Brick warehouses from the 1880s and 1890s surround you here in the Warehouse District, built to hold goods arriving by rail from the flour mills, lumber camps, and farms of the Upper Midwest. This was the commercial engine room of Minneapolis at its most powerful — a city that processed the raw materials of a continent and shipped them east. The warehouse district uses the Romanesque Revival architecture pioneered by H.H. Richardson in Boston, with heavy stone arches at the entrances, broad windows to let in light, and thick masonry walls that have survived 130 years of Minnesota winters without complaint.
By the mid-twentieth century these buildings had mostly been abandoned as warehousing moved to cheaper land near the interstates. Beginning in the late 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s, developers converted them to lofts, restaurants, bars, and offices. The warehouse district became Minneapolis's first serious experiment in urban loft living, and it worked.
Tonight this neighborhood will be full of people — dinner, bars, clubs in basement spaces under those thick brick arches. But the bones of the buildings are 1880s Minneapolis, and they are magnificent.