Wyman Partridge Building
1916
PDF of Wyman Partridge History
The twelve-story Wyman Partridge Building, located at 110 North Fifth Street, was built in 1916, as a warehouse for the Wyman Partridge Company. The building was designed by Kees & Colburn for the Company in a Renaissance-inspired style. Wyman Partridge was both a manufacturer and wholesaler of dry goods. It was to be an annex to their older building, the Wyman Building, at 400 First Avenue North, which could be accessed by a skyway, the first in Minneapolis. Kees and Colburn had also designed three other buildings in the Warehouse District. In the Mill District, they had designed the Advance Thresher and Emerson Plow buildings (both of which are now the Canopy Hotel) and the Pittsburg Plate Glass Building (now American Trio Lofts).
The Wyman Partridge Building features a buff brick façade with a terra cotta base, a first-floor entry with a canopy with decorative brackets, and decorative spandrel panels between the first and second floors. The building also features pilasters on the fourth through the ninth floors, a terra cotta parapet with pediments, decorative reliefs, and the company’s name at the top of the building in the center. The sides of the building are clad in a less finished, dark brick. The building is part of the Historic Warehouse District, listed on The National Register of Historic Buildings in 1989.
The building was constructed by the H.N. Leighton Company on a site previously occupied by a barn and stable and purchased, after considerable negotiations, for $24,000. The Wyman Partridge business had grown considerably between 1905 and 1910, from 75 to 130 salesmen.
In 1930, the Partridge family retired from the dry goods company with the business then controlled by United Dry Goods. The sale did not include the manufacturing side of the business. United Dry Goods’ purchase was part of a plan to develop a national system of plants.
The Minneapolis Tribune reported on April 29, 1934, that the two buildings, the Wyman Partridge Building and the Wyman Building, would combine and become the Wyman Merchandise Mart. The project would cost $100,000 and provide 400,000 square feet of space available for light manufacturing, jobbing, and merchandising. An additional first floor entrance was added. The building had recently been vacated by the Ely-Walker Dry Goods Company, which had purchased Wyman Partridge in 1930. The focus of the Merchandise Mart would be on the textile industry.
Over the years, the building has been adaptively reused as an office building, and it once housed the Glam Slam nightclub, owned by Prince. Other tenants over the years have included: Upjohn Company, Northern Furniture, Carson Pirie Scott, National Upholsters, Midwest Stores, Contemporary and Traditional Furniture Company, and LaMaur.
Finance & Commerce reported on July 12, 2005, that Minneapolis developer Ned Abdul was engaged in “serious discussions” to buy the Wyman Building at 400 First Ave. N. and the adjacent Wyman Partridge Building at 110 Fifth St. N. from Wyman Properties. Abdul’s company, Swervo Development, had purchased older Minneapolis office buildings for eventual conversion to condominium and was close to an agreement with Wyman Properties.
The Wyman Building was listed in the city of Minneapolis records at 243,648 square feet, while the Wyman Partridge Building had 223,912 square feet of space. The Wyman Building was then sixty percent vacant. Wyman Properties had owned the buildings since 1945. The combined estimated market value of the two structures was approximately $8 million, with the Wyman valued at $5.6 million and the Wyman Partridge at $2.4 million.
In 2006, following the purchase, the building underwent a major renovation by Swervo, including exterior restoration, elevators, mechanicals, windows, and restrooms.
In 2006, RJM Construction was hired as the general contractor to relocate the Carmichael Lynch firm to the Wyman Partridge building. The renovated space would include floors eight through twelve, linked by a stylized bleacher stairway. The renovation would include a rooftop patio.
In 2009, the building made the news again when the Star Tribune reported on October 6, 2008, that Carmichael Lynch hoisted a vintage Subaru 360 to its tenth-floor lobby through the removed glass windows.
In 2024, Architectural Castings reported that it had been involved in the replacement of two large terra cotta belt cornices and a large, detailed upper parapet wall for the Wyman Partridge Factory building. The original construction had used glazed terra cotta parts to clad multiple brick walls that were then cracked from differential movement between materials. That issue, along with deterioration of the terra cotta glaze and rust jacking from corroded ferrous connection materials, left the building in need of repair. Replacement pieces were created.