These Minneapolis buildings resonate with baby boomers but baffle Gen Z

If it seems as if commercial architecture has been stagnant for a while, you might be right. For most of the 20th century, styles changed every 10 years or so, rolling through the big cities first, ending up on main street later.

The baby boomer generation saw the biggest changes. In the immediate postwar era, downtowns were characterized by old brick buildings with some classical details, but from the 1950s onward, everything built was modern and simplified. The boomers also were familiar with the exuberant kitsch and button-down corporate modernism of the 1950s and ’60s, the mirrored glass facades of the 1970s and the postmodern classical shapes of the 1980s.

The zoomers — a generation born between 1997 to 2012 — grew up with those styles, as well, but they weren’t there to see them new. They were the existing order, a fait accompli, just like the prewar buildings had been for the boomers. It was someone else’s streetscape. Of course, they know what the IDS Center is, but they have no memory of the sunset poking through the girders while it was under construction, or watching the excavation for the Metrodome.

So it goes with every generational shift. Nothing new there. What makes the boomers different is that the smaller details, the interesting characters, the ordinary commercial architecture of their era, are vanishing rapidly, and they’re the only ones who remember them.

Here’s a sampling of familiar streetscape characters that boomers might recall, while zoomers might find them utterly baffling.

Ask a boomer what they were, and you’ll have a prompt answer. The outdoor kiosks were the little yellow huts, the size of toll booths, usually found in parking lots. One could drop film to be processed into photos there, and pick up the prints later. Fotomats started to appear in the late 1960s, and disappeared in the late ’80s — competition from in-store labs and the rise of digital film did them in. The buildings with oversized roofs stuck around for years, and repurposed, until the lot was reused for housing. That was the fate of the Fotomat in Dinkytown at 4th Street and 15th Avenue SE. Some were just removed because they were empty and impeded traffic.

Ask a zoomer about one, and you’ll get blank looks and shrugs.

The entire baby boomer generation will have to pass from this Earth before people stop lamenting the loss of the Weatherball. It stood atop the Northwestern National Bank Building from 1949 until it was toppled by fire in the great Thanksgiving Day blaze in 1982. Today, it has been gone longer than it was around.

Boomers recall the bright neon high in the sky, or the smaller versions attached to the bank’s branches, or little coin banks created in the Weatherball shape. However, zoomers, unless tutored in the particulars of streetscape history, have no context for the enormous letters N and W, and a sphere that blinked a meteorological code.

Few chains had a building as distinctive as the Pizza Hut in the 1970s, and that wasn’t because they were great. The roof seemed ill-proportioned when viewed from certain angles. And the triangular windows look a bit odd, until you realize they copied the shape of a pizza slice. Architect Richard Burke was a frat brother of the chain’s founders, and they paid him $100 for every restaurant made with his design. The store in Minnesota looked like one in Washington, or Maine.

You can paint it any color, change the windows, move the doors, add a sign, and boomers will still recognize it as a Pizza Hut. They will instantly recall the red-and-white checked plastic tablecloths, the red plastic water glasses, the Tiffany lamps. Patented in 1965, it’s one of the most successful acts of branding in architectural form since the Golden Arches.

Zoomers are more likely to know the brand to be a strip-mall tenant, and not a sit-down date-night restaurant. For them, it might be naught more than an app.

If a restaurant chain didn’t distinguish itself by its building shape, it used a novel sign with distinctive typography. The shape of the sign at Sambo’s Restaurants, a chain that had 13 locations in Minnesota in 1980, is best described as an oval with points.

The chain was named for its founders Sam Battistone Sr. and Newell Bohnett. They leaned into the “Little Black Sambo” connotations with the store’s interior illustrations, which showed scenes from the book. By the time the chain hit Minnesota, the illustrations had changed to show a boy with cliched clothes from the Indian subcontinent, but it was still cringeworthy. The company went bankrupt in 1981, and many of the Sambo’s switched to Denny’s.

Zoomers may not have a rich collection of idiosyncratic signage, since logos and signs have become more standardized. Their equivalent might be remembering bygone icons on phone apps.

For most of the 1960s, large supermarkets in town or the ‘burbs were brick buildings with big windows. The only way they signaled their purpose was a big square sign on the corner of the building, by the doors that had the name and chain affiliation. This is a buried memory, but boomers recall the original purpose of the building if prompted. And they remember going to the store with Mom and being allowed to test the miracles of the automatically opening doors.

Zoomers grew up with a different type of grocery store experience. Upscale markets such as Lunds & Byerlys and Kowalski’s Markets feature exterior styles that promise country-club vibes or European elegance.

For decades, the exterior and some interior areas of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport had walls made of shiny black bricks. The last remnants of the old style were found at the end of the baggage pickup area, but they’re gone now. The bricks could also be found on various commercial buildings around town, such as the now-demolished Johnson Meat store, but most of those locations have been razed, as well. Like much of the boomer streetscape world, it was one of those styles that seemed modern and common. Then it was old. And then it was gone.

Zoomers might, in their dotage, remember when apartment buildings had strange waffle patterns on the facade for no reason, providing that style eventually fades. It will. Everything changes, eventually. Just ask a boomer.