Maybe Sesame Seed Bun but No Special Sauce

Meanwhile back in the warehouse district, we've got the McDonald Bros. Co. a wholesaler of china, crockery and glassware.  It was the business of Matthew McDonald "who for a considerable period was one of the owners of an extensive wholesale and retail china, crockery and glassware." He was born in Pennsylvania in 1848 to Irish immigrant parents and started his china business there before relocating to Minneapolis in 1884. It sounds like they were on Nicollet first, but moved down Fifth Street to this location near First Avenue, where they apparently expanded into retail. Matthew died in 1910, leaving the business in his brother's hands.

Members of the McDonald family apparently prospered enough to house themselves on the lovely Lake of the Isles Parkway, where Frank McDonald, a department manager, lived in 1917. Millard McDonald, one of Matthew's sons who graduated from law school and served in the aviation forces in the first world war, lived over on Blaisdell Avenue in 1910.

The building apparently had a major fire in 1895, which lead to the death of five firemen, at the time the deadliest fire in the history of the Minneapolis fire department.

There's a cool shot here and a close-up on Fickr and here's the building in 1902.

Foreign Lands: Money Is A Ball

So my re-commitment to the mission didn't last long, but what can I say?  I went into my archive of backlogged Minneapolis signs and wasn't inspired, so it's back to strange and mysterious land of St. Paul.

Minnesotans of a certain age will remember Norwest, which was acquired by Wells Fargo in 1997.  Before there was a consolidated Norwest, Northwestern National Bank was the anchor of a multi-state bank affiliation that dated to the 1920s that helped its members survive the great depression.

I may be wrong, but in my memory Norwest was the first bank in the Twin Cities to offer free checking, which makes me remember it fondly (low bar for positive bank feelings, eh?).  The Norwest logo used to be a common site around town.

As to less common sites, Norwest's "weatherball" in downtown Minneapolis is too good not to include.  I don't have any memory of it, but apparently they had a 157 foot tower on the top of their headquarters, which was largest bank sign between Chicago and the west coast (do you think people stopped to see it after checking out the largest ball of twine?).  At the top was a color-changing ball that would give you a primitive weather forecast.  Minnesotans love a good weather prediction, so the ball grew in popularity until it became central to the bank's marketing (check him out lounging on the beach in the first link of this paragraph).  It was actually popular enough to prompt a local news report in 2007.

Alas, the ball went down with the rest of the bank's headquarters in a destructive fire on Thanksgiving day in 1982.

You can see another shot of the sign on Flickr.

Foreign Lands: Its Own Juvenile Joke

I still have a backlog of Minneapolis signs, and many neighborhoods left to explore, but some day those resources will be exhausted, and it's fun to explore other places too, so I'm going to occasionally bring you signs from foreign lands. This one is truly exotic, from strange and alien confines of downtown St. Paul. If any of you are ever brave enough to venture there yourselves, come prepared, it's truly the wild, um, east.

I remember radio ads for Butwinick's from my childhood. As you can imagine, it's a name that a tween would remember. I'm surprised I've not found more about the store's history on the internet, but Writing On The Wall says it was in operation from the '30s to the '90s. I'm guessing that its closure was just before everything started getting documented digitally on the web. Apparently a scion of the family now owns a mattress store.

From the Historical Society's photo archives we learn that Butwinick's store had a fire in 1949, which led to a big sale that drew a big crowd. And here's another shot from Flickr.

The sign's on the corner of 7th and Sibley, which looks like it's actually a few doors down from the original store.

Babe The Blue Ox Was Stabled Across The Street

This one hearkens to fundamental reason we are all here. Lumber. Poised at the northernmost naturally navigable point of the Mississippi River, next to an abundant source of natural power in the form of St. Anthony Falls, it was lumber that first put Minneapolis on the map. Trees were felled in the northern forests, floated down river, and brought to the mills that lined either side of the falls. Flour, and even textiles came later, but what first made this the Mill City was saw milling.

The Lumber Exchange doesn't date to those early days, but it's a reminder that even before agriculture there were trees and there were saws. Today there are offices, retail on the ground level, and I guess a dance club of some sort as I walked by one weekend evening in February and saw all manner of deranged youths standing in line dressed to party and without coats. Ah, youth. It's frozen.

The Historical Society has quite a few pictures of this old gem. The city tells us that construction started in 1887, with a second phase completed in 1890. As the name suggests, it was meant to be a center of lumber trading, but its function drifted as the lumber industry faded. Wikipedia tells us that it's the oldest high rise in Minneapolis and that it's the oldest building outside of New York of more than 12 floors. It was billed as one of the first fireproof buildings, but I'm not sure if that was before or after the big 1891 fire that seems to have devastated it and its neighbors.

In addition to the sign labeling the building, there is what seems to be a separate sign for something that had offices in Chicago and St. Louis, but I can't make out any more of it.

The building sits at Hennepin and 5th Ave. S., but the sign is prominent near the intersection of Hennepin and Washington.

Tidying Up

There's little left to be found about the The Ideal Broom & Brush Factory, in the alley between 1st & 2nd Avenues and 3rd & 4th St. Even the building itself seems to be completely abandoned. The front of the building has a faded awning that says, "The New French Bar" that definitely doesn't look, well, new.

Aside from a few Flickr photos (one of which tempts me to steal a line about Dickensian street urchins), I don't know much about this company or from where in the mists of time this comes to us. Instead I will give you a two cool Historical Society photos of a fire and its aftermath in 1937 at the Ideal Laundry that was a few blocks away, which had a cool sign of its own at the time.