In August we told you that the walls at Oakland’s on 9th were stuffed with newspaper from 1889, the year the building went up. We have now gone back and actually read the pages in the restoration photographs, and we owe you a correction. The newsprint packed into at least one of these walls is from Sunday, February 17, 1985, and the front of it is a picture of Prince.
What the photographs actually show
Two images survive from the job. The first was taken on April 12, 2019, three days into the restoration, when a plaster wall was opened and a cavity between the studs turned out to be packed with wads of yellowed newspaper. Look closely and the pages are not Victorian at all. There is a full comics page, the multi-panel kind that did not appear in American newspapers until the 1890s, and a department-store advertisement for Donaldson’s with the headline “Sew your own for Spring and Save.” Somebody stuffed that wall in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth.
The second image, from March 2, 2021, settles the date. It shows one of those pages, smoothed flat and held up on the 9th Street sidewalk in front of the brownstone. It is the front of the Sunday entertainment and arts section, page 1G, and the dateline reads Sunday, February 17, 1985. The paper is the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, the name the morning paper carried between the 1982 merger of the Star and the Tribune and its 1987 renaming as the Star Tribune.
Prince, on the front of the section, the week before the Grammys
The lead story is a readers’ pop music survey, and the headline that survives on the torn page says a Minneapolis act had won “all 5 categories.” The photograph under it is Prince, in ruffles, one gloved hand raised, credited to staff photographer David Brewster, with a line sending readers to page 8G, where “pop music critic Jon Bream agrees with readers.” The printed results begin with Purple Rain, by Prince and the Revolution, as best album.
Consider the timing. Purple Rain had come out the previous June. Nine days after this paper landed on doorsteps, on February 26, 1985, Prince collected his first three Grammy awards; a month after that, on March 25, he won an Academy Award for the film’s score. The Sunday paper inside our wall is from the exact week Minneapolis was the centre of the pop universe, and a Minneapolis reader was being told, in print, that the city’s own had swept the poll.
Below the fold is a review of a touring exhibition of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the collection of the Vienna academy, illustrated with Pieter de Hooch’s “Family in a Courtyard,” with a note that the show would travel on to Houston and San Diego. Prince on top, Old Masters underneath: a very Minneapolis Sunday.
Why 1985, and why it matters for the building’s story
Newspaper does not get into a wall on its own. Somebody opens the wall, does work, and packs the cavity with whatever is to hand before closing it up, and the date on the paper is a floor on when that happened. We already knew the building’s outline: the 1889 permit for a three-storey brick apartment house with a brownstone front, its long middle life as the Delta Hotel, and the 1960 permit under which owner Erwin Sego turned the hotel into 18 apartments and six sleeping rooms. A February 1985 paper tells us that someone was still opening these walls and patching them a quarter-century after that conversion, in the building’s apartment years, long before the 2016 fire and the restoration that began in April 2019.
It also tells us something about how history gets written, including on this website. The 1889 date in our August post was an assumption dressed as a fact: old building, old wall, old paper. The photographs were sitting in the owner’s own archive the whole time, and reading them took ten minutes. We would rather correct ourselves than let it stand.
Where the rest of the story lives
If you want to see what a Minneapolis paper looked like in the building’s early decades, the Minnesota Historical Society’s newspaper hub is the place to start. For the building itself, read who built Oakland’s on 9th, the story of the reclaimed materials that went back into it, and the answer to whether the restoration won a preservation award. The National Park Service’s preservation briefs describe exactly this approach: let the building tell you what it is, then check it against the record.
The walls are closed up again now, with twenty-first-century mechanicals behind the original brick and plaster, and every studio comes fully furnished with a full kitchen, fast Wi-Fi, all utilities and free laundry, a block’s walk from the skyway rather than connected to it. Book a night, a week or a month, or call (612) 314-5124, and sleep inside a building that keeps its own newspaper clippings.
Keep reading: Can You Walk From Downtown Minneapolis to the Stone Arch Bridge? A Route From 9th Street