In 1900, Thomas Barlow Walker purchased the 1.4 acre “baseball block” to use as a site for a nine story warehouse building. The property formerly housed a 1,800-seat ballpark that hosted the Minneapolis Millers and the St. Paul Saints. Walker hired master architect, Harry Wild Jones to design a 500,000 sq. ft. warehouse for the Butler Brothers Company, a mail order retailing firm. Their building at 1st Avenue North and 6th Street, completed in 1913, was the largest wholesale warehouse west of Chicago. Originally built for offices and wholesale warehousing, the old place occupies half a city block. Twice as long as it is wide, the building is divided in half by a 3′ thick fire wall. When it was completed, the Minneapolis Journal called it, “one of the most commanding buildings in Minneapolis”. The interior is built with massive timber beams and posts, cut from Douglas fir cut near Aitkin, Minnesota. The columns are 24 inches wide at the bottom level.
The basement was used as a horse stable, to accommodate deliveries. The lower level also contained three large coal-fired boilers for heating. Mechanical elevators were used to move goods throughout the building. Its Gothic brick exterior invokes Italian architecture and references Louis Sullivan’s “Chicago School”. The Butler Brothers made good use of their new facility. A small goods retailer with a growing mail order business, the company used the building as a distribution center and showroom. For many years business boomed. In the 1930’s, Butler Brothers developed the Ben Franklin Stores and Federated Stores. After the Second World War, the Butler Brothers was one of the largest wholesalers in the country. In 1950 the Ben Franklin Company started using the for storage. There used to be a rail spur out back, but as highways were built and overbuilt around the Twin Cities, trucking started to compete with the railroads. The downtown location and vertical design of the Butler Building made it less and less desirable for its original purposes. In 1960 the Butler Brothers was purchased for $53 million by Ohio based City Products Corporation.
The Butler Brothers building sat empty for much of the next decade, but it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and a year later the building was purchased by Washington, D. C. based developer Charles Coyer. Plans were drawn up to revive the aging warehouse and create a large an office-retail complex in the eastern half of the building. Renovation was completed in 1974 and the building was officially renamed Butler Square. The building’s renovation was recognized with an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects in 1976.
