Jeez, The Upper Midwest Has Super Highrises
Images by Chris Hytha
Writing by Mark Houser
Five buildings from the Highrises Collection from the Upper Midwest.
While Chicago grabs the glory as the skyscraper capital of the Midwest, the cities to its north boast an enviable collection of their own. Milwaukee once had a tower taller than anything in its bigger neighbor down the Lake Michigan shoreline. Minnesota's Twin Cities also feature iconic highrises in their skylines, as does Rochester, birthplace of the famed Mayo Clinic.
Drone photography of Foshay Tower in Minneapolis, MN from the Highrises Collection.
Foshay Tower
(W Hotel Minneapolis)
Minneapolis, MN
This office obelisk was intended as the Washington Monument of the Midwest. So said Wilbur Foshay, who apparently saw no issue with emblazoning his name in lights on a purported presidential memorial. It was one of many dubious claims made by Foshay, who went to prison four years after this highrise opened.
An eastern transplant who briefly managed a Kansas power company, Foshay relocated to Minneapolis and built a portfolio of small utilities, paying a fraction up front and financing the rest by issuing shares for sale to the public. As his paper empire ballooned to 30 states, he commissioned the tower and financed a blowout three-day dedication gala headlined by John Philip Sousa.
Two months later, the market crashed, investors were stuck with worthless stock, and the company went into receivership. Foshay was convicted of mail fraud and served three years in Leavenworth, until a letter-writing campaign by his supporters prompted a commutation from Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The failed businessman then brought his creative energies to Colorado, where he ran a promotional campaign claiming the mountain streams were so cold that the trout grew fur. Visitors to the tower, now a swanky hotel, can have cocktails in a mahogany-paneled lounge that was once, if only briefly, Foshay's office.
Drone photography of the Mayo Clinic Building in Rochester, MN from the Highrises Collection
Mayo Clinic Building
(Plummer Building)
Rochester, MN
Terracotta nurses survey the prairie from this highrise, revealing its medical mission and paying tribute to the women essential to its success. That includes Edith Graham, the clinic's first professional nurse and wife of Dr. Charles Mayo, who with his brother, Will, oversaw this tower for their family's storied institution.
Their father, William, arrived in town as a government physician to examine Union recruits for the Civil War. Later, when a tornado devastated Rochester in 1883, Mayo cared for victims with the aid of Franciscan nuns. The sisters went on to build a hospital that the doctor and his two sons staffed.
The practice quickly outgrew its first facility, prompting construction of this colorful addition. Great bronze doors open to a flamboyant lobby and oil painting of the brothers, whose offices upstairs are preserved as a museum. A carilloneur — the clinic's fourth since construction — plays daily concerts on the tower bells.
In 1954 the building was named after Dr. Henry Plummer, a thyroid specialist who designed several innovative features of the structure, including an instrument sterilization system. On the facade, a sculpted stone relief portrays Plummer poring over a blueprint. A similar tile commemorating the actual architect, Thomas Ellerbe, was never mounted.
Drone photography of the First National Bank Building in Saint Paul, MN from the Highrises Collection.
First National Bank Building
Saint Paul, MN
The three-sided, 50-foot illuminated logo on the roof has been out of date since the financial firm it refers to changed its name to U.S. Bancorp in a 1997 merger. Its irrelevance only heightened when the company moved out a few years later. But St. Paul maintains the iconic sign, presumably to inform Minneapolis where the older, smaller twin city sees itself in the pecking order.
This skyscraper originated in an earlier merger, when First National Bank of St. Paul joined forces with nextdoor neighbor Merchants National, the first bank to build a highrise on the block. A skybridge connecting the 17th floor of the new tower to the 16th of the old curiously rises instead of descending, due to differing story heights. Louis Hill, chairman of First National, wrangled the deal through deft family diplomacy; his father, Great Northern Railroad tycoon James Hill, had bought the bank in 1912 and left his eight children each an equal share.
News coverage at the dedication noted a basement shooting range where the private security guards could practice "the manly art of bank defense." It also marveled that every one of the uniformed women operating the elevators was exactly 5'1" tall.
Drone photography of Milwaukee City Hall in Milwaukee, WI from the Highrises Collection
Milwaukee City Hall
Milwaukee, WI
When Milwaukee held a nationwide design contest for their city hall in 1891, few were surprised when the winning entry was a German Renaissance-inspired design drawn up by a German-born architect. A quarter of the population of the city known as "German Athens" were immigrants from the Fatherland, the most of any U.S. city.
The enormous belfry was 353 feet tall even without counting a 40-foot flagpole, meaning that, for a moment in history, Milwaukee had a highrise taller than anything in Chicago or New York. History was made again in 1910, when Emil Seidel took office here as the first Socialist mayor of a large American city.
This building was designed before steel framing was universal. Its load-bearing walls support their own weight, as well as the building’s most remarkable feature: seven stories of floating wrought iron walkways that hang dramatically over the tiled atrium floor.
Intended for the simple task of getting from the stairs to the offices on each floor, the walkways became a popular spot for committing suicide during the Great Depression, prompting the city to stretch protective netting across the void in 1935. It stayed for more than 50 years, until the walkways were restored to their full vertiginous glory.
Drone photography of the Milwaukee Gas Light Building in Milwaukee, WI from the Highrises Collection.
Milwaukee Gas Light Building
Milwaukee, WI
Prohibition complicated construction of this highrise. Agents raided a small hotel on its planned footprint on the eve of demolition and found booze in the kitchen. So a federal judge padlocked the grill, and excavators had to leave the room propped on pilings for a year while they tore down everything around it to dig the foundation.
The flame beacon on the roof, while not original, signals the building's main purpose as utility offices and showrooms for gas appliances. The gas was not the natural kind, but rather manufactured by cooking coal. This was done at a large plant on the city's west side designed by local architect Alexander Eschweiler, who also designed iconic gas stations in the shape of Japanese pagodas. His three sons joined his firm just in time for this skyscraper project.
A large bronze sunburst over the entrance, destroyed in an earlier remodeling, has been replaced and complements other Mayan-inspired elements. The exterior lightens as it rises, and it is not Wisconsin's famed dairy output but the pale yellow local bricks at the top that are the source of the Milwaukee moniker "Cream City."
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