Design: Urban Renewal

Despite a checkered past, the Ford Center is poised to breathe new life into the North Loop.

HGA’s rendering of an upgraded Ford Center.

Image credit: Courtesy HGA

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By: Phillip Koski |   December 2011   |  From the print edition

When Target Field opened two years ago, the historic brick and concrete warehouses of Minneapolis’s North Loop gained renewed prominence, thanks largely to Twins fans looking for street parking or a reasonably priced pre-game beer. But the Ford Center, the 10-story, red-bricked behemoth kitty-corner from third base, is likely the biggest winner in the “build a stadium and see what happens to property values” sweepstakes.

In a recession that has crushed demand for new housing and office space, construction crews continue to work their way through the North Loop, transforming industrial properties into vibrant urban amenities. Once a lonely, towering figure perched above a massive railway trench, the Ford Center now finds itself in the middle of the action.

Thanks largely to the Historic Preservation Tax Credit law passed by the state in 2010 (which makes rehabilitating old buildings more profitable than tearing them down), the Ford Center is undergoing a transformation that will polish its tired exterior and modernize its vast interior space to accommodate top-tier tenants culled from the city’s sizeable creative class. Already committed are long-term tenant and upscale cleaning-product maker Caldrea, award-winning architecture firm (and author of the renovation work) HGA and skyrocketing “brand connection agency” (a.k.a., ad firm) Olson, which will occupy the top four floors. The last stop of the Northstar commuter rail line lies just feet to the east, and planning has already begun to create a commuter plaza on the south side serving the Hiawatha line and three other future light rail lines.

Constructed in 1914 by the Ford Motor Company using a design by local architects Kees and Colburn, the building was one of the first (and last) purpose-built vertical assembly plants for the Model T. Dressed in anonymous, smooth red brick and decorated with spare bands of cream-colored terra cotta, the building’s signature feature is its industrial steel windows—needed not for views, but to bring daylight into the inner bays of the assembly floor (while electric light was common in buildings of the day, Ford kept costs down by using the sun for free).

The century-old building’s history casts an ironic shadow over its current status as the center of a transit-oriented, redevelopment renaissance. Ford’s Model T was arguably both the iPod and iPhone of its age (on Monday nobody needed one; by Tuesday nobody could live without one). Funny how a century later this landmark building, which built the cars that eventually killed the streetcar system, would have a front-seat view to the resurgence of mass transit.

Also funny—if you like that kind of humor—is how outdated the building was upon its completion. As Henry Ford pushed his empire outward from Detroit, he established manufacturing plants in other urban centers. At the Minneapolis plant trains would drop parts; workers at the top floor would drop the product down floor by floor as parts were added. As efficient as this system was, Ford was perfecting a newer method of production—the continuous, horizontal assembly line. By 1914, Ford’s sprawling, single-story plant in Highland Park, Mich. was constructing a car in about 90 minutes, whereas earlier methods—like those used at the Minneapolis plant—took more than 12 hours.

“By the time they finished building the Minneapolis Ford plant, it was already obsolete,” explains Elizabeth Gayles, an architectural historian with local consulting firm Hess Roise. “But, they were stuck with it.”

Stuck, that is, until politically savvy Ford secured tracts of farmland in St. Paul’s Highland neighborhood, convinced both cities to build a bridge to get workers across the Mississippi and snatched up the water-power rights at nearby Lock and Dam #1 before either mayor knew what hit him. The Highland plant, based on the new assembly method, opened in 1924 as operations at the Minneapolis plant were shut down and the building put up for sale, standing vacant until Honeywell picked it up in the early 1940s. More recently, the Ford Center had been subdivided into small lease spaces for artists, designers and business startups drawn to cheap rent and able to look past inconveniences like unreliable elevator service, lack of air conditioning and broken windows.

But that era too will soon be history, with renovation work to be completed and new tenants moved in by early 2012. The Ford Center is humming again, but this time with the creative energy and drive for innovation that the New Economy demands for success. It’s a testament to the idea that a simple, well-constructed building can thrive despite the vagaries of the marketplace, politics and technology. Not bad for a factory that was obsolete on opening day.