Riverside Plaza, the 1,300-unit modernist apartments that dominate the eastern Minneapolis skyline, quietly turned 50 years old last 12 months. When it was originally in-built 1972, the apartment complex, composed of six distinct buildings, a car parking zone, and large concrete plaza were intended to be just the primary a part of a much larger complex of urban mixed-use structures. With all of the phases complete, the concrete communities would have principally replaced Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, which was seen then as a slum with no future.
But that’s not what happened. Neighborhood opposition and shifting politics halted expansion of the ambitious housing project. Over time, the apartment complex evolved into a reasonable community with historic designation.
One guy has been there almost your complete time, keeping the constructing from falling apart.
“After I first set foot on that property, there was a much larger college population there,” said Gordy Willey, the longtime chief engineer of the Riverside Plaza apartment complex, once I asked him what’s modified. “The University of Minnesota was there, and there have been nearly 100 apartments in each constructing reserved for Control Data for his or her school.”
Minneapolis has modified since Control Data, a now-defunct tech firm, had a small West Bank training school. Riverside Plaza’s strange history reflects the changing mores of urban planning and Minneapolis society. Despite the economic and social tides, the hundreds of apartments in Riverside Plaza still stand tall, providing homes for countless Minneapolitans near downtown, jobs, the state’s largest university and the varied attractions of the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.
That’s to not say every little thing has all the time gone easily, no less than not from an infrastructure perspective. With this many homes, windows, heaters, and sinks, something is all the time going fallacious.
“It’s not the form of job security most individuals want,” Chief Engineer Willey admitted. “If you’ve got 1,303 apartments, you already know it’s probably going to occur. You hope you get to it before it cuts loose.”
One way or the other, 66-year-old Willey has been working on the apartment complex through almost its entire lifespan, and it’s secure to say that no one knows the ins and outs of the buildings higher than he does. He began working within the buildings as a twenty-something mechanic back in 1982.
The way in which he tells it, Willey got the job almost by chance. The engineers ahead of him in seniority quit, were fired, or couldn’t agree on a salary, leaving him the last man standing. He continued working for Sherman Associates when the developer bought the complex within the late Nineteen Eighties, after a default by the previous owner, and he hasn’t stopped fixing things since.
There’s an extended list of things that have to be kept in fine condition in Riverside Plaza, every little thing from the heating oil tank to hundreds of appliances to the sprinkler system to the emergency power supply.
Fun fact: emergency power was installed within the Nineteen Eighties after Metrodome construction (!) knocked out power to the neighborhood, trapping people within the elevators. Willey needed to go in and rescue people stuck in between floors.
As you would possibly imagine, the elevators serving the buildings have all the time been a headache. Since the buildings were originally planned with studio and one-bedroom apartments and fewer families, the unique designers didn’t foresee elevator demand being as high as they’re today. As Willey puts it, “they get a workout.”
For a long time, the most important problem was the pipes. Until the $70-million-dollar 2010 remodel, Willey was continually fixing the pipes for the buildings’ “dual-temperature” heating system, where cold and warm water flow all through the complex. Once they were first constructed, the insulation contractor did a substandard job, resulting in near-constant rust and rupture by the point Willey took over the upkeep.
Reinstalling all those pipes was job No. 1 through the extensive 2010 remodel.
“That problem is now behind us, and that has made my life much significantly better,” Willey said. “Those pipe failures happened 24/365, whether it was 20 below outside, or 95 degrees and a pair of a.m..”
From the start, it was never smooth sailing for the Riverside Plaza project. Its ribbon-cutting infamously coincided with the anti-war protests on the University of Minnesota campus in May 1972. Demonstrators trickled over into Cedar Square West (because it was then known) and threw eggs at Housing and Urban Development secretary George Romney. It made national news headlines, especially because the state’s largest anti-war protests broke out the following week, when students occupied the nearby University campus.
All that while, tenants were moving into the brand-new apartments of the “Latest Town in Town”, because the short-lived Federal policy that helped fund construction was known. Back then, the apartments were intended for each form of household, from furnished student housing to upscale apartments for singles (like fictional Minneapolis resident, Mary Tyler Moore) to reasonably priced housing for families. It was presupposed to be a various, futuristic community reflecting every facet of Minnesota society.
In that light, Riverside Plaza could be viewed as a failure, a spot that, as groundbreaking DFL politician Allan Spear described in his memoir, “never fulfilled its expectations.”
It’s all perspective
It seems that every little thing depends upon perspective. One group that arrived to live at Riverside Plaza are the flocks of rock doves that continually pirouette over the skies of Cedar Avenue. With panoramic views of town and the river valley, the buildings offer ideal nesting ground for urban pigeons, giving a mellow soundscape to the brutalist concrete spaces.
You may think they were all the time there, but you’d be fallacious.
“Well into the Nineteen Seventies, there have been no pigeons,” Willey told me. “I can’t pin down the precise 12 months once they showed up — it was sometime within the 90s — but they only grew exponentially.”
In a form of arms race, Willey and his Riverside Plaza maintenance staff have worked for years with a university team to accommodate falcons on the rooftops, within the hopes that raptors might keep the pigeons under control. It really works, kind of, though there are all the time more pigeons to function falcon food.
Due to falcons, every time Willey’s crew must go onto the roof to repair infrastructure, they convey with them a babies’s sled to make use of as a shield. One person keeps the falcons at bay, while the opposite makes the repair as quickly as possible, until they will retreat back to safety.
Still, it’s higher than any of the alternatives.
“I don’t see how we’re ever gonna do away with them,” Willey admitted. “We’ve paid different corporations, tried alternative ways; it’s not that I’m anti-pigeon, but I’d like them to live someplace else.”
Still standing
It feels strange to walk through Riverside Plaza 50 years after the fraught opening. The wide open spaces are clean and well kept, but something seems missing. The charter school on the plaza has been closed since COVID, however the nearby corner store is open. The plaza’s art and architecture seems designed for an audience that’s now not there, relics of a forgotten second-story city of the longer term.
In comparison with much of America’s large-scale mid-century urban housing, Riverside Plaza has fared well. To at the present time, the buildings provide reasonably priced homes for hundreds of individuals – the overwhelming majority are refugees from East Africa – and due to the extensive 2010 rehab, they’ll achieve this for a long time to come back. That stands in contrast to many other subsidized apartment complexes which have been torn down throughout the Midwest.
“You have got to be there to know, and a lot of the things said about that place simply aren’t true,” Willey said, referring to stereotypes about inner-city apartments. “I’ve been there all that point and it’s not an unsafe place to be. Many of the tenants aren’t an issue. It’s like several group of hundreds of individuals, there are all the time gonna be some troublemakers.”
Especially for a Modernist housing project, 50 years is an extended time to survive and thrive. Given town’s housing shortage, the 50-year-old buildings are considered one of town’s chief assets.
And all of the pipes are insulated now, though Willey admits the bathtubs are quickly reaching the top of their design life.
“I don’t think I’d do it again, if given the selection,” Willey admitted, referring to the moment when he took over as maintenance head. “Similar to Riverside, I’m feeling my years, and a $70 million rehab of me won’t change anything.”