A Labor of Love

摘要

The pigeons have been evicted. The grandeur restored. The legacy preserved. Built in 1888 to house the operations of James J. Hill's railroad empire (the Great Northern Railway), the renovated building at 281 Kellogg Boulevard has found a new place in St. Paul's future. When Hill asked his in-house architect, James Brodie, to construct the office building in St. Paul's Lowertown district, he kept the massive devastation from the Great Chicago Fire in mind. Having leveled 18,000 buildings and the downtown railroad depots more than a decade earlier, Hill was well aware of the susceptibility of timber and iron-framed structures.