August History Friday: Strutwear Building

Kraus-Anderson has called the Elliot Park neighborhood home for a hundred years, so KA’s history is closely tied to this Minneapolis neighborhood. A notable chapter in this shared history unfolded in the 1980s when Kraus-Anderson converted the Strutwear garment factory at 1010 7^th St. into an office building known as 1010 Metrodome Square.

Industry Square Turned Sports Venue

In the 1970s, Minnesota’s professional sports teams were outgrowing their home at Bloomington’s Met Stadium. A group of Minneapolis business leaders, led by John Cowles Jr (publisher of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune) proposed an alternative to replacing the stadium at its original site. The term “Industry Square” was coined to describe both a group of Minneapolis investors and a portion of the eastern edge of downtown that, it was thought, would be put to better use as a professional sports venue.

Among the owners of this underused real estate was Kraus-Anderson, who would soon forgo the convenience of their centrally located construction yard to make way for the Hubert H Humphrey Metrodome.

Strutwear Knitting Company’s Story

Started by James Struthers in 1916, the Strutwear Knitting Company began producing their signature hosiery (“add pride to your stride”) from their factory at 1010 7^th St in 1923.

Increasing sales through the 1920s caused the plant to expand several times, but the economic downturn of the 1930s hurt the business. The already difficult conditions for the Strutwear garment workers were made worse, and the resulting tensions came to a boiling point in 1935.

The building’s registration form for the National Register of Historic Places tells the story succinctly:

“The Strutwear Knitting Company Building represents one of the most important labor victories in Minneapolis’s history. The property is locally significant under criterion A in the area of social history. Its period of significance is 1935 to 1936, when Strutwear employees were on strike against the company’s anti-union policies. It was not only a battle against Strutwear officials but against the Minneapolis Citizen’s Alliance, an anti-labor business association and militant defender of the city’s open shop-shop reputation. Thousands of industrial workers from across all trades, skill levels and genders joined the eight-month-standoff, which marked a turning point in Minneapolis’s labor movement.”

Strutwear occupied the building until the 1950s, when it changed hands but continued, off-and-on, as a garment factory. A local company called Sharpe Manufacturing was still using the facility to produce clothing in the Metrodome’s early days, but in 1986 Carl Pohlad, owner of the neighboring Minnesota Twins and president of Marquette Bank, purchased the old factory with the intention of converting it into an office building.

1010 Metrodome Square

Carl Pohlad chose Kraus-Anderson to manage the conversion of what was then a 55-year-old garment factory into 175,000 square feet of brand-new office space.

The bulky limestone structure, wrapped around a relatively small atrium made a surprisingly ideal space for office work. Architects Setter Leach & Lindstrom took home awards for their thoughtful reimagining of the factory, and Building Design and Construction Magazine saw fit to honor the project as a whole with that year’s “Reconstruction Project Award.”

1010 Metrodome Square was intended to be occupied mostly by employees of Pohlad’s Marquette Bank, which was subsumed by U.S. Bank in the 1990s. U.S. Bank continued to operate out of Metrodome Square until 2006.

After a prolonged period of vacancy, a period in which the Metrodome was replaced by the U.S. Bank stadium, and the old Strutwear factory was included in the National Register of Historic Places, the Strutwear building was recently converted into a residential complex branded as the 1010 Lofts.

It’s a rare building that can thrive under three major changes in use: half a century as a factory, quarter century as an office, with a third life as an apartment just beginning.