Northstar Center is again leading the way in reimagining downtown Minneapolis

For an office tower in such a prominent Minneapolis location, the Northstar Center on Marquette Avenue and 8th Street cuts an anonymous profile. Its boxy, beige-and-gray 1962 exterior aged rather poorly and, to my eye, visually rhymes with the unloved mid-century modern Centennial Office Building next to the Minnesota State Capitol. Both remind me of gray “house flipper” paint jobs that dominate contemporary staging photos, certainly nothing to admire for inspiration.

That’s why, for all its mundane qualities, it’s a surprise that the Northstar Center is one of the most important buildings in the history of downtown Minneapolis. If you put aesthetics aside and account for overall impact, I’d rank it in the top five below famously epic towers like the IDS Center and Foshay. When it was built in 1962, and again in 2024 with its contemporary office-to-residential remodel, the gray building represents a turning point in downtown’s trajectory.

A history lesson

When construction began in 1961, the Northstar Center was billed as a transformational project. Built by Leslie Park and Edward Baker, businessmen who owned several key downtown properties, the new complex included unprecedented architectural details. The main feature of the project was its all-encompassing scale, with an internal pedestrian network that moved office traffic off of Minneapolis sidewalks and into a maze of skyways and food courts. Then and now, for some people, this was seen as a great innovation. When the building’s two original skyways were christened, it marked the beginning of the Minneapolis interior skyway system, now the largest of its kind in the world.

One of Northstar Center’s key features was a 1,000-vehicle parking ramp occupying a significant part of the building. It was so large as to be ungainly — one ad stated it offered “six floors and ten acres of parking space” —  and the office-tower section of the building sits on a windowless podium of car storage, an unfortunate mid-century architectural trend.

(As was par for the course at the time, an eight-foot-tall model of the building was put in the lobby, built by a “St. Paul housewife” named Frances Macklin, who had started her own architectural modeling business out of her home and spent over 500 hours on the project.)

When it opened, the developer put out a multi-page full-color ad supplement in the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune touting its arrival:

“Downtown Minneapolis, bursting out of its midwestern seams, is rapidly gaining the atmosphere and reputation of a dynamic metropolis [thanks to] a unique experiment in downtown revival. Today city planners from all over the world — using what is happening in Minneapolis as a guide — are taking a closer look at their own cities. The result could mean a rebirth of downtowns all over the United States… The $25 million superblock [is] an entirely new concept for concentrated business districts… a city-within-a-city that offers a complete spectrum of business, dining, lodging, entertainment, parking and service facilities — something for everyone — with the conveniences of everything tied together under one roof.”

Inside the Northstar complex was a “motel,” two office towers (Cargill was one tenant), a swimming pool, limo service to the airport, a cocktail lounge sporting “purple-tinged East India Rosewood decor,” interior “arcades” full of shops including a tailor, post office, and dozens of others, a drive-thru bank branch, and a central cafeteria with a live organist. 

The big innovation, though, was self-containment. Fitting with the suburban zeitgeist, the new model in the 1960s was enclosure and isolation. Forced to compete with the lure of suburban office parks and shopping malls like the then-brand-new ‘dales, Northstar Center offered a retreat from city streets and the old downtown life. Instead, a “city within a city” attracted the discerning suburbanite with connected buildings that made it possible to come downtown without leaving your modern confines. 

“I’ve been all over downtown today without ever having my topcoat on…” said O. Harold Swanson, VP of Baker Properties, quoted in the Minneapolis Tribune and describing the brand-new skyways. In much of the 60s ad copy, avoidance of the outside world was a prime attraction, and in that respect, the Northstar Center was the first of its kind. The building complex paved the way for the rest of the megaprojects, like the IDS tower next door that truly redefined downtown Minneapolis.

Deserted streets

That was then. By the time the 21st Century rolled around, many downtown leaders had begun to realize that isolation was not the way to go, that cities thrived on street life and connection between diverse around-the-clock places. Instead of feeding traffic to Nicollet Mall and the downtown streets, the success of the skyway system came at the expense of the streets, leaving them seeming deserted and unwelcome. As a result, the recent pivot toward emphasizing street life and neighborhood connection has an uphill battle when faced with the architectural challenges of the interior “superblocks” like the Northstar Center and its descendants. 

While the architectural legacy of the Northstar Center and the city’s now-gargantuan skyway network remains, the Northstar Center is redefining downtown for a second time as the first major office-to-residential conversion in the downtown core. Faced with the need for housing and the abandonment of offices, development company Sherman Associates has converted multiple floors of cubicles into 215 market-rate apartments, while the rest of the parking and office complex was remodeled into over 300,000 square feet of class A office space by Polaris Properties.

The new building opens to the public on Tuesday, and they’re bringing back some pomp from its debut, 61 years ago. The old rosewood lounge is now a reservable event space, the café is back (though without the organist), and the second-floor “arcade” shops have been transformed into mid-century dioramas depicting a bygone era. At the very least, it’s a creative reuse of space. It’s the kind of project that, if downtown Minneapolis is to thrive again, needs to rapidly become a trend.

It’s curious that the same building would play such a role in a large downtown area, both as the harbinger of modernist urban architecture and the first example of its “repurposing.” Then and now downtown was in a crisis moment. In the late 1950s, the emergency stemmed from sweeping changes brought by the automobile and its subsidized suburban landscape, where tax breaks, government mortgages and free flow of highway funds devastated the old patterns of city life.

Today the COVID pandemic has had a similar impact, making skyscrapers seemingly obsolete overnight. The old model changed so rapidly that long-term plans and long-term leases have only begun to register the tectonic shift in commuting and office demand. The downtown of 2024 barely resembles the landscape of 60 years earlier, when streets were full of shoppers and the life of the entire metro seemingly revolved around the downtown core. These days, the central business district is just another neighborhood, and a centrally located one with a massive amount of underused space. 

Unlike the turn inward to skyways, deserted streets, and self-containment, this time around the Northstar Center is headed in a more urban direction, bringing everyday people into the very heart of downtown to live. The one commonality is that, once again, the Northstar Center is leading the way.

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

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