On Sept. 22, 2005, a large crane hoisted a T-Mobile cellular antenna facility onto the very top of the Andrew’s House Apartment Building at 414 SE Seventh Street in the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood. This building is a contributing structure to the Fifth Street Southeast Historic District. The large, galvanized structure, with its catwalk, stairs, equipment and antenna, immediately drew the attention of the entire neighborhood. Thus began a 20-month effort to get the City of Minneapolis to explain how this facility got approved.

Since late September 2005, the Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association (MHNA) has doggedly pursued this issue with City Council members, the Heritage Preservation Commission (HPC) staff and the zoning administrator. Numerous emails and phone calls yielded very little substantive information and revealed a reluctance of city staff to deal with this issue.

The application process was bungled terribly by the city. The city accepted an application for administrative review that was incomplete, with several of the questions relating to the historic district left unanswered. Zoning staff failed to verify whether the property was in the Fifth Street Southeast Historic District. Zoning staff approved the administrative review with conditions, which it never enforced. After the facility was installed and operational, Zoning staff directed T-Mobile to go back to HPC to get approval. That was in October of 2005.

Even after recognizing the flaws of the process in October 2005, neither the HPC staff nor the zoning administrator took the initiative to resolve this issue. Only after recently obtaining the HPC administrative file documents and direct contact with T-Mobile representatives, did an application for a certificate of appropriateness with the HPC get submitted. The HPC held a public hearing on May 15, 2007.

Despite the HPC staff findings of fact that this building is a contributing structure, that the built antenna facility “materially impairs the architecture and historic value of the building,” and that it violates a district guideline to retain the original roof design, the HPC granted a certificate of appropriateness anyway. The certificate of appropriateness includes conditions that require T-Mobile to move the facility to another portion of the roof, but that will not happen. T-Mobile will appeal the conditions, citing a flawed approval process with the city, and we will be stuck with an ugly antenna facility forever.

What the neighborhood sought at the public hearing on May 15 was a denial of the certificate of appropriateness by the HPC, consistent with the HPC staff findings of fact. If this public hearing would have been held in summer of 2005, we are confident the HPC would have denied the design of this facility as it is built, and an alternate design could have been negotiated with T-Mobile. The threat of litigation, not the preservation of heritage, ruled this day.

The neighborhood will appeal this decision out of principal. We are not naïve enough to think that City Council will overrule the HPC, but at least we will have another public hearing to voice our opinion.

last revised: June 14, 2007

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