The Foshay Resurrection

Photo courtesy of The Minneapolis Public Library

Ralph Burnet’s reinvention of Minneapolis’s historic icon should prove to be a lucrative labor of love.

August 2008

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.

The Foshay Resurrection

The Enveloping of the Ivy

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