the City Center complex was built, and that accounted for the final entries in the paper’s archives: a deserted street on a Sunday morning, still shots of a stolid old buiding, then a puff of smoke and a cascade of bricks. It was a loss; given the dreck that replaced it, no one could argue we’d traded up.
It never looked like this, as far as I can tell. Contemporary photos in the Star-Tribune library - such as the one on the previous page - don't show those rooftop pagodas, and the ground-level garden on the right side of the picture seem equally contrived. That would have been the Hennepin side of the block, and Hennepin was a busy vigorous commercial street. |
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