The story of how a boarded-up 1889 brownstone became a working extended-stay building on 9th Street usually gets told the way construction stories always get told: permits, contractors, budgets, sixty-five windows and four thousand pounds of lime mortar. All of that is true.
But go back through the project’s own photo archive and a different story keeps surfacing, one that is easy to miss because nobody invoiced for it. A surprising amount of Oakland’s on 9th was put back together by people who were not being paid to be here.
Three painters who gave up a Saturday
In January 2021, with the building close to the finish line and the trim still raw, three professional painters turned up on their day off. Jason the Painter, Steve of Honey Badger Painting, and Ben of Bucket Painting spent most of a Saturday making the trim look, in the owner’s words, world class.
These are competitors, in the ordinary run of things. They came because it was a historic building and they wanted it to shine again. If you run your hand along the painted woodwork in the hallways, some of that finish is theirs.
The graduates who came back for the final push
At the end of that same month there was one more sprint. Everyone who had worked on the building and moved on came back for a weekend to push it over the line — a whole crew of them, photographed on the stairs, seated, the owner joked, front to back by supervisory authority.
The line the owner wrote under that photograph is the closest thing this project has to a thesis: the Oaklands has been blessed by the people who supported it — the City, the online community that followed the work, the volunteers, and the workers. Four groups. Only one of them was on a payroll.
Doors from houses that did not survive
Two neighbours, Ezra and Christina, donated doors they had salvaged from houses torn down on their own block. They spend their own time restoring a Painted Lady, so they know exactly what is lost when a nineteenth-century house comes down and exactly what a door like that is worth to a building that needs one.
Those doors matter more than they sound. Almost nothing original survived inside this building — there is precisely one door still hanging in its original location, the old coal-room door, scarred by a basement fire in the 1970s and submerged for three winters when the building had no roof. Everything else had to be found. Some of it was found by neighbours.
The reuse ethic ran right through the finish work. An old pocket door, no longer useful as a door, was hung from its own top brackets and levelled with its original adjusters to become a set of cubby shelves. The hardware still works. It just does not roll any more.
The staircase, and where its missing parts came from
The grand staircase is the thing everyone photographs now, and it is the thing that nearly did not make it. It sat under open sky through three Minnesota winters. Most of what you climb today is original; the parts that were gone were donated from the Grand Hotel and worked back in.
It is an odd, good feeling to know that the balusters under your hand came from two buildings rather than one.
The archivist who found the builder living next door
The most satisfying donation was not physical at all. Kathleen Bell, an archivist and genealogist, took on the question of who actually built this place — and found that the original owner and builder lived in the house immediately next door. In an old aerial drawing his house is there with an arrow on it, and the Oaklands is still an empty lot beside it. She wrote up a synopsis of his life and handed it over.
That research is the backbone of everything we have since been able to say about who built Oakland’s on 9th. It exists because somebody with the right skills decided to spend them on a stranger’s building.
Why a guest might care
Mostly you will not think about any of this. You will think about whether the kitchen has what you need, whether the laundry is free (it is), and how long the walk is to work. But the reason this building still exists at all is that a lot of people who had no obligation to it decided it was worth their weekend.
The building was very nearly demolished, and its long slide from 1889 luxury apartments to the Delta Hotel began when the streetcar system consolidated under Thomas Lowry and families could finally live away from downtown — a story we tell in full here. If you want the wider context for why old buildings like this one get saved or lost, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Service preservation briefs are both worth an hour. For the Minneapolis version of the story, Mill City Museum is a twenty-minute walk from the front door.
Come see what they did
Oakland’s on 9th is at 215 South 9th Street in downtown Minneapolis — furnished studios with full kitchens, WiFi, all utilities, heat and free laundry included, by the night, the week or the month, with no contract. The Skyway is a block’s walk, not a connection, and some units are pet friendly.
Book at our booking page or call (612) 314-5124 and ask for a room on the staircase side. If you are in town for something grander, our sister property 300 Clifton is a restored 1880s mansion in Loring Park, and Minneapolis Trolley Tours will show you the rest of the old city from a vintage trolley.
Keep reading: How Does Check-In Work at Oakland’s on 9th? Contactless Keycodes and What to Expect on Arrival