[Editor’s note: This article first appeared online via the Star Tribune on October 22. It has been reprinted with permission of the author.]
What’s the most intriguing new constructing within the Twin Cities?
Not The Eleven, the predictably elegant, gleaming white apartment constructing towering over the Minneapolis riverfront close to Gold Medal Park. Not the glassy 4 Seasons rising on Hennepin Avenue close to the Central Library, although it guarantees to be a dynamic downtown presence. And positively not any of the scores of predictably designed mid-rise condo buildings proliferating in downtown and Uptown.
It’s the Water Works Park and Pavilion in Mill Ruins Park.
Don’t really feel dangerous in the event you don’t know the place Water Works Park is. It’s Minneapolis’ latest park area on its most historic spot. It actually rises out of ruins of riverfront mills that fueled town’s rise within the late 19th and early 20th centuries—the place Fuji-Ya Restaurant as soon as stood, throughout from the Stone Arch Bridge. The pavilion gives much-needed facilities—locations to take a seat, meet, public restrooms (!) in addition to being residence to Minnesota’s first Native American restaurant, Owamni.
The presence of Owamni (Dakota for “place of swirling waters”) is especially becoming. St. Anthony Falls and surrounding territory was a sacred place for the Dakota lengthy earlier than white settlers based a metropolis there.
Knit collectively by the Stone Arch Bridge, which opened to pedestrian and bike visitors in 1994, the Minneapolis riverfront attracts 2.6 million guests a 12 months. It’s a compelling place for shifting via however restrooms and locations to eat have been discovered solely on 2nd Avenue South close to the Mill Metropolis Museum and Guthrie Theater—and didn’t supply a river’s edge expertise. The pavilion and the park areas on both aspect of the constructing fill this long-time want.
The restaurant occupies the pavilion’s second flooring and spills out onto an out of doors terrace overlooking the falls. The primary flooring, on the West River Parkway degree the place cyclists and runners and walkers spill off the Stone Arch Bridge, gives public restrooms and a big convention room out there for reserving—all constructed throughout the stone and brick partitions of two historic mills. Folks may even purchase a drink and sit at out of doors tables on the parkway degree or round three firepits. And thoroughly sloped walkways lined with native vegetation and benches for casual seating convey folks from First Avenue South comfortably down the 30-foot slope.
It’s like Minneapolis now has a entrance porch with a Mississippi River view.
Elegant simplicity
The design of the park area—the South Terrace, Metropolis Steps on the north—achieves what’s so uncommon today: simplicity with out being simplistic.
The concrete walkways zig-zag between profuse plantings of native vegetation—edible, medicinal, and non secular—which are recognized with indicators in English and Dakota. The benches—some concrete, some wood-topped—present flexibility for seating for any and all and for future programmed storytelling or musical applications (unamplified by request of close by neighbors).
Equally revolutionary for the neighborhood, there’s a playground for young children—executed in pure wooden relatively than the same old eye-popping blue, crimson and yellow plastic.
The pavilion reveals its layered historical past. An early design positioned the constructing on the north finish of the location, close to the threerd Avenue Bridge, to keep away from constructing throughout the partitions of the 2 previous mills that Fuji-Ya was constructed inside. However later excavations decided that the partitions could possibly be stabilized sufficient to be constructed inside—and what a cheerful discovery that was.
Brick and thick stone partitions give a hoary and nearly mysterious texture to each the outside and inside of the constructing. A curving stairway rimmed in metal carries guests to the second flooring on wealthy wooden stair treads salvaged from Fuji-Ya. Skinny yellow brick much like that used on different close by buildings just like the Crown Curler Mill fills within the gaps between salvageable partitions.
Damon Farber Panorama Architects led the design staff with HGA designing the pavilion, MacDonald and Mack as historic consultants, and the 106 Group as archaeologists. The Therapeutic Place Collaborative introduced in Dakota artists and language specialists to design covers for the fireplace pits and interpret the rainwater assortment and use of Native vegetation. Artist choice for a bigger work is underway.
HGA performed with the weather of the brand new part, to obviously specific it’s a up to date addition: the central arch is asymmetrical and the glass doorways offset to 1 aspect; the brick on the second-floor angles right here and there. The strikes are adequately subtle that they don’t detract from the historic stone partitions that give the constructing its compelling aesthetic.
Inside, the 18-foot-high ceiling, stonework, and rusted metal remnants create a panoramic architectural expertise. “We didn’t need to make it a museum,” stated Tom Evers, who heads the Minneapolis Parks Basis, which helped fund the mission. However it’s arduous to not need to know the tales these partitions inform.
Up the tactile stairway, the second flooring is refreshingly easy and, with solely an eight-foot-high ceiling, feels extra cozy. After I stood by one of many home windows within the restaurant, I skilled a robust sense of deja-vu: I had eaten precisely right here earlier than, in considered one of Fuji-Ya’s tatami-mat alcoves.
Miraculous
That Water Works developed in any respect—and significantly on this style—is a minor city miracle.
In 1987 the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board acquired Fuji-Ya’s car parking zone to construct the West River Parkway. Groundbreaking restaurateur Reiko Weston, a Japanese warfare bride who introduced Japanese cooking to the Twin Cities, discovered her restaurant couldn’t survive with out the parking and in 1990 the Park Board ended up taking your complete property, which prolonged north to the threerd Avenue Bridge.
However, tragically, the Park Board had no plans to make use of it and no cash to protect or develop it. The distinctive constructing, which provided so many their first expertise of the Minneapolis riverfront, moldered away.
Twenty years later, builders eyed the property within the burgeoning riverfront and proposed low-rise luxurious townhouses after which an 11-story luxurious apartment tower. After years of wrangling and a lawsuit, the Park Board stopped the apartment improvement. However the property nonetheless sat derelict, a scruffy barrier between downtown and the riverfront.
Come 2011, the newly energized Minneapolis Parks Basis and the Park Board’s Central Riverfront Grasp Planning course of re-assessed the realm. The revelation: this unbelievable web site must be parkland, not “extra land” to be rid of. A fundraising marketing campaign raised $16 million so as to add to Park Board and different funds to develop a park and park constructing on the location, in addition to full a long-sought river overlook at 26th Avenue North to assist join town’s North Facet to the Mississippi.
It took a few design detours and main excavations to disclose the present mills, decide the fitting place for the constructing and envision such a welcoming park area. After 30 years of city planning blunders, Water Works is a triumph.
Former Star Tribune structure critic and reporter Linda Mack writes about structure and concrete historical past.
