My woodworking shop is located in the basement of a historic building complex in Minneapolis. The complex is currently known as the 2010 Artblok. The building houses a few dozen local artists, consignment kitchens for area restaurants, a couple of screen printing studios, a few pottery studios, a metalworking facility, a theatre company, a mead brewery, and two or three woodworkers, including myself.
The building I work out of is actually one of a complex of buildings, connected by skyways and tunnels. The facility began as a General Mills research laboratory in the ’20s. It is reported to be the place where Cheerios were invented, back in the ’30s or ’40s. After General Mills moved out it’s changed hands a few times, and became an artist studio space in the 2000s. I moved into the space in 2018. Prior to that, I had been working out of my garage, which was unusable for at least 4 months during the winter every year.
It’s an interesting set of buildings, there’s clearly a lot of history here. The rooms have mostly been cleared out from whatever purpose they served for General Mills, but you can still find some remnants around. The hallway outside my shop has sported a “bioreactor fermentor” for years. No one seems to know what to do with it. The freight elevator is a frightening old beast, the kind where you lift the door gates by hand and control the height of the elevator directly with Up and Down buttons; no floor selection here. The bathrooms speak of a much busier building, with a bank of six sinks along the wall (I’ve never seen more than two people in the facilities at once).
While they have since moved out, the complex used to host a local glassblowing studio, with four huge glassblowing furnaces taking up the floor of this big space. I wonder what this space was originally built for. Maybe assembling or testing large wheat processing machines? Now this huge area largely used for storing artists’ works and festival equipment.
It’s a neat space to be able to work out of. The artists who work here participate in the area’s art festivals, so you can walk around and see what everyone makes.