Dayton’s Saved by the Tax Credits

Here are a few of the jigsaw puzzle pieces I’ve been able to gather about the journey of the vacant Dayton’s Department Store (as it was and always will be) from 2017 to it’s grand but still not entirely completed reopening on Thursday November 18, 2021.

This was hastily researched so many pieces are missing.
Brian Whiting of the Telos Group has been omnipresent in all the media coverage as an energetic, intelligent guide to the Dayton’s project, as visible as the mysterious owners, the 601w Companies have been invisible.

And there too, the impressarioess Mich Berthiaume in charge of conjuring what was uniquely Minnesotan and resonantly nostalgic about Dayton’s.

Some will remember that when Macy’s closed “Dayton’s” the vacant store was the focus of anxious speculation about its future. It had no local or national historic designations.

Two New York based companies became involved, the 601w cos. and Telos Company, The plans published in the local press revealed most interior elements removed. The interior design was disconcertingly modern, rather like a hybrid of a shopping mall and an industrial warehouse with its core structure removed.

Many feared the elegant J.B. Hudson space with its marble surfaces and wrought iron grilles, the magnificent chandeliers, the richly wood paneled Oak Room, the fabulous jet stream curves and atmospheric blue of the Sky Room and the bold color and art deco flourish of the ladies rest rooms would be demolished and hurled into dumpsters.

So the deconstruction and reconstruction of the Dayton’s Project began. All the details of what what was undone and redone would be fascinating to discover.
As the project proceeded, it proved to be more challenging than they thought. But this group had worked on other old buildings and continued to move forward.

At some point Meghan Elliot and her company New History became involved. The Dayton’s building had neither local nor national historic designations. A listing on the National Register would bring it an
incredible 20% of the reno costs in Federal and State tax credits.

The Dayton’s department store was listed on the National Register on July 17, 2019.
Ah 2019 that transition between the “before times” and the “after times” when COVID emerged and changed the course of everything.

So as articles appeared in the press with the puzzle pieces of the seemingly endless saga of when the Dayton’s project would reopen…

COVID swung its scythe and scattered everyone, no foodhalls, no restaurants, no tantalizing tours. Office buildings emptied as many workers went home to work. The office tenants The Dayton’s Project needed to survive did not arrive.

Announcements appeared and vanished about the potential opening. Cycles of anticipation and disappointment repeated.

Meanwhile the architects of the project produced plans for a multi-floor atrium that would vastly “open up” the core of the building. The architects of the National Park Service objected. All progress ceased as the commercial and historical architects battled.

With 20% in tax credits on the line, I assume a compromise was reached.
Meanwhile, the MN state tax credits were about to expire in the spring of 2021 and the legislature, focused on many other issues, seemed unlikely to renew them. But at the last moment of a special session, the tax credits were renewed!

COVID took the stage again to threaten the project… with few if any tenants signed on and the food hall and restaurants still on hold, the investment company that held the mortgage for the Dayton’s building decided to foreclose. They were going to take Dayton’s and auction everything off in August 2021! (boo! hiss! the scoundrels!!!)

But then something happened….something that will have a particular poignancy to everyone who has ever fought to save a historic building from destruction.

The case to save the Dayton’s building went to Hennepin County District Court. All the players were there. The good guys and the bad guys and the historians…who are sometimes both.

A temporary restraining order preventing the foreclosure and auction of the Dayton’s building was requested. The City of Minneapolis joined the case and filed a legal brief citing the historic importance of the building to our City.

On August 10, 2021 Judge Susan Burke issued the temporary restraining order just two weeks before the Dayton’s building foreclosure and auction.

601w Companies were required to put up a $10 million dollar bond to secure their rights to the building.
What happened after this is a story for an intrepid journalist to tell and I hope they do.

At some point a tenant, Ernst & Young signed a lease and moved in. Let’s hope others join them soon.
Aware that the public had been waiting years for a grand opening and also aware that they had little to enchant and attract the public….

They hired impressarioess Mich Berthiaume to do her magic.
She brought in the artisans of the Maker’s Market from the Superbowl and summertime Nicollet Mall farmer’s markets. She knew the opening would happen a certain time of year, a time when so many of us of a certain age remember going downtown after Thanksgiving dinner to see all the wonderous Christmas decorations behind the majestic plate glass windows with the animated figures, lights, sparkle, music and magic.

