A developer wants to tear down an old Minneapolis flour mill. Some neighbors want to save it.

In the heart of Minneapolis, along busy Hiawatha Avenue, there are enough stoplights to give drivers a chance to gaze at the old flour milling complexes and wonder why they sit idle in the middle of a metro area.

To some, they’re empty eyesores that are a magnet for trespassers, graffiti and drug users, a relic of bygone days when Minneapolis was the flour-milling capital of the country in the early 1900s. To others, they’re an important part of the city’s history and shouldn’t be torn down to make way for another upscale apartment building with a rooftop deck.

The former Nokomis Mill on the southeast corner of Hiawatha and 35th Street was built in 1914 and operated until 2019, when it was closed by agribusiness conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland Co.

The steel elevator, original 1914 mill, and numerous steel and concrete bins may soon be demolished, like other grain mills that came tumbling down as companies consolidated operations. A small group of preservationists hopes to prevent that from happening, and instead want to see the property repurposed into affordable housing or a brewery.

The Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Commission voted Feb. 4 to approve a demolition permit for the Nokomis Mill. A new construction offshoot of the Zachary Group applied for the permit with plans to buy the property from ADM, and is interested in developing housing there.

The demolition permit is being appealed by Joel Albers, a health economist and pharmacist who leads a small group called Save Minneapolis from the Wrecking Ball that formed about a year ago to save the historic Bethany Lutheran Church building. A public hearing on the appeal will be Tuesday at the Minneapolis City Council’s Business, Housing and Zoning Committee.

Albers calls the former Nokomis Mill at 3501 Hiawatha Av. “iconic.”

“These mills are just so unique,” Albers said.

The company that wants to demolish the buildings calls them “immensely blighted,” saying it costs $13,000 per week just to secure the property. That’s $676,000 per year.

Cousins Louis Zachary and Steven Zachary started the subsidiary Zachary Construction Group about a year ago, and this is their first project. Louis Zachary has worked in construction for 35 years, most recently as president of construction at Doran Cos. The Zachary Group has specialized in risk management insurance brokerage services for over 20 years. About a year ago, Steven proposed they start their own Black-owned construction firm.

“You see a lot of developers and contractors fleeing from Minneapolis and St. Paul,” Louis Zachary said. “Steven and I are both born and raised in the Twin Cities and in the metro area, and we still believe in the town.”

This building, however, is not salvageable, they say.

“There’s no viable economic use for that property other than demolition,” Steven Zachary said.

Construction of a railway in 1864 along the Minnehaha-Hiawatha corridor led to the development of mills and grain elevators, and Minneapolis became the country’s flour milling capital from about 1880 to 1930, when Buffalo, N.Y., stole the crown.

Once home to dozens of grain elevators, Minneapolis has since seen most of them demolished by consolidation and progress.

With its flour-dusted glory days behind it, the Nokomis Mill is now prone to graffiti and trespassers who sometimes leave needles and syringes behind, which is why it has 24-hour guards, surveillance cameras, and 6-foot-high barbed wire fences. It would cost about $35,000 to remove some 60 sections of graffiti tags to comply with orders issued by the city, according to the Zachary Group.

“Nevertheless, vandals, squatters and criminals have continuously compromised the site for nefarious activities,” the Zachary Group wrote in a letter to the city. “It is our firm belief that there is no reasonable amount of money that can be spent to prevent the criminal activities without demolishing all existing structures.”

The 2.4-acre complex is located on “ancestral homelands of the Dakota people” and the Minnehaha-Hiawatha corridor, which was part of the Fort Snelling Military Reservation established in 1819 at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. “We believe fervently that these beginnings of stolen Native American land where this grain mill sits need to be reconciled,” Albers wrote in his appeal.

Demolishing the property would amount to “erasure of people’s history,” he said. As an example, he points to the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews at the remains of the site of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

He argues there are viable economic alternatives to adapt the buildings for reuse. For example, the former Layhart grain elevators were converted into housing, the former Bunge elevator was converted into a housing cooperative, and the Mill Ruins apartments and museum are an example of adaptive reuse. He’d like to see the corridor converted into green spaces and bike paths.

But the city’s Community Planning and Economic Development (CPED) found there were no “reasonable alternative uses” that wouldn’t require significant financial investment.

The Zachary Group looked at converting the mill building into 25 housing units and demolishing the rest, and estimated the cost at $28 million, or over $1.1 million per unit, compared to $400,000 per unit if they demolish everything and build 240 units.

The Zachary Group argued the city should assess what’s culturally significant, saying mills of its era were “havens of exploitation, subjugation and disenfranchisement.”

“Let us not romanticize the truth,” they wrote.