The Foshay Resurrection

When Wilbur Foshay’s now-iconic tower opened in 1929, the Indiana limestone structure designed to resemble the Washington Monument—capped on all sides by ten-foot-high carvings of the Foshay name (embedded with white light bulbs)—was considered garish, overbearing, and vain by many locals. To the reserved Scandinavian burghers, the fact that it was the highest building (447 feet) between Chicago and the West Coast only added insult to injury.

Architect Léon Arnal (a local, no less) filled the tower with African mahogany, Italian marble, wrought iron façades, gold-leaf ceilings, and terrazzo floors inset with brass. And it was ostentatious, with two levels of underground parking for tenants and guests in an era when most Americans didn’t own a car, and a centralized soap supply mechanically dispensed to bathrooms when most public facilities depended on gravity-based cones of harsh Borax powder. A two-floor aerie near the building’s peak was spectacularly outfitted as Foshay’s personal suite.

The opening party, in August 1929, lasted days, cost $116,000 ($1.4 million today), and drew members of President Hoover’s cabinet. John Philip Sousa was commissioned to write The Foshay Tower March for $20K ($250,000 today).

The tower was doomed.

Two months later, the stock market crashed. Foshay’s check to Sousa bounced, his fortune made in the utility business was under duress. Foshay was convicted of mail fraud in 1934, served three years in Leavenworth, and eventually was pardoned by President Truman. He died in the anonymity of a Minneapolis nursing home in 1957, never having made his way into the old-money social circle to which he so badly craved admission.

Wilbur Foshay never occupied that mahogany office suite on the twenty-seventh floor, not for a day.

Fast forward eighty years. The Depression that brought Wilbur Foshay down did wonders for his icon. A global economic downturn combined with World War II virtually ensured that there would neither be funds nor material for massive office towers for many decades; the Foshay reigned as the queen of the Minneapolis skyline until it was eclipsed by the IDS Center in 1972.

The Foshay’s 1929 ostentation looked, in 1972, dowdy and dated, and the building sank from class A office space down the alphabet. Numerous modernizations merely hacked at its period charm without making it more desirable.

By 2005, it was home to cheap office space for low-key businesses and suffering from 50 percent vacancy. It was for sale. In seventy-five years, the Foshay Tower had evolved from an ostentatious showpiece that made locals blush to a beloved architectural icon listed on the National Register of Historic Places that no one wanted to occupy.

The Enveloping of the Ivy As the Foshay Tower drifted into decline, the diminutive ziggurat–style Ivy Tower on 2nd Avenue South at 11th Street was also sinking into disrepair and disregard. Following many different reclamation plans, the 1930 building finally found salvation in developer Jeffrey Laux’s plan to surround the Moorish–influenced tower with a modern glass and concrete hotel/condominium, which opened to guests in the winter of 2008 and is turning over its first residential unit to owners as you read this. Ivy Hotel + Residences came to pass because it emerged on the market at the peak of the condo boom, says Laux. It contains ninety-two condo units and 136 hotel rooms (including a few suites, the 17,000-square-foot Ivy Spa Club, and Porter & Frye restaurant in the historic building), all geared to a luxury clientele. “About a third to 40 percent of our owners own one or more other luxury residences,” notes Laux, who deems Ivy “the first true luxury product in the Twin Cities” in both the condo and hotel realm. His claim would provoke howls from developers of The Carlyle and several Twin Cities hotels, but if you’re distinguishing between five-star facilities and five-star staffing and service, he may have a point (if Ivy can meet its lofty goals). It is, for example, the only local hotel to offer three daily housekeeping services to all rooms. The hotel is affiliated with Starwood’s Luxury Collection of deluxe independent hotels. The Ivy boasts a marginal location, but is on the skyway system and adjacent to the Minneapolis Convention Center. The finished project (the historic interiors were gutted by the time Laux took control of the building) includes a twenty-six-story condo tower to the north and a nineteen-story hotel abutting it on the south (11th Street) side, with a common entranceway and lobby. Initial plans to only develop a small addition to the Ivy foundered for the same reason so many Ivy Tower reclamation projects did—the resulting structure lacked the mass to create a return that could support the renovation. Now the Ivy is a showpiece. It may be overshadowed by a tower of far less architectural distinction, but in seventy-five years time, who knows?

While local real estate mogul Ralph Burnet’s Chambers Hotel was under construction, Tim Rooney, his development partner, officed at the Foshay. He suggested Burnet take a look. Burnet did not need another reclamation project on his hands—the rehabilitation of two Hennepin Avenue dowagers into the Chambers was running months behind and costing imprudent sums.

