History

The California Building’s story starts not as one building, but two. The southern, two-story section was built in 1915 as a bottling factory for the Minnesota Fibre Bottle Co., designed by Minneapolis architect Christopher A. Boehme and built by S.M. Klarquist & Son. Its brick commercial detailing still shows on the façade today: polychromatic brickwork, a denticulated cornice, decorative pilasters.

In 1920, the taller six-story section rose behind it: a reinforced concrete cereal mill built and owned by the U.S. Cereal Company, at a moment when Minneapolis was the flour-milling capital of the world, powered along the Mississippi at St. Anthony Falls. This mill ran on electricity instead of river power, a modern departure from its river-dependent neighbors. From its earliest days, the building was a source of local employment, part of the industrial backbone that gave Northeast Minneapolis its working character.

Franklin Transformer Manufacturing Company was founded in 1929 by Guy Pugh, funded, fittingly, by the workplace efficiency awards he’d won. The company had moved into the California Building by the early 1930s. The original product was a modest one: small electrical transformers. Battery chargers and battery testing equipment followed, and by 1941 a new fast charger for automotive batteries had pushed the young company’s annual sales past $1 million, growth that meant steady, local jobs at a time when the country was climbing out of the Depression.

World War II turned the operation over entirely to defense work: manufacturing quartz crystals for radio transmitting and receiving equipment, and battery chargers engineered to withstand extreme cold, deployed extensively on the Russian front. After the war, Franklin moved into consumer appliances, growing quickly through new plants and acquisitions across the Midwest and Canada. In November 1962, the company was purchased by the Studebaker Corporation, becoming the Franklin Appliance Division of Studebaker, one of eight divisions in the larger corporation. (Longtime neighbors’ memories of Studebakers filling the parking lot likely trace to this era, when the building served as the Division’s headquarters and corporate visitors came calling.) By 1975, Franklin’s presence here had wound down as operations consolidated elsewhere. White Consolidated Industries acquired Franklin Manufacturing Company, and later Electrolux acquired WCI.

The building saw a handful of smaller tenants afterward (a drapery company, a mail-sorting operation, a metal fabricator), but by the early 1990s it sat largely idle, one of many aging industrial buildings in Northeast Minneapolis being eyed for demolition, its decades as a source of local jobs seemingly at an end.

By 1991, the California Building stood on the edge of ruin. Unpaid back taxes had pushed it to the brink of foreclosure by Hennepin County, and with only weeks before ownership would revert to the county, its future was genuinely uncertain. Speculative buyers were already circling. Neighbors, wary of the handful of artists and fabricators already occupying the space, wanted the building torn down, or turned back into conventional industrial use.

New ownership stepped in with a different vision: turn it into lasting workspace built for fine artists, not a temporary stopover. The mission from day one was simple, and at the time nearly unheard of in Northeast Minneapolis: “We are here to stay.”

That commitment landed at exactly the right moment. Just across the river, downtown Minneapolis’s Warehouse District gallery scene, long a home base for the city’s working artists, was already cracking under pressure. The building that once housed the Rifle Sport Alternative Art Gallery was demolished in 1988; when the Target Center opened in the heart of the district in 1990, the direction was clear. Artists knew the pattern well: as a neighborhood’s cultural cachet rises, rents follow, and artists get pushed out.

There were already artists scattered through other warehouses in Northeast Minneapolis at the time, occupying space informally, the way artists often do in industrial buildings on their way to something else. What made the California Building different was intent: it was purchased specifically to become a permanent home for artists, not simply occupied by them along the way. That makes it the first building in what is now the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District created for that express purpose. It was this decision to build for the long term, not just the short one, that helped set the concentration of artists in Northeast Minneapolis in motion, the beginning of what has since grown into the largest concentration of artists in the state.

Some tenants were already there when new ownership arrived, and stayed on. Among them were metal fabricators Tim and Tom Kelly, whose industrial-scale work relied on drive-in access near the building’s loading dock, a direct link to the building’s manufacturing past. When Tim retired, Tom continued the business and began exploring his own artistry, making furniture, lighting, and decorative fixtures. He kept his space in the building for 43 years, longer than any other tenant, and a living example of what “here to stay” was meant to mean, for community as much as for jobs.

Around the same time, painter Florence Hill arrived at the California Building in the early 1990s after being displaced from a previous studio by rising rents, the very pattern the building had been created to interrupt. Hill went on to lead a figure-drawing cooperative for 50 years, opening her studio every Sunday afternoon so artists at any level could gather, draw from a model, and sharpen their craft together. “It gives me stability,” she said of the standing tradition. “The door will be open and the coffee will be on.”

Word spread quickly beyond the building, too. Artists like Aldo Moroni and Clarence Morgan found space here as downtown’s gallery scene contracted, and by 1993 the shift was visible enough that the Star Tribune took notice: “The artists are coming to Northeast.” As more artists followed, the neighborhood around the California Building grew into the arts district it is today.

That growth took deliberate work at every scale. The building’s owners set the table for that community to form, creating the conditions, spaces, and open doors within the building that let tenants build community with each other through shared events and everyday encounters. In the neighborhood, artists carried an unfair reputation at the time, and early relationships with neighbors took real work to build. The neighborhood’s own Bottineau Neighborhood Association was initially skeptical of artists moving in, favoring a return to traditional industrial use instead, so the owners got involved directly, joining the board, sponsoring events, and showing up to meetings to help build trust and change that perception over time. Separately, the owners worked alongside the original group of artists who helped launch Art-A-Whirl^®, the studio-crawl tradition that still draws crowds more than thirty years later, opening the building’s doors so the public could see the artists’ work firsthand. Around this same time, the building’s owners opened Mill City Coffee inside the California Building, another bridge space where art, food, and conversation could mix freely with the wider neighborhood.

More than three decades later, the California Building hasn’t stopped being a factory. It’s just making something different now, and employing people in a different way. Today it’s home to more than 110 working studio artists, across every discipline from painting and ceramics to sculpture, textiles, and design, each one a working professional whose livelihood is anchored in this building.

Mill City Coffee ran for about a decade before passing to new hands; today, that same space and spirit continue at Mojo Coffee Gallery, a community hub both inside the building and across the neighborhood.

The building has grown roots outward, too. California Street Farm, an urban farm on site, reflects that same commitment to community: supporting local food, small-scale entrepreneurship, and local jobs, and giving people another reason to gather here. The farm runs a weekly farmstand every Monday, 4:30 to 6:30pm, June through October, and operates as a CSA. californiastreetfarm.com

The neighborhood the California Building helped seed has grown into its reputation. Today the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District packs more than 1,200 independent working artists into a single square mile of repurposed industrial warehouses, buildings built, like this one, on a history of manufacturing and labor, now home to creative enterprise instead of production lines. That density and commitment to the arts has earned the district the title of #1 Arts District in America multiple times in USA Today’s 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards. Art-A-Whirl^®shows that scale every May: billed by NEMAA as the largest open artist studio tour in the country, it drew roughly 120,000 visitors in 2025, with more than 1,600 artists, galleries, and businesses taking part across 100+ locations in 2026. What began as one building’s stubborn commitment to permanence has become a district that draws visitors from across the country, supports hundreds of working artists’ livelihoods, and anchors Northeast Minneapolis’s identity: a community built, brick by brick and artist by artist, to stay.