A St. Anthony Treausre

Opening in 1904 within blocks of the mill district, where the famed Pillsbury family made their fortune, the Pillsbury Library was the City of Minneapolis’s second branch library. A gift from Minnesota’s eighth governor, John Sargent Pillsbury, the building was constructed for between $65,000 and $75,000, and was possibly the first example of Beaux Arts architecture in Minneapolis. As such, the National Park Service added it to the National Register of Historic Places in 1992 as a key building in the St. Anthony Falls Historic District. The district itself was added to the National Register in 1971.

After the library closed in 1967, the building was used for various community-service purposes, as a doctor’s diagnostic laboratory, and most recently housed the Dolly Fiterman Fine Arts gallery. The interior of the library had undergone extensive renovation to accommodate commercial use, while the exterior mostly stayed the same.

A recent renovation to the building, now called the St. Anthony Falls Office Building, won a Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Award in the historic restoration or renovation category, and also won two awards from the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota: the adaptive reuse award and the alliance’s first award for excellence in sustainable design.

In November 2006, the Phillips family—prominent local liquor moguls and philanthropists—purchased the building. After eight months of renovation, the space is now used as a family office for the Phillips’ various business interests.

As the surrounding neighborhood in Northeast Minneapolis, just across the river from downtown, has continued to grow and see new development in recent years, the concern over preserving the area’s historic buildings has also grown. Support for the Phillips’ proposed restoration of the old library notably came from the Nicollet Island-East Bank Neighborhood Association in the form of a unanimous resolution in favor of the project.

Having previously worked on one of the owner’s homes, Domain Architecture & Design was chosen as designer on the project shortly after the building was purchased. Domain worked closely with Ryan Companies, who oversaw all construction.

“The vision underlying this particular project provided Domain with a unique opportunity to seamlessly blend two sometimes divergent areas of architectural expertise,” says Mike Everson, Domain Architecture & Design’s consultant on Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) projects. These diverging areas, he says, are “preserving a site’s historically significant underpinnings and respecting the aesthetics of its architectural heritage, while incorporating both known, established practices and emerging ‘green build’ concepts.”