American downtowns vividly illustrate the impermanence of architecture.
In the Twin Cities, thousands of downtown buildings have come and gone over the years, some of them leading only the briefest of architectural lives. To be sure, there are Methuselahs such as the 131-year-old Lumber Exchange in Minneapolis and the 128-year-old Pioneer Building in St. Paul, but they fall into the realm of notable exceptions.
The average life span of downtown buildings in the Twin Cities is probably 50 years, which is about what it is in other American cities. In Chicago, described by one writer as "arguably the world capital of architectural obsolescence," a study found that the mean age of downtown office buildings demolished from 1900 to 1930 was 32 years.
As downtown buildings have grown ever larger and higher, however, they may have ensured themselves longer lives than their predecessors. Huge downtown skyscrapers won't last forever, but tearing them down is costly and complicated, and I'd be willing to bet that a building such as the IDS Center may well be around for a century or more.
The rapid churn of downtown buildings has been going on for a very long time.
Take the case of the lovely little First National Bank Building constructed in 1906 at 5th Street and Marquette Avenue in Minneapolis. It was a well-ornamented classical design featuring stone walls, a columned portico, large ground-floor windows with distinctive circular windows above, and a decorative fence along the sidewalk. Within, there was a handsome skylit banking hall.
The bank certainly looked as if it might be around for a while. In fact, it stood for only eight years before being demolished to make way for the much larger First National Bank-Soo Line Building (now Soo Line City Apartments). Why the bank fell to the wrecker so quickly isn't known, but it may simply have been a "placeholder," designed to occupy the corner until First National could erect something much larger on the site.
Other short-lived downtown buildings come under the category of failed projects. One barely remembered building of this kind was the 13-story Radisson Center on 7th Street, where the Marriott City Center Hotel now stands. Built in 1969, Radisson Center was a merchandise mart linked by skyway to the Radisson Hotel across the street. The building, however, never flourished, and it was gone by 1981, giving it the shortest life of any tall building in the history of Minneapolis.
Perhaps the best known modern example of a here-today, gone-tomorrow downtown building is the Conservatory, a shopping mall completed in 1987 on Nicollet Mall between 8th and 9th streets. Luxuriously finished in the best postmodern style of the time, the project incorporated the fronts of two historic buildings into its glassy, block-long facade. But its peculiar layout never worked, and the project turned out to be a colossal failure. The end came in 1998, just 11 years after the complex's grand opening. U.S. Bancorp Center, built in 2000, now occupies the site.
Outside the downtown core, great mansions have proved to be particularly prone to early demise. James J. Hill's first mansion, in St. Paul's Lowertown area, stood for a mere 11 years before being razed in 1891. It was torn down after Hill built a decidedly larger home, now a National Historic Landmark, on Summit Avenue.
Across the street on Summit, Norman Kittson in 1884 built what was then the largest mansion in the city, a towering French Second Empire pile that promised to stand for the ages. But after Kittson died in 1888, the mansion lost its mojo and became an outsized boardinghouse. Then, Archbishop John Ireland found its site perfect for a little building project he had in mind, and by 1906 Kittson's mighty mansion was gone, replaced by the Cathedral of St. Paul.
Even more spectacularly ephemeral was the Charles G. Gates house, completed in 1914 at 2501 E. Lake of the Isles Pkwy. Gates was a millionaire playboy who met and married a Minneapolis woman and decided to make their home in the city. The home he had in mind turned out to be a four-story, 38,000-square-foot Renaissance Revival mansion, to this day the biggest ever built in Minneapolis.
Gates, poor fellow, never enjoyed his over-the-top dream home. He died in 1913 of a heart attack at age 37 while hunting in Wyoming.
His young widow, Florence Hopwood Gates, decided to finish the vast mansion, but did not find it a comfortable place. She eventually remarried and moved out, selling the house in 1923 for a mere $150,000 to Dwight F. Brooks of St. Paul. Brooks never lived in the house, instead treating it as a lavish toy he could show off to friends.
After Brooks' death in 1930, and with the Great Depression deepening by the month, no one could be found to buy the house and take on the enormous cost of maintaining it. Three years later, the mansion was wrecked, having survived only 19 years.
Larry Millett is an architecture critic and author of 14 nonfiction books and eight mystery novels. He can be reached at larrymillett.com.
