Nagell's Hardware at 625 Marquette

As one of the largest construction companies in the Midwest with well over a century of building experience, Kraus-Anderson has found itself on both sides of the urban renewal saga. KA has worked on many large projects that involved the clearing away of old buildings, but sometimes it is a Kraus-Anderson building that has to make way for the new. One of the earliest significant buildings in KA’s history was built near the corner of Marquette (then known as 1st Avenue) and 7th Street by the company’s founder, J.L. Robinson, in 1905. It was a charming three-story brick building with large windows facing Marquette Avenue occupied by hardware stores, first the Builder’s Hardware Company, and then, for nearly fifty years, Nagell’s Hardware. E.T. Nagell was a Norwegian immigrant who made a success of himself in the hardware business, owning a small chain of stores. In 1960 the building that Robinson built in 1905 was one of several that was wrecked to make way for downtown Minneapolis’s quintessential urban renewal project: The Northstar Center. As the earliest example of a mega-block in Minneapolis, and as the birthplace of the city’s skyway system, the Northstar Center is so emblematic of the planning and design of the urban renewal era that it has been listed (with no apparent irony) on the National Register of Historic Places. The images are courtesy of the Hennepin County Library Digital Collections. #TBT #hclib