Take a guided photo tour of Minneapolis in 1907
Old photographs help understand what life used to be like. But a few — a select few — are so captivating that they transport us into the past. Boot up the time machine: We’re headed to 1907. September 1907, specifically, when photographers climbed atop City Hall to take a series of pictures of downtown Minneapolis that would ultimately require 21st-century technology to be fully appreciated.
Now the images can be uploaded at high resolution and stitched into one panorama — like you'll see below — allowing viewers to zoom from the skyline to intimate details. This is perhaps the most tantalizing slice-of-life picture of our bygone city.
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Zoom Out “It reveals things that essentially nobody ever saw before, because nobody would look at it in that way,” said Mike Evangelist, a historic-photo enthusiast who created a version of the panorama. “It’s so immersive.”
Most photos of this magnitude were commissioned to celebrate the completion of a building, or capture a postcard view. This panorama didn’t cater to a client. It didn’t aim for a flattering angle. It simply recorded the world as it was.
When the light hit the plate that day in 1907, it engraved unvarnished details no one ever thought to capture, because they seemed unimportant — laundry drying on a rooftop, men mingling outside a bar, horses lined up in a stable.
The photographers captured all that detail because they shot the images with a large-format camera onto 8-by-10-inch glass negatives. Compare that with the 35 millimeter (1.3 inch) negatives that became prevalent later in the 20th century. The lens of the camera also could be tilted so both far and near objects were in focus.
The photograph was made by the Detroit Publishing Co., a photographic powerhouse of the era that earned its reputation by shooting postcards and panoramas of scenes across America.
“They were selling those panoramas to anybody who wanted it,” said Cynthia Read Miller, a former curator at the Henry Ford Museum, which once owned the glass negatives and still maintains a large Detroit Publishing collection. “I’m sure they locally were trying to sell it to the city of Minneapolis.”
It is unclear if this panorama was widely viewed again before the 10 glass negatives were digitized by the Library of Congress. There is no record of it being reproduced or displayed.
The city had several utility companies in 1907. Consolidation wouldn’t begin until 1909, when H.M. Byllesby, an apprentice of Thomas Edison, would begin to buy up companies to form the firm later known as NSP. There were few utility poles in downtown, however. The lines had been run under the street at the end of the 19th century. But some buildings were connected by wires that ran from rooftop to rooftop, draped on sawhorses.
The Burlington Route railway was one of the country’s largest. At the time this ad was created, James J. Hill’s Great Northern railway was one of its owners, along with the Northern Pacific. Two popular destinations are noted in the ad: Chicago and St. Louis, which could be reached on the Bee Line. The original name survives in the BNSF Railway (Burlington-Northern-Santa-Fe).
In 1907, a Donaldsons addition — the city’s tallest retail structure — was almost complete. It was on the other end of the block from Donaldsons’ gleaming white Glass Block, whose alabaster dome can be seen in the panorama, to the right. (The dome would be removed during World War II, and the metal used for the war effort.)
The bank opened just months before this photo was taken. Considered the best equipped bank in the city at the time, thousands came to marvel at its interior, which was decorated in a cream-and-gold scheme. Despite its lavish look, the bank didn’t last. It was demolished in 1914 to make way for the First National Soo Line Building, making it “perhaps the shortest-lived bank in Twin Cities history,” according to the book “Twin Cities: Then and Now.”
The Panorama Building went up in 1886 and instantly drew crowds with a massive 360-degree panorama showing the Civil War’s Battle of Atlanta. “The spectator does not see walls of canvas and paint, but seems actually to gaze for miles in every direction upon an animated landscape,” the Minneapolis Tribune reported. By 1907, the building no longer housed a panorama. It was a furniture showroom, which it remained until the 1920s.
The marquee of the Bijou, at 20 Washington Av. N., helped date this panorama. The play, “A Fighting Chance,” was on stage in September 1907. The reviewer for the Minneapolis Morning Tribune did not approve of the production, which included a fake marriage, prison breaks and a bloody shootout. The theater remained open until 1959, and was razed the next year.
Luxe lodging arrived when the West Hotel opened in 1884. Its famously large and opulent lobby became a gathering place for local boldface names and visiting celebs of the era, including Mark Twain and a young Winston Churchill. The distinctive brick-and-marble striping on its lower floors makes it easy to spot in old photos. In 1907, that exterior appears marred by soot from coal smoke.
Why is there a statue of a man on top of this building? We don’t know the answer, but we do know the building — it’s the Palace Clothiers. It was the second location for Maurice Rothschild’s store. Rothschild was building a new eight-story headquarters next to the Palace. It’s almost finished in this photo. Both buildings were demolished in 1960 for the Sheraton-Ritz Hotel.
Soot may have obscured the 1894 nameplate carving, but this was indeed Minneapolis’ grand Metropolitan Opera house. The Romanesque Revival theater was designed by a local architect who specialized in entertainment venues, including a few brothels. “In its heyday the Metropolitan was the center of theater activity in the northwest,” the Minneapolis Star reported in 1937, the year the building was demolished.
