Mary Richards worked here. WJM-TV, home of Ted Baxter, Lou Grant, Murray Slaughter and the aforementioned Mary, was located in this building. Every week the camera zoomed in on the broad facade to show the windows of Mary’s office. And therein lies a problem.

In one episode, everyone’s having a bad, bad day. At the end they are all calmed and renewed by cramming into the film library room and watching the sunset. It’s a nice scene. Unfortunately, this side of the building faces east. No matter how you configure WJM’s office, there’s no way they could see the sunset without crossing the hall. Those of us who live here, we know these things. They don’t help you at all, of course.

We also know the history of this building: it was the Midwest Federal Savings and Loan building, a mid-60s testament of faith in downtown Minneapolis. At night you could look up and see the bank’s symbol, the Green Tree, glowing at the top of the building. The bank’s branches in the suburbs were strange round buildings, top heavy and green, meant to carry forth the Green Tree symbol into the ‘burbs. They were like the Weatherball (see Norwest) but not quite in the same league.

Midwest Federal went bust in the late 80s for all the usual S&L reasons. The owner suffered legal opprobrium. The branches were sold, and the last remaining Green Tree building was demolished in the summer of 1998. The banking area of this building is now a Barnes & Noble, two busy floors of books.

I worked here in the mid-80s, at TV Guide magazine. It made sense: when I was living in Fargo in the 70s, I’d garnered my entire perception of Minneapolis-as-Valhalla through the Mary Tyler Moore show. I’d decided that Minneapolis was were I would Make It After All, and ten years after arriving in town, I was working in Mar’s building. It was my first taste of working downtown, and I loved it.

Working at TV Guide was another matter, though, and we parted company after a year. The building has been renovated since then, and oddly enough, I feel absolutely no nostalgic twinges whatsoever when I go there. The lobby convenience store is gone, as is the tall Swede who concluded every transaction with the same stentorian pronouncement: THANKS A LOT. The elevator cabs have been redone, so they bear no resemblance to the ones Mary took in the opening credits.

In those credits, she was clutching a newspaper - the one I work for today.

 This is probably an ugly building. Its decoration makes a nod to the Gothic terra-cotta effusions of the Medical Arts building next door, and for a building of its time, that’s quite a step. It’s nothing special. No one pays it much notice. But every longtime Minneapolitan knows that this is where Mary worked, and if they ever tried to knock it down, people would throw themselves in front of the bulldozers. I’d be first in line.