If you have ever stayed in a building put up before the turn of the last century, you have probably run your hand along a strange vertical slot in a doorway and wondered what used to live in it. The answer is almost always a pocket door — and at Oakland’s on 9th, the 1889 brownstone we restored at 215 South 9th Street in downtown Minneapolis, they turned out to be one of the more interesting things the building had to tell us.
What a pocket door actually is
A pocket door does not swing. It slides sideways on a track and disappears into a hollow cavity built inside the wall — the “pocket.” Push it all the way home and the doorway reads as an open archway with no door in sight at all. Pull it back out and you have a solid, full-height wooden door and a closed room.
The whole point is floor space. A swinging door needs a clear arc of about nine square feet to open into, and it needs that arc kept empty forever. A pocket door needs none. In a compact nineteenth-century flat, where every square foot was doing several jobs at once, that was not a luxury detail. It was arithmetic.
Why an 1889 building was full of them
Pocket doors were near their peak in American building when this brownstone went up. Mass-produced sliding hardware — hangers, tracks, adjusters, flush pulls — had become cheap and reliable, and the way people used rooms suited them perfectly. A parlour and a sitting room could be thrown together into one long space for company, then slid shut again into two private rooms afterwards. Doors that vanished were how a small dwelling changed shape through the day.
The National Park Service makes the same point in a broader way in its preservation guidance: the features that give a historic interior its character are frequently the ordinary working ones — the doors, the trim, the stair, the way spaces connect — rather than the ornamental showpieces. Its brief on identifying character-defining elements in historic interiors is worth reading if you own an old building and are trying to work out what actually matters in it.
What 130 years does to a pocket door
Very little about a pocket door ages gracefully. The track is buried inside a wall where nobody can see it, service it, or even reach it without opening up plaster. The hangers carry a heavy slab of solid wood on small steel wheels. The door itself swells and shrinks with a century and a half of Minnesota humidity. And the pocket, being a void inside a wall, is exactly where a hundred years of dust, plaster crumbs and small hardware go to collect.
So they fail quietly and then all at once. One of ours came off its track during the work, which is the classic failure — as we put it at the time, that is the thing with pocket doors, you never know when they will fall off their tracks. Add to that a 2016 fire that left this building a burned-out shell, and three winters standing open to the weather before it had a roof again, and the surprising thing is not how few original doors survived. It is that any did.
What we did with the one that could not be saved
One old pocket door was past rehanging. Rather than skip it, we took it apart and made it into built-in cubby shelves — and kept its own hardware doing the work. The unit hangs from the original top brackets, and the old adjusters, the little threaded fittings that let a carpenter level a sliding door in its opening, were used to level the shelves. The mechanism still moves. It just does not roll anywhere any more.
That is the same philosophy that runs through the rest of the restoration. The reclaimed wood in the studios is not reclaimed from somewhere else — it came out of this building, salvaged before and during the fire work, and went back in as trim, shelving and built-ins. We have written about more of that in the salvaged 1889 details hidden inside Oakland’s on 9th.
What you can actually see today
You do not need a hard hat to read this building any more. The restored woodwork, the original stair, the exposed 1889 brick and the reused timber are all simply part of the studios now. Some of it is obvious. Some of it rewards a slower look — a wider-than-usual reveal beside a doorway, a length of trim whose grain does not match its neighbours because it used to be a floor.
If you want to learn to read an old building this way yourself, the Park Service brief on understanding old buildings through architectural investigation is a genuinely good primer, and the wider Preservation Briefs series covers nearly every material you will meet. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is the place to start if you are trying to save one. And if you want to know who lived behind these doors, the Minnesota Historical Society’s digital newspaper collections are searchable and free.
Stay in it, not just read about it
The studios here are fully furnished and rented by the night, the week or the month, with no contracts — utilities, heat, WiFi and laundry are included, and every studio has a full kitchen. There are three tiers to choose from: Good, Better and Best. We are on South 9th Street downtown, a block from the skyway system — you walk that block outside; the building is not skyway-connected — and within easy reach of the Armory, Target Center and Orchestra Hall.
If historic buildings are the reason you are visiting Minneapolis at all, you are in good company: our friends at 300 Clifton run a Georgian mansion bed and breakfast in Loring Park, and the Pillsbury Club occupies the Charles S. Pillsbury mansion, which you can tour.
Check dates and book a studio, or call us on (612) 314-5124 — we are happy to talk through which studio suits your stay.
Keep reading: Where Do You Put Your Stuff During a Furnished Extended Stay in Downtown Minneapolis?