The Church of the Immaculate Conception, built in 1868, was home to the city’s Catholics, who were raising money for much grander future digs, the Basilica of St. Mary. (The Basilica opened in 1914.) The peculiar structure in the 3rd Street roadway is an “underway” passage leading to the freight houses and tracks below street level, according to architectural historian Larry Millett. The underway remained until at least the 1970s.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art has a painting called “On a Roof Garden,” by W.A. Rogers. It depicts swells enjoying drinks on a roof garden, high above the noisy world. It’s not just any old roof garden, it’s the Metropolitan Building (aka Northwestern Guaranty Loan Building), the enormous office building whose demolition in 1961 is still lamented. Newspaper accounts of the building’s opening day in 1890 reference the roof garden, so we know Rogers’ tableau wasn’t fanciful.
When built in 1873, the old City Hall was in the Gateway District, then the center of commercial activity. Minneapolis had joined with St. Anthony the previous year, and needed a place to consolidate its management. City Hall was a slender structure, just four stories tall, but still had room for a post office and the Minneapolis Tribune. The distinctive mansard roof was a hallmark of the Second Empire Style, which we associate today with haunted houses. It was demolished in 1912.
Real estate developer Edmund Walton foretold the city’s population reaching 400,000 by 1910 on this sign. He missed the mark by 100,000, although the city had grown a whopping 48% when it barely passed 300,000 people in the 1910 census. That would happen to be the same year Walton wrote the first racial covenant into a deed in the city, blocking homeowners from selling their property to members of minority groups, according to researchers at the Mapping Prejudice project.
This sales pitch for cigars came from a speech by Henry George, a liberal economist who ran for mayor of New York City in the 1890s. The union ally briefly silenced the crowd when he said he wouldn’t do special favors for “the laboring man.” “I am for men,” George said. “The equal rights of all men. Let us be done with asking privileges for the laboring man.” The crowd went wild. But he never became mayor. He died hours after the speech.
Before it was leveled to make way for parkland, Nicollet Island was densely packed with commercial and industrial buildings. A sliver of the building called the William Bros. Boiler Works lives on as Nicollet Island Pavilion. Another building nearby became Nicollet Island Inn. The Minnesota Bee-Supply Co., shown in the photo, is what you might expect. An ad from the time says it sold “everything used by beekeepers.”
The painted ad for a cheroot bears the name of Anna Held, an actress and singer who was famous for singing racy songs and revealing her legs on stage. When she died in 1918, Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about her. Her longtime partner was the famous impresario Flo Ziegfeld, but the two never married. Flo went on to marry Billie Burke, the actress who played Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, in “The Wizard of Oz.”
Local photo enthusiast Mike Evangelist, who connected the images and shared a version of panorama a few years ago, spotted this detail in a building near the river. Those are the rear ends of horses lined up at Harwood Manufacturing Company’s livery stable. Harwood made barrels and later sacks for the city’s flour industry. The building, which now houses offices, was recently rebranded as the Barrel House.
The center was the city’s attempt to outdo the State Fair. Its first expo featured fine art and what was then high-tech industry — brickmaking and milling machines. The Grand Old Party nominated President Benjamin Harrison for re-election here in the 1892 Republican National Convention. In 1903, the building was taken over by International Stock Foods Co., run by Marion Savage, who owned one of the era’s most famous racehorses — Dan Patch
Designed by the local firm of Long & Kees, the 1885 Corn Exchange was torn down in 1965. It wasn’t as showy as the firm’s riotously ornamented Masonic Temple on Hennepin Avenue (now known as the Hennepin Center for the Arts), but the exchange had a sober dignity.
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“It reveals things that essentially nobody ever saw before, because nobody would look at it in that way,” said Mike Evangelist, a historic-photo enthusiast who created a version of the panorama. “It’s so immersive.”
Most photos of this magnitude were commissioned to celebrate the completion of a building, or capture a postcard view. This panorama didn’t cater to a client. It didn’t aim for a flattering angle. It simply recorded the world as it was.
When the light hit the plate that day in 1907, it engraved unvarnished details no one ever thought to capture, because they seemed unimportant — laundry drying on a rooftop, men mingling outside a bar, horses lined up in a stable.
The photographers captured all that detail because they shot the images with a large-format camera onto 8-by-10-inch glass negatives. Compare that with the 35 millimeter (1.3 inch) negatives that became prevalent later in the 20th century. The lens of the camera also could be tilted so both far and near objects were in focus.
The photograph was made by the Detroit Publishing Co., a photographic powerhouse of the era that earned its reputation by shooting postcards and panoramas of scenes across America.
“They were selling those panoramas to anybody who wanted it,” said Cynthia Read Miller, a former curator at the Henry Ford Museum, which once owned the glass negatives and still maintains a large Detroit Publishing collection. “I’m sure they locally were trying to sell it to the city of Minneapolis.”
It is unclear if this panorama was widely viewed again before the 10 glass negatives were digitized by the Library of Congress. There is no record of it being reproduced or displayed.