This entry includes a walking tour! Take the tour.
Introduction
Text-to-speech Audio
This block of Wall Street offers a glimpse of Lowertown during its economic heyday between 1880 and 1930 when these buildings hummed with the sounds of commerce and industry. The first one you'll take a look at is the Great Northern Lofts (300 Wall Street). Stand across from it on Broadway so you can see what the building's southeast corner reveals about its history.
Images
300 Broadway Street
A Bird's-Eye View of Downtown St. Paul from the West Side (1910)
Backstory and Context
Text-to-speech Audio
The Northern Pacific Railroad Office Building/Great Northern Lofts (300 Wall Street)
- This is one of three buildings constructed by James J. Hill to be featured on this tour. Hill immigrated here from Canada when he was eighteen (1856) and got his start in business by working as an office clerk in Lowertown. Over thirty years later he was on his way to becoming one of the wealthiest men in America and he decided to anchor his business, the Northern Pacific Railroad, in this Italian Renaissance Revival-style office building.
- Its construction reflects the Hill's obsession with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He insisted that his architect eschew the more common usual iron or timber frame construction in favor of fireproof steel beams enclosed in solid brick exteriors and interior masonry walls—3 feet thick in some places—and supporting heavy arched brick and clay ceiling
- As you can imagine, this fireproof structure makes the building incredibly heavy, which was nearly its undoing. Lowertown is located in a river valley undergirded by soft dirt rather than bedrock. The pilings driven into this unsupportive muck failed at one, causing the building's southeastern corner to settle by as much as two feet. If you look at that corner carefully you can make out repaired breaks that reveal where it sank and was jacked back up.