1887 Queen Anne mansion on Park Avenue in Minneapolis lists for $599,900

When the Harry F. Legg House first came to be shortly before the turn of the 20th century, it was one of many mansions along Park Avenue that housed Minneapolis’ wealthiest residents.

Named for its original occupant, the owner of a downtown jewelry store, the nearly 140-year-old house is ready for a new owner to continue its history, listed at $599,900.

Prominent architect George H. Hoit designed the house in 1887 in the elaborate Queen Anne style, with a turret, steep-pitched roof and stained-glass windows.

While the home is on the National Register of Historic Places and even has its own Wikipedia page, the Elliot Park neighborhood around it has substantially changed from its upper-class past. The five-bedroom home was even briefly a halfway house for formerly incarcerated men a few years ago.

The home’s current owner, Ali Nkosi, said he first saw the house years ago while working as a commercial real estate appraiser for Hennepin County.

“I fell in love with the structure, the design, the architectural details,” the 40-year-old real estate investor said.

Nkosi bought the house in 2019 but has not lived in the home, zoned for residential or some commercial uses. The operators of the men’s transitional housing rented it briefly but broke the lease and moved out after a few months. Since then, Nkosi has offered the 3,200-square-foot house as a short-term Airbnb rental or event venue for weddings, family reunions and murder-mystery parties.

Recent decades have seen many of the mansions that once lined Park Avenue demolished or converted into offices, nonprofits and other institutions.

But in its heyday, the avenue was “Minneapolis’ answer to Summit Avenue in St. Paul,” said Ryan Knoke, a Park Avenue historian and one-time resident of the area who has led walking tours there since 2008.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Park Avenue roadway was as narrow as a side street, featuring large lots, 10-foot boulevards, majestic trees and grandiose mansions with deep setbacks.

“A grand Victorian promenade, if you will,” Knoke said.

One stretch, called the “Golden Mile,” was home to the city’s richest lumber and flour barons. The Legg House was just a couple of blocks north of that, in a neighborhood just a notch down the socioeconomic scale that housed upper-middle-class professionals and business owners.

What happened to change Park Avenue’s character was a classic example of “be careful what you wish for,” Knoke said. Like many geographic changes, it involved cars.

When automobiles first became available in the early years of the 20th century, they were a status symbol only the wealthy could afford, including, of course, Park Avenue residents.

Park Avenue was the first Minneapolis street paved with asphalt (which surrounding residents paid to have done). Its residents “were so proud of their automobiles, that every year, all along Park Avenue on June 21 — the longest day of the year — they would have a parade of autos to show them off,” Knoke said.

But the pavement also made Park a convenient thoroughfare for trucks transporting goods into downtown Minneapolis. And as cars became more affordable for the masses, suburbs sprouted on former farmland, with residents commuting to the city.

In the 1940s, the city turned Park and nearby Portland avenues into one-way streets going opposite directions and, a decade later, widened them. With the broad boulevards gone and increase in traffic noise, the elites fled to quieter enclaves around Lake of the Isles and Lake Minnetonka.

“What I always think is interesting about the life cycle of Park Avenue is the one thing [early residents] had the most civic pride in was their beloved street,” Knoke said. “But that was the very thing that also drove them out.”

In later decades, the area became “really a tough place,” Knoke said. Most of the Park Avenue mansions were torn down; those remaining became commercial institutional or rental properties.

“It’s really a shame that they didn’t just keep the history on Park,” Nkosi said. “There’s a lot of history there that [has] been approved to be demolished or rebuilt. It’s really quite sad.”

But the area has been going through a turnaround in recent years, Knoke said.

“Now if you look at the Harry F. Legg House, it’s beautifully restored and majestic,” he said.

Legg would recognize the home’s current interior, which Nkosi has revived, full of elaborate carved-wood flourishes around doorways and its grand front staircase. One of the home’s four fireplaces features an intricate carved mantel, a decorative metal surround and tile hearth. A bathroom contains a claw-foot tub with an oak ring around its top edge.

The home’s layout reflects the days when even middle-class families often had live-in help. It “clearly represents the social lifestyle of the period,” in the words of its National Registry entry,

On the second floor, there are three big bedrooms in front. The two smaller bedrooms in back are accessible via a staircase off the kitchen.

“It kind of feels like a servant area and a homeowner’s area,” Nkosi said.

The house “looks really good,” per Nkosi. But it does lack some modern features, such as central air, or has others that don’t meet city code but are grandfathered in, such as narrower doorways.

“It’s an old house, so it doesn’t function perfectly,” Nkosi said. “But it’s been a great house.”

Elizabeth Sibet of EXP Realty (esibet@gmail.com, 763-221-9397) has the $599,900 listing.