But the condo boom was echoing across Minneapolis, and Burnet felt a tug at his heart as well as his wallet. “That building meant a lot to me,” he recalls. “As a kid, I took the bus from 50th and Bryant downtown to the Y for swimming lessons. We’d go to the stand at the Foshay, get a hot dog for ten cents, then go up in the observatory for five. The Foshay was part of my history.”

Negotiations took ninety days, and Burnet ended up buying the tower that cost $3.75 million to build for $15.5 million. Lest you think Burnet got taken, in today’s dollars Wilbur Foshay paid $450 million to build his monument. Burnet called in his Chambers construction team from Ryan Companies, who told him the old metal-frame windows needed replacing, but the building had good bones and there would be few surprises. But what would he do with it?

Office space was out. The Foshay’s elegant tapering design once promoted as the height of modernity (the building is forty-four-feet narrower at the top floor than at the bottom) “doesn’t lend itself to offices today,” says Burnet. Condos were an obvious choice, but Burnet knew that market intuitively and declined to play. “If you can’t have a patio and fresh air, there are lots of other high-rise options where you can,” he surmised. “Who would pay top dollar for that?”

The nascent hotelier decided it would need to be a hotel. The decision assuaged his sense of nostalgia as well. “If you build condos, you take it out of public view. Everyone has a Foshay Tower story. There’s no question the community loves the building. As a hotel, everyone can enjoy it inside and out.”

Burnet is a modernist and a serious collector of modern art. He understood the Foshay was a modernist gem and wanted to work with a hotelier with a modern aesthetic. After Ian Schrager’s trendy hotel collection on the coasts, the hippest hotel operator in America was Starwood’s W Hotels. Founder Barry Sternlicht sought to mimic Schrager’s design ethos and sense of style without the Schrager Hotels’ snobbery.

W flourished under Ross Klein, a former Polo Ralph Lauren executive who grew the brand in hip cities across the globe, securing higher average rates and occupancies than W’s sister Sheraton and Westins, which often boast larger rooms, better locations, and more amenities. The brand’s cheeky sense of humor, youthful vibe (it was one of the first to offer condoms in the minibar and gay porn on pay-per-view), and reputation for cool bars and nightlife was just the prescription for a staid hotel company, and Klein was one of the most solicited hoteliers in the world.

Burnet made inquiries. “Minneapolis was not on W’s radar,” he recalls. The closest W was in Chicago, the next ones west were on the coast (shades of 1929).

But someone got ahold of someone else and a key Starwood player had a look-see. “When they saw the building, they fell in love with it,” Burnet says. They knew Burnet had street cred. He was building a very cool hotel several blocks away, partnering with global chef Jean–Georges Vongerichten, who co-owned a company that developed restaurants for Starwood Hotels. Klein gave it the green light. W Minneapolis—The Foshay would open in 2008. (Klein left W for competitor Hilton Hotels just weeks before the opening and did not respond to requests for interviews.)

The renovation proved to be complex, and unlike at Chambers, Burnet was not in control. “New York approves everything,” he explains. “Every wastebasket, every fabric color.” Munge Leung: Design Associates of Toronto, a firm with a modern aesthetic, but few high-profile American projects, was chosen to handle the interior design—in consultation with the National Park Service. Since the Foshay had been  listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, two decades after Foshay’s death, its restoration made the developers eligible for substantial tax credits under the Federal Rehabilitation Tax Incentive Program. “This tax credit has saved many historic buildings,” says Audrey Tepper, a historical architect who supervises preservation for the government and had responsibility for the Foshay.

“The Foshay didn’t have a lot of historic character on the upper floors [aside from Wilbur’s bilevel suite near the top],” she explains. “There was not much to repair or restore” except for the historic lobby and windows. That is until a 1980s drywall ceiling was removed from the “arcade” that leads from the building’s Marquette Avenue entry into the lobby. Underneath it was a deteriorated art deco carved-plaster and horsehair ceiling.

Tepper wanted it restored. “It seemed too destroyed,” says Burnet. Tepper “encouraged” Burnet. A few hundred thousand dollars and several months of historical craftsmanship later, what could be saved had been and what was missing was rebuilt. In the scheme of the $57 million renovation of the Foshay (not including $18 million in soft goods and furnishings), it was not much money for a lot of impact. Perhaps in exchange Burnet was given the green light to replace the building’s porous but historic windows on all floors but Foshay’s bilevel suite, which is being restored as a sedate watering hole known as Prohibition.

The other major complication in restoring the Foshay was that every couple of stories its floor-plate narrowed, necessitating fifty-seven different room layouts, preposterous in a 230-room hotel. Every three floors, plumbing and wiring tracks had to be reconfigured. And in an odd parallel to the Chambers rehabilitation—where the buildings’ floor heights did not line up, necessitating a connecting transition structure—the large two-story ground-level “pedestal” that wraps around the tower (and was built at the same time) does not line up with the tower itself, necessitating a six-foot staircase to get to the second floor meeting rooms.

