Mary Merrill Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board Headquarters

Size: 3.8 acres

Neighborhood: Hawthorne

Service Area: North

Commissioner District: 2

Acquisition and Development

The building is the first office space that the park board has owned. Until the purchase of the former warehouse and office building for its headquarters, the park board had always leased space.

The first park boards leased space in commercial buildings, including a building owned by the first president of the park board, Charles Loring, on Washington Avenue at 2nd Avenue South.

The park board later had offices in the basement of the County Court House until 1902 when it moved into the third floor of City Hall, where it remained until the 1960s. With the growth of city government in the 1960s there was less and less room for the park board. The board’s annual report in 1962 noted that the park board had been under pressure for some time to move its offices out of City Hall.

In 1966 the park board was finally forced to move and it selected space in the Public Safety Building near City Hall. That space, however, never was well-suited to the park board and in 1979 the board moved its offices to the Flour Exchange across from City Hall. In yet another move in the early 1990s, the park board and its staff moved once again, across the street to the Grain Exchange.

When the park board was informed of a steep increase in rent in 2002 for space that was ill-suited to the board’s work anyway, the board began to look at alternatives to renting space. The answer was found in an office-warehouse building facing the Mississippi River upstream from Broadway Avenue. The building was purchased in 2002 and renovated for occupancy in 2003. The land and building were acquired for approximately $3.5 million. Subsequently the park board has acquired from the city the riverfront in front of the headquarters, as well as the riverbanks upstream to Olson Park.

2018 Building Rededication The MPRB headquarters building was renamed in 2018 as the Mary Merrill Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board Headquarters. Superintendent Emeritus Merrill began her career at Powderhorn Park in 1972 and rose through the ranks of the Recreation Department to become, in 1999, the first woman and person of color to serve as MPRB Superintendent. After retiring in 2003, she became the first former Superintendent to be elected as a Park Commissioner in 2006. Merrill came out of retirement to serve as Interim Superintendent in 2018.

“Acquisition and Development” section compiled and written by David C. Smith; other text by MPRB staff.