And so she summoned the Santa bear collectors, and a retired designer of the Dayton’s holiday windows and found the fellow who rescued and was restoring the animated figures from the 8th floor auditorium’s Christmas wonderlands.

And so it was, that the Dayton’s Project opened on Thursday Nov 18, 2021, with just enough of what everyone anticipated with hopefully more to come.

Amid all the speeches and show and excitement, I believe the historians were there. The determined guardian angels of the historic Daytons’ past and present. Perhaps they shared a cup of sparkling cheer as they toasted their victory.

The Dayton’s project is the largest project in Minnesota
History to use federal and state historic building rehabilitation tax credits!

#Daytons #Dayton’s #TheDaytonsProject #historictaxcredits

Another Loss

“On December 18, 1961 [February 2018, 100 years after the women who founded the Handicraft Guild closed the school] wrecking trucks rumbled through the streets of downtown Minneapolis toward a rendezvous with the past. [10th and Marquette] Their destination was the corner of Third Street and Second Avenue South,[9th, 10th and Marquette] where for seventy-one years [111 and 104 years] the Metropolitan Building [Handicraft Guild] (originally known as the Northwestern Guaranty Loan Building) had towered above its neighbors like a “small red mountain.” But with Minneapolis in the midst of the greatest urban renewal project in its history, the Metropolitan [the Handicraft Guild] was about to come down, a victim of age, politics and ideology. [greed,lies and corruption]

Once, it had been the pride of the city, the building that more than any other announced to the world that Minneapolis had come of age. [The ONLY Handicraft Guild built specifically for women in the U.S.] “Here there has been erected…the most magnificent office building in the whole, round world.” gushed the Minneapolis Journal when the great sandstone structure opened on May 31, 1890….visitors strolled along the building’s glass floors (which occassioned some fright), toured its four hundred shops and offices, and fought off vertigo to gaze across the central light court—a twelve-story-high fantasy in glass and iron that was among the greatest spaces of its kind ever built in America…[Built for women artists and educators by master architects. Has skylights, tile by Ernest Batchelder, incredible woodwork and a Guild Hall.]

By the early 1950s, [2013 – present] however, the Metropolitan no longer seemed so grand a place, in part because of the company it kept…The Gateway was in desperate need of redevelopment. [deliberate demolition by neglect] But the solution chosen by the city was an extreme one—total destruction [total destruction]…All told, nearly two hundred buildings spread over seventeen square blocks were demolished. This amounted to 40 percent of the city’s historic central business district. [historic=obstacle to progess] The Metropolitan was among the last buildings in the Gateway to fall, and it did not go down without a fight. [the Handicraft Guild won’t go gentle into its destruction]

A loose coalition of architects, historians, and people who simply loved the building did their best to keep it standing. Their efforts proved fruitless. [developers get everything they want] Despite the building’ s architectural and historical significance, it had few friends in high places, and the temper of the times was against it. [Sacrificed on the altar of “re-election” and Corruption, Greed, Hypocrisy, Indifference]

Several years earlier, a prominent academic historian, displaying the bias of the era, had written that “perhaps no single building by a Minneapolis architect is worthy of measurement or preservation.” Such thinking was endemic in the 1950s and 1960s,[2013-present] when old buildings generally were viewed as aesthetic embarrassments, worthless relics cluttering the road to progress. An attorney for the Minneapolis Housing and Redevelopment Authority called the Metropolitan “a monstrosity in the eyes of most observers.” [The same load will be shoveled this time]

The Minnesota Supreme Court, in an opinion permitting destruction
of the building. was equally unsympathetic. Allowing the Metropolitan to stand, the court said, “would have an unfavorable effect upon the value of surrounding property.” Other arguments against the building—that it was too old, too dangerous (because of the threat of fire spreading up through the light court), and too poorly designed for modern use—[lies}could all have been answered a decade later when historic renovation became commonplace. [The Court is controlled by those with the most money and power.]

The day before the wrecking crews arrived, a newspaper reporter interviewed fifty-eight-year old Wally Marotzke, who for twenty years had been the building’s engineer. ” I’m not gonna watch ’em rip it down,” Marotzke told the reporter. “I don’t think I could. But I’ll tell you one thing. The future generations are gonna read about this building and they’ll see some of the buildings they’re putting up here [utter cloned crap] and they’ll DAMN US, they will, for tearing down the Met the[Handicraft Guild].”