Unlike the timeless minimalism of the art-filled Chambers, the W will be virtually art-free, but full of designer furnishings that take on the role of art. The effect is not entirely soothing or cohesive—each guest room is adorned with a garish magenta minibar and sofa pillow, black-and-white draperies and bedding, white built-ins and occasional tables in rounded corners and circles, plus bathrooms of white, black, and purple tones. (W relaxed its requirement that all toilets be enclosed in separate water closets on floors where it would have created airline-type claustrophobia.)

The W customer likes to party more than most travelers, says Burnet. One of Ross Klein’s inflexible charges was that each room contain at least “three places to screw,” Burnet chuckles. “I’m not making that up.” Which perhaps explains why the hotel will have one restaurant but three separate drinking spots: the aforementioned Prohibition on twenty-seven (for the space, Burnet is trying to reclaim the statue of Foshay’s girlfriend from the family of late Minneapolis hotelier Bob Short) and what is expected to be a “loud party scene” (Burnet’s words) at the W Bar and W Living Room adjacent to the restaurant on the ground floor.

Perhaps the only drama around the W’s run-up to opening came around the hotel’s restaurant. Keys Cafe, which awkwardly inhabits the old café un deux trois space, will remain, to be augmented by an all-day, 170-seat restaurant on the ground level.

“W works with Tom Colicchio and Todd English, and they’re very particular,” Burnet says. The Foshay was proceeding toward a restaurant managed by the Vongerichten/Starwood partnership, unsurprising given Vongerichten’s existing relationship with Chambers. A kitchen was built to its standard and ads for a hiring fair were posted on Craigslist, but as late as Memorial Day, two months before the hotel’s scheduled opening, no restaurateur had been announced, no contracts signed.

It’s not clear if Burnet fired Vongerichten or vice versa. Burnet says he was never nervous, but with guests booked for mid-August and the GOP convention coming to town two weeks later, “we were getting down to short strokes,” he admits. “We just never got a deal done.”

Earlier in the spring, Burnet had run into Alan Ackerberg, who handles real estate for Parasole Restaurant Holdings. They chatted about a building near Parasole’s Edina Salut, which Burnet wanted to sell. He mentioned his difficulties nailing down a restaurant deal for the W, and Ackerberg, says Burnet, suggested he contact Parasole cofounder Phil Roberts—the company might have a solution to Burnet’s problems.

Two weeks later, it was announced that Parasole’s iconic Manny’s Steakhouse would leave its longtime home in the Hyatt Regency to move into a space designed for another restaurant. “The greatest restaurant in the Twin Cities is moving to the greatest building in the Twin Cities,” Burnet crowed. The hurried move, happening as Manny’s navigates a problem-plagued expansion in Miami, has delayed the hotel’s intended opening from July 28 to August 13.

Burnet expects Manny’s presence and the W’s expansive drinking scene to secure the hotel’s place as a locals’ hangout and return the Foshay to the status of contemporary icon of the Minneapolis skyline. In May, he told us, “I’ve had over 200 e-mail requests for the opening party—this is going to be big.”

Hotel Minneapolis: Hiding Amid History The 1906 Midland Bank Building on 2nd Avenue South at 4th Street is one of the less visible historic structures in downtown Minneapolis. It was built to house the Security National Bank and functioned as the Midland National Bank for much of its life. The Richardson Romanesque structure was designed by Franklin and Louis Long, architects who birthed the Minneapolis Lumber Exchange (redeveloped by Jeff Laux’s dad), the Flour Exchange, and Minneapolis City Hall. The building devolved into obscurity over the years, but its massive lobby with eighteen-foot Carrera marble columns, ornate staircases, and period bank ephemera remained intact, and during the condo boom, developer Jon Hempel purchased the building to convert it into a condo hotel. The condos were dropped as the market soured, and the building was renovated to be a local outlet of Hilton’s midmarket Doubletree brand. Called Hotel Minneapolis, it will embody an upgraded design ethos for middling Doubletree and have a moderate price point relative to the W and Ivy. Guest rooms will still contain flat-screen televisions, stylish design flourishes, and all the latest in wireless Internet and MP3 players; the hotel will offer a fitness center and full room service and Restaurant Max, from Morrissey Hospitality, the hotel’s operator, which also manages The Saint Paul Hotel and the St. Paul Grill. The Midland did not qualify for federal historic preservation credits because, in contrast with the heavily altered Foshay Tower interiors, the Midland Building’s wealth of historic detail on its upper floors was sadly not retained in the hotel conversion, according to U.S. government preservation architect Audrey Tepper. The restored lobby will nonetheless boast a spectacular historic feel, perhaps even eclipsing the W in sheer monumentalism. Hotel Minneapolis will open August 1.