Very cool, thanks for posting it, Paul!

That's awesome!

Thanks Paul for sharing this cool pic and a little bit of history.

Considering its weight and amount of electricity it must have consumed if the tower was found, as cool as it would look, I don't know if it'd be such a good idea to remount it. I'd totally love to see it erected independently somewhere close by though, turned on for special events. Say, instead of chopping a tree down use the tower as the official Christmas tree (not that I think many people would actually go for that).

Sure wish I had been around to see it.
I can't imagine how cool it would have been.

Photo above courtesy Midwest Architectural Archives. 

The tower came down March 8, 1967. According to the DNT's report at the time, "The building's owners had it removed due to high maintenance costs." The owners at the time would have been the Hartley Family Trust, the same owners who had the top three floors and Moorish dome of the Temple Opera Block removed in 1942.

Rumors for the reason behind that abound. Many suggest the Temple Block was compromised so that the NorShor's tower would stand out more as landmark. The one that makes me chuckle--and this has been reported by architectural historians as well as Hartley family members--was that Guilford Hartley, who built the Orpheum/Orpheum garage in 1910, had the Temple Block shortened because he thought the Moorish flourishes on the Romanesque Temple Block clashed with his brand new, neoclassical Orpheum Theatre. Well, Guilford Hartley died in 1922, and the floors weren't removed until 1942. (His son, also named Guilford Hartley, was part of the Hartley family Trust in 1942....)

By the way, the Hartley Trust didn't convert the Orpheum into the NorShor. It owned the buildings, but the Minnesota Amusement Co. leased the Orpheum/Garage and arranged and paid for the transformation.

I'd love to somehow make that "photo documentary" ("121 Years of Performance and Film") available on PDD or the new NorShor web site after Saturday's event. It's a powerpoint right now--does anyone have any ideas how to turn it into something that can be viewed on a web site?

slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/

Tony, if you can send me the jpgs, or the powerpoint file, I can make a gallery on PDD and the NorShor site.

Just looked--could not find renovation cost among my records, Adam.

Here's a fun tidbit from the DNT July 10, 1941, day before NorShor opened::

"[The Tower] was designed to stand a normal wind pressure of 100 miles per hour. The foundations carrying the tower were carried down to the bedrock."

Zach, I checked. I think the confusion comes in because this statement is stuck in a paragraph about the tower (from 1941 DNT article), but it seems the 300 tons of structural steel was part of the entire renovation:

"With reference to the structure, over 300 tons of structural steel were used to form the skeleton of the building."

But how and where did they add that much structural steel to an existing building? Could this reference have been about the tower and its support structure?

Gary - I'm going to pretend that you didn't write that we should put a windmill on top of the Nor Shor

I'm interested in the laker in the background. How far in can you zoom before the iq starts to break up?