-Larry Millett-Lost Twin Cities [words in brackets are not LM’s]

Preservation Warriors pt2

one

two

three

trendhypepoof

Ridiculous

They owned it for years, did nothing to it except inadequately protect it from inevitable arson, and now this ridiculously impossible nonsense that will never happen. Just effing wreck it already like you wrecked everything else here.

Farkitecture Follies pt5

The man who will wreck the Handicraft Guild.

cityclub

Farkitecture Follies pt4

3 Minneapolis City Council Persons

Farkitecture Follies pt3

 

JoEllen Haugo…librarian…historian and absolutely right!  DESTROYING WOMENS HISTORY.

There will be more to say on this much more.

Womens

Preservation Warriors

And now for a little break in the Fark awards…an infusion of heroism, activism and integrity…standing up and speaking out…confronting the corrupt, speaking truth to evil, resisting the criminal….from the fight to save Brenda Ueland’s House…Anders Christensen

Speaking Truth to Evil

Farkitecture Follies pt2

To blatantly plagarize, from the Preservation Alliances 2008 Ten Most Endangered
Historic buildings:

Oakland Apartments,
Minneapolis

The Oakland Apartments is a three-story, red limestone and brick residential building located on the east edge of downtown Minneapolis at 213-215 South Ninth Street. Designed by Minneapolis architect Harry Wild Jones in 1888, the building is an excellent example of the Richardsonian Romanesque style. The building also stands as a rare remnant of the nineteenth-century residences that once spread across the south and east sides of downtown Minneapolis. In spite of its significant historic integrity and connection to the renowned local architect, Harry Wild Jones, the Oakland Apartments is not locally or nationally designated as a historic landmark.
Originally surrounded by similar residential structures, the Oakland Apartments is now one of only two buildings on its block, isolated among surface parking lots. The building is vulnerable to future development, which could claim the entire block. Because the Oakland Apartments is not historically designated, demolition of the building could go unnoticed and unchallenged. Advocates of the building are working to obtain local historic designation for the structure. However, the nomination will need significant public support to convince the Minneapolis City Council to approve designation of the building over any objections from the owners. If preserved, the historic apartment building could serve as the centerpiece of a residential or mixed-use development of the type and scale of similar recent developments in the nearby Elliot Park neighborhood, which have served to revitalize the area.
Action Steps:
• Contact your City Council member to support moving forward with a local historic designation study for the Oakland Apartments.
• Attend the June 14, 2008, debut of Harry Wild Jones, American Architect, at the Hennepin History Museum (www.hennepinhistory.org). Voice your interest in the formation of the Harry Wild Jones Society, a local group interested in the identification and promotion of Jones’ designs.

Needless to say there was no historic designation. The Oakland apartments remained neglected. The urban poor who lived there were exploited by an owner whose family
built clone plan housing ticky tacky in the far flung fourth ring suburbs.

After the major fire in September 2016, everyone was evicted, the suburban
owner decided to write it off as a loss, the brownstone was boarded and abandoned. It will be wrecked any day now. But who knows when since
the City swarm decided the once public wrecking permit information is
now deliberately with-held from the pesky public.

A building it is attached to (the Seton Guild) a purveyor of legal marijuana,
ponders its own unsettled fate. The journalists rather than calling for
the building’s restoration speculate about large scale developments.
More More More.

Farkitecture Follies award #2
Greedy suburban slumvestors who exploit historic buildings and discard their tenants
City employees and officials who think “good riddance let’s rake in the bribes for another megamonstrosity, and a “Preservation Alliance” too cowardly and too covetous of corporate money to publish an Endangered list anymore.

Farkitecture Follies pt 1

Arbitrary

Saint Anthony Falls, a sacred site for the Dakotah and Ojibwe..where the City of Minneapolis was founded. The river, the falls, a wild and powerful beauty. The flour and lumber industries took their energy from the river. Citizens and historians created guidelines to protect the historic district. Yet Developers built apartment towers and others plan to over-run the district with more apartments and condos, destroying the historic buildings, poisoning and controlling the power of nature, disregarding and dishonoring the sacred.
In their determination to acquire, conquer and destroy, they have a corrupt ambitious partner who has rewritten laws, removed obstacles, made backroom deals and accepted campaign contributions. He has declared that he will make his own history by destroying ours. A group of citizens has filed suit to stop the tower that will set in motion more engines of destruction.
They have fought but they will loose. The justice system is as broken and corrupt as the process at City Hall.

Farkitecture Follies award 1: The Arbitrary and Capricious corruption and prostitution of the public self serve ants at Minneapolis City Hall.