Guests notice it on the way up the stairs. Between the landings of Oakland’s on 9th there is coloured glass — amber, deep blue, a geometric pattern that has nothing to do with 2026 and everything to do with 1889. The question that follows is always the same: is that real, or is it new?
It is a fair question, and the honest answer has more than one part.
The stained glass came with the building
Oakland’s on 9th was built in 1889 at 215 South 9th Street as a brick apartment house with a brownstone front, designed by Harry Wild Jones. Jones is not a household name outside Minnesota, but he should be: the same architect built the domed Lakewood Memorial Chapel at 3600 Hennepin Avenue, whose clerestory of twenty-four Art Nouveau stained-glass windows doubles as a sundial. Coloured glass in the stair hall of a 9th Street apartment building is a much humbler thing than that. But it is the same architect, in the same city, working with the same instinct — that light coming through glass is worth spending money on.
That instinct is why the glass mattered enough to fight for a hundred and thirty years later.
The 2019 GoFundMe
When restoration work started in the spring of 2019, the stained glass got its own campaign. It ran on GoFundMe that June, separate from everything else, and it worked. That is unusual. Most restoration budgets treat decorative glass as the line item you cut when the roof costs more than you thought — and at Oakland’s, the roof genuinely did cost more than anyone thought, because for three years there had not been one.
What three winters without a roof does to a building
A fire in 2016 left the building a shell. It then sat open to the weather for roughly three years — snow falling directly onto the grand staircase, water standing in the basement, the boiler system destroyed by the freeze-thaw of winters it was never meant to face. Before the fire and after it, the building appeared on lists of the most endangered structures in Minnesota. We have written elsewhere about how it avoided the wrecking ball.
Glass does not survive that neutrally. Lead came goes soft and sags; putty fails; frames rot out from under the panel. Any conversation about “restoring” stained glass in a building like this is really a conversation about triage.
The part we will not tidy up
Here is where the record is genuinely mixed, and we would rather say so than smooth it over.
In June 2019 the project posted that the stained-glass windows were being restored, and thanked the people funding it. In October 2020 the window specialist — a carpenter named Will, who worked all 65 windows in the building start to finish over roughly eighteen months — was photographed putting the last of the caulk around the outside of the stained-glass windows, which reads like glass that was saved and reset. But a March 2021 retrospective from the same account describes a meeting that concluded there was no way to save the original windows after the fire.
The most likely reading is that those two statements are about different windows: the ordinary sash windows were beyond saving and were replaced, while the decorative glass was salvaged, repaired and set back into restored openings. That is what the photographs show, and it is what usually happens on a project like this. But we are not going to state it as settled fact when our own record says two things. If you want the definitive answer, ask at the front desk — somebody who was on site will tell you exactly which panel is which.
Sixty-five windows, one at a time
The unglamorous work around the glass is worth knowing about, because it is the reason the building is comfortable now. Every one of the 65 window openings was taken apart: old sash removed, brick moulding and stone sills restored, new units set, painted, caulked and foamed. It took about a year and a half, and for six months of it the work ran seven days a week. The masonry got the same treatment — every joint repointed with lime mortar mixed on site to match the original, more than 4,000 pounds of it, much of it laid at night to stay out of the neighbours’ way. There is a fuller account of that work here, and a separate one about what turned up inside the walls.
This kind of window-by-window work is exactly what the National Park Service’s Preservation Briefs recommend and almost nobody actually does, and it is the sort of project the National Trust for Historic Preservation exists to argue for. It is slower and more expensive than tearing the openings out and starting over. It is also the only way you end up with 1889 glass in a building you can book by the night.
The other glass you will notice
Stained glass is not the only glass in the building. The light fixtures throughout are antiques, professionally restored, and no two studios have quite the same one — flush mounts with etched shades, globes, crystal sconces in the stairwell above a red runner. Each unit got its own.
It is a small thing, and it is the kind of small thing that tells you what sort of place you are staying in.
Come and look at it
Oakland’s on 9th is furnished month-to-month studio living in downtown Minneapolis — a night, a week or a month, no contract, with full kitchens, free laundry, WiFi and all utilities included. It is a block’s walk to the skyway (the building is not connected to it), and walking distance to the Armory, Target Center, Orchestra Hall and the Nicollet Mall. Some studios are pet friendly.
Book at secure.webrez.com/hotel/3097, or call us at (612) 314-5124 and ask which studio has the best light. We have opinions.
Keep reading: Is downtown Minneapolis safe? An honest answer.