Balto Building, 2550 Pillsbury Avenue South
Guest post from our hard working volunteer Nick:
A few blocks from my house in Whittier there’s a strange looking building I’ve always wondered about. It looks nothing like the rest of the neighborhood’s turn-of-the-century houses and apartment buildings — it has the blocky look of an old office or industrial building, though it does appear to be a residence today. I decided to do a little digging through Special Collections to see if I could figure out what exactly this odd looking building originally was and what it is today.
According to the building permit cards in Special Collections, the structure was originally built in 1901 as a telephone exchange for the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company. The Minnesota Historical Society has a picture from 1926 listing it as the Dykewater Exchange. In 1935, the building was renovated into an office building for the Minnesota Commercial Men’s Association. The City of Minneapolis directory from that year lists them as an insurance broker. You can still faintly see the lettering bearing their name in the marble above the building’s front door.
The building was again renovated into a multiple office building in 1941 by the architectural firm Liebenberg & Kaplan. That firm is perhaps best known as the architect behind many of Minneapolis’s great theaters from the late 1920s and 1930s such as the Uptown, the Varsity, and the Granada (now called the Suburban World). Liebenberg & Kaplan also designed the Temple Israel synagogue located just off 24th and Hennepin Ave. in South Minneapolis.
From the 1940s through the 1970s, the building functioned as an office for the Minnesota Commercial Men’s Association and later a different insurance brokerage called the American Benefit Association. During the 1980s and 1990s it changed hands several times, functioning briefly as a women’s center and more recently as a residential building. Today the building is a private residence owned by Greg Martin, owner of the Urban Bean coffee shops in south Minneapolis. In April 2007, an article was published in dwell magazine about Martin’s experience renovating the building and includes a slideshow of photos showing the interior of the building today.
