Northwestern National Life Insurance Company Home Office

About this property

The Northwestern National Life Insurance Company Home Office, was also known as the Loring Park Office Building, and is now a 75 unit boutique apartment complex known as 430 Oak Grove located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was designed by the architecture firm of Hewitt and Brown in the Beaux-Arts style as the headquarters of the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 16, 2012. The building faces Loring Park on the north and is surrounded by residential buildings to the south, St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral to the west, and the Woman's Club of Minneapolis on the east. It has a reinforced concrete structure and is faced with gray Bedford limestone and brick. The front entrance has a Palladian loggia style, with a tall archway flanked by Ionic columns and a porch behind it. The building is significant for its architecture and also for its role in the commerce of Minnesota. The company was established in 1885, and was originally named the "Northwestern Aid Association". It became the Northwestern Life Association in 1888. In 1901, the company's president, William Frank Bechtel, merged the Northwestern Life Association and the National Mutual Life Association into the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company. It was the second-largest life insurance company in the American Midwest after the Northwestern Mutual company in Milwaukee. The company built a headquarters building at 11th and Nicollet, combined with an auditorium for public use, in 1905. As the company grew, though, that building was no longer large enough for its staff or for efficient operations. The company accepted a purchase offer in December 1919 for its Nicollet Avenue property, and in 1920, they purchased three lots near Loring Park. In August 1922, the board of directors authorized construction of the headquarters. They searched for a suitable architect, and contracted with the firm of Hewitt & Brown. Hewitt & Brown had designed two nearby buildings: St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral and the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church a block away. Plans were approved in January 1923, with revisions continuing through September of that year. The site had an odd shape because of the street intersection on which it faced, and Hewitt considered it an "interesting problem". He chose the terrace and the loggia as a solution to the grade on which the building faced, and it gave the building a monumental effect. Ground was broken for the building on March 1, 1923. Construction was finished the next year, with the first tenants arriving in January 1924 and with the move complete on March 15, 1924.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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