This kind of gesture greatly cheapens the value of a Preservation
Award. Previously, that award has been given to successful "saves" of
historic properties, mainly through enlightened renovation and
sensitive re-purposing of spaces and structures with historic
meaning. Plaques or signs that say something like "Something Really
Wonderful Used to Be Here; go to the Historical Society to see a
picture of it" are just too sad for words, much less as a reward for
tearing something down.
In the Como neighborhood several years ago, People for Pride in
Living purchased from the Bunge Corporation a large grain elevator
complex that Bunge had stopped using in 2003 when they decided to do
all their shipping by river rather than rail (this terminal elevator
site is right on the BNSF main line, and has been since about 1880,
when it was called the Midway Elevator[s]). PPL, before it could
demolish a major part of the historic elevator silos to build a
low-income rental property complex, had to do a "mitigation," which
was a researched history of Minneapolis terminal elevators, complete
with information on their purpose, construction techniques,
operations, mechanisms, etc. PPL paid consultants to do the research,
and their rather nice article was published in "Hennepin History."
Then the wrecking crews came. We still have part of the complex
standing; an eyesore no one knows what to do with. I think the
subsidized housing complex PPL built there has a commons room with a
little plaque, too.
Most of the Lewis Gillette-inspired concentration of
grain-oriented/railroad-dependent industrial structures in Southeast
Minneapolis have hit the dirt in the past twenty years; others are
going down as the University continues to expand its footprint in
Minneapolis. No mitigations there, that I know of.
If there is no imagination about how to re-use historic structures,
then at least there ought to be a carefully-done piece of published
and accessible research on the neighborhood, the block, who lived
there, how and why it changed, etc. But that tends to be downbeat
history when the goal is to tear something down from the outset, a
story of decline and decay and socioeconomic disasters of one sort or
another. No one wants to write and publish such negative views,
especially not in Minneapolis, which--and I can't think of an
exception--is a city that glosses over everything with La-De-Dah,
writing Boosters' History. Boosters don't write about failures. And
it seems with Children's Hospital getting a Preservation Award, we
not only have a cheapening or perversion of the award itself, we have
a falsification of the historical record, by silences or omissions
covered over with gloss.
Connie Sullivan
Como, in Southeast Minneapolis