September Friday History: Amos Andersen Houses
By Matt Goff, KA Archivist
Kraus-Anderson hasn’t built too many houses, and most of the single-family homes in KA’s portfolio are mansions built more than a century in the past. Some noteworthy exceptions occurred a mere seventy-five years ago during the post WWII housing shortage. One noteworthy thing about these eight South Minneapolis homes is that they were all built for the same client: Amos Andersen.
Amos Andersen, pictured here with his wife Helen, was an owner and operator of Kraus-Andeson from 1930 until 1937 when he and his partner Mathew Kraus sold the company to Lloyd Engelsma. A decade later, Amos was apparently spending some of his golden years addressing the post-war housing shortage by developing land on the southern edge of Minneapolis.
Most, if not all, of these KA-built homes can still be found in the 5600 block of Minneapolis’s Kenny neighborhood. The contrasting aerial photos (1940 vs 1957) show that Kraus-Anderson played a small part in a vast, decentralized building project that saw most of the available land within Minneapolis filled in with one-and-a-half story houses. It pleases this archivist to see this humble structure, arguably the quintessential building of Minneapolis, as part of the Kraus-Anderson portfolio.
CATEGORY: Construction