Little house on the pavement // Only six blocks from the IDS Tower, a lone single-family house harbors remnants of the last century - but the market may not let it survive into the next.; [METRO Edition] Steve Brandt, Staff Writer. Star Tribune. Minneapolis, Minn.: Jul 6, 1997. pg. 01.B Copyright Star Tribune Newspaper of the Twin Cities Jul 6, 1997 Mary Borrell would shake hands with you, but right now her hands are black with dust. And some of that dust dates to the 19th century. She is cleaning out her great-aunt's gray, green-trimmed house at 816 Park Av. S., a musty blue-collar Victorian that is the closest remaining single-family house to the core of downtown Minneapolis. Just six blocks from the IDS Tower, it's an orphan huddling beneath a canopy of elms and a mammoth cottonwood, as 8,700 commuters a day rush by. She rummages through piles and extracts remnants of the past. There's a wooden cheese box, a curtain stretcher, a deck of playing cards given away by a Hennepin Avenue liquor store to commemorate the New Year of 1898. There are hats half a century out of fashion, drawers of crocheted handiwork, newspapers pronouncing Richard Nixon's presidential resignation. Scattered around the rambling house are an old-time icebox, cast-iron bed frames, a coal bin and cavernous trunks. There's a 15-year-old car out back with just 15,000 miles on it. For Borrell, squeamish at the thought of encountering mice, "It's been a nightmare in some respects, but it's been a lot of fun." Borrell, of Edina, got the job because she's the executor for the estate of Margaret O'Connell, the last of her two great-aunts who lived in the house for almost 60 years. Margaret and Cecilia O'Connell were working women, holding three jobs apiece. They waited tables in St. Louis Park, were domestics at hospitals a block down S. 8th St. and took in boarders. "Cele always worked hard and spent all her money. Margaret always worked hard and saved all her money," Borrell said. Margaret played the stock market and was just successful enough to pay for living in a nursing home for her last four years. The house, now occupied by a caretaker, was her only significant asset when she died in March. A question of economics How much that asset is worth is a question that will be played out in the marketplace of downtown economics. Borrell and Towle Real Estate are asking $275,000 for the 55- by 130-foot midblock lot. That's more than $38 per square foot. It's a price obviously based on the assumption that a new owner would raze the house and redevelop the site. But the city assessor values land on the block at only $14 per square foot and values the house at only $13,000. Rehab costs, including new wiring, new plumbing and a new roof, as well as tearing out the peeling walls and ceilings to the house's skeleton, would easily hit six figures. Tim Dulany, a Towle agent, hired an engineer to inspect the house's structure. "He said economically it does not make sense to rehab the property unless the city or some nonprofit group wants to get involved," Dulany said. That suggests an uncertain future for a house that has stood for more than a century while development consumed its Elliot Park neighbors. Yet the place has a last-century charm to it that has attracted inbound commuters on Park, who see the streetscape turning harsher and larger in scale as they near the downtown core. "All of a sudden out of the blue, bam! There is a reminder of the city when the city was just a tiny little community. It's kind of like the last little historical note," said Loren Niemi, executive director of Elliot Park Neighborhood Inc. One of those commuters, Renee Sayles, was curious enough when she saw the for-sale sign go up this spring that she turned the corner and wrote down Towle's number. "It's one of those settling markers. There's something familiar and comfortable about it," she said after a tour. The house lacks any formal historic designation that would impede demolition. On architectural style alone, it made the city's survey of about 800 potentially significant properties. But no one has thoroughly researched its past, and there has been no request that it be given local historic preservation status, which would make demolition harder. "It's pretty amazing that that house has made it," said Amy Lucas, who staffs the city's Heritage Preservation Commission. She dates the house to the 1870s, judging by its architecture, and said not many houses of that age remain on their original sites in Minneapolis. Bob Roscoe, an architect and commission member, said, "It's almost like a frozen time of what a rooming house is like." Borrell understands the sentiment the house evokes. When her great-aunt rode from her nursing home in St. Paul to her doctor in Minneapolis, she'd make the driver go by her house. She'd tell her doctor, "I feel OK, but I just drove by the house. I want to go home," Borrell recalled. Prayer and pint bottles While her great-aunts lived there, the house was a mix of before-and-after-meal-prayer piety and Irish levity lubricated by the pint whiskey bottles that have turned up in odd corners, Borrell said. "I was in this house the night the original St. Olaf's Church burned. They cried all night," she said. "Of course, they were drinking." But sentiment doesn't pay the winter heating bills of more than $500 a month. Clear away the house and trees, and the lot might hold 20 to 25 parking stalls. But a city moratorium on creating more parking lots downtown temporarily forestalls that option until 1999. The neighborhood association's Niemi said that, in Elliot Park, there's probably more sentiment for saving the lot's trees than the house. Nevertheless, he said, "We are totally, unalterably opposed to the demolition of any more properties for surface parking lots. It's a wasteful but profitable use of space," he said. He said one possibility might be to use the lot for landscaping and parking spots to enhance potential redevelopment of the adjacent brownstone rowhouses that line S. 9th St. and make up part of a city-designated historic district. "The truth is, that property only has value as part of a larger redevelopment package," said Alan Arthur, director of the Central Community Housing Trust, which converted one of the brownstones into 16 studio apartments and would like to rehab the others. He said 816 Park is overpriced, something he attributes to a developer buying options on property in the area a number of years ago in anticipation of an office tower two blocks away that failed to happen. Sayles, who is Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton's sister, knows she can't afford the asking price. But she has floated the idea of a museum preserving the history of working women, perhaps selling arts and crafts and offering lunch or tea. The neighborhood offers rehab loans of up to $100,000 for such projects. Meanwhile, Borrell's summer break from her teaching job is spent sifting through endless piles, sometimes aided by sister-in-law Jody Borrell. She wants to stay out of the politics of the property's future. But here are reminders of the house even in her classroom. Virginia Lee Burton's classic children's story about a small house engulfed by a big city, "The Little House," is a favorite there. "I read this to my second-graders and I almost start crying." Copyright © 2007 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved