Articles in a Minneapolis newspaper after a donor party raised $604,500 for the building in one night. “When Minneapolis wants a thing,” remarked one donor, “it is only a matter of going after it.”
On a recent afternoon, the staff in the MIA library set out several boxes of archival material and invited employees to peruse, an initial fact-finding foray in advance of next year’s 100th anniversary. And what could have been an allergy-inducing trip through mouldering grip-and-grin photos and self-congratulatory newspaper clips proved far more interesting for reasons we never expected. Here’s what we learned:
A newspaper story from 1911 showing preliminary plans for the MIA. At the far right is a list of initial donors: Pillsburys, Lowrys, MacMillans, and James J. Hill among them.
1) We were, and arguably still are, an ambitious town. Like, Napoleon ambitious. Just check out the drawing above, taken from a 1917 publication of a Minneapolis city plan that proposed a Parisian-style spoke-and-hub series of grand circles and diagonal boulevards cutting across the city, including one traversing the park outside the MIA (seen at far right). None of this ever happened, possibly because building these boulevards would have meant demolishing hundreds of homes and businesses in their way. The city, which petered out into undeveloped land around Minnehaha Creek and stockyards just north of the University of the Minnesota, was still young enough to think grandly, even imperially, about design. But perhaps not so young, or flush, to pull it off.
2) Minnesota was still known as the Northwest, a seeming geographic misnomer that either predated “Midwest” or left us out of it, and makes you wonder how Seattle, Portland, etc., were categorized. (If you hadn’t thought about it, this was the origin of so many things called Northwest here, though many have recently faded—Northwest Airlines, Norwest Bank.) Newspaper stories about plans for the MIA, in the New York Times and locally, inevitably referenced the Northwest getting an art museum, conjuring images of prospectors hauling paintings.
Advertisements in the Minneapolis Journal soliciting backers of a new art museum: “You can help add more luster to the city’s name.”
3) In some ways, we were still a frontier. A 1911 Minneapolis Journal front page showing renderings of the proposed MIA building and a list of city fathers ponying up to pay for it is surrounded by headlines like “Chinaman bound, choked to death,” about an immigrant garrotted in his laundry business, and “Three babies cremated at home,” about children killed in a house fire while the parents were out. The MIA backers were pushing for an art museum not just as a feather in their cap, as a capstone of progress, but as a veneer of civilization, helpful for business: real cities had museums. And Minneapolis, rising from the plains on rail and milling, wanted desperately to be taken seriously.
4) Newspapers were just one cent. Remarkable.