When I arrive at the Upper Post of Fort Snelling on a balmy late-September afternoon, a banner underscoring its new reality flaps on a chain-link fence: NOW LEASING, FALL 2022.
Mark Gustafson meets me outside the former HQ, a stately brick building outfitted with a clock tower. “This is bringing back a lot of memories,” Gustafson says, tilting his head up to look at the familiar steeple.
Gustafson, my tour guide for the day, photographed all of the Upper Post’s buildings in 2006 and 2007, when they were near ruin and overgrown with what he calls “atmospheric” foliage. At that time, it was one of 11 places on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s “Most Endangered” list. “It was a photographer’s dream,” Gustafson says, “ if you like ruins and interesting old buildings.”
His photos would eventually be exhibited as part of a government and civilian effort to save the Upper Post. As a result of that endeavor, things have changed. While parts of what is now called Upper Post Flats are still under construction, many of the buildings are complete, and the first residents moved in this fall.
Gustafson points to a lot behind the leasing office where a harness and saddle workshop once stood. “There was a building here that started to collapse when I started my project. By the following year, all that was left standing was a chimney.”
The Upper Post’s oldest buildings date to 1879—some 50-odd years after the first historic buildings were built at the lower fort. Over its history, thousands of soldiers have quartered there. And in style, no less, as its polo fields, golf course, and trick pony shows, all of which drew civilian crowds from Minneapolis and St. Paul, earned Fort Snelling a reputation as “the country club of the Army.”
Fort Snelling also served as a “separation point” in 1945 and 1946. There, many soldiers who helped win World War II bade their last farewell to army life. Shortly after, the fort was decommissioned and the Upper Post passed on to the Veterans Administration and later the DNR, only for the buildings to sit largely unused.
As we stroll the grounds, Gustafson recounts memories like he’s flipping over seashells on the beach. There were the rickety steps of the tower he’d scaled to photograph the clock, frozen at half past 12. The Army Band barracks, which later housed Japanese American code breakers, where he’d found a squatter’s mattress sitting in a pool of pale midwinter sunshine. The officer’s house—there’s a whole row of them at the Upper Post, running perpendicular to the airport tarmac next door—fitted with an ornate 19th-century staircase.
Then there are the massive barracks themselves. When Gustafson was last here, he photographed the buildings, which had windowpanes that were shattered like jagged teeth. He’d even ventured inside, but barely.
“For a million dollars, I don’t think I would have gone to the lower level,” he notes with a shudder.
Fast-forward 18 years and nearly $200 million, and the barracks are being converted into simple, stylish apartments with whitewashed walls and stone countertops.
The revamp was born of a public-private partnership, headed by the Minnesota DNR, the Minnesota Historical Society, Hennepin County, and other entities. Over the years, myriad fates had been proposed for the property—an aviation center, an athletic complex, a charter school—before the group settled on a proposal by real estate developer Dominion.
The $160 million–plus project received significant funding in government bonds and low-income housing tax credits. The apartments, billed as affordable, start at $1,235 a month for a one-bedroom and $1,874 for a four-bedroom. And, of course, there’s that historical continuity—Dominion says it’s working to get military families connected with the apartments.
Gustafson, for his part, never had a personal agenda for the Upper Post’s fate. He simply wanted to save it. After his photos were published on the front page of a 2007 Sunday Life issue of the Pioneer Press, he got a call from a man whose father, Vern, had been stationed at the Upper Post during World War II. The two men met Gustafson and his fellow preservationist Todd Adler there. Vern, age 92, outfitted in sneakers and spectacles, gave them a tour. It was the first time he’d been back since 1942.
“The number of military people that were here from the 1800s up to the present—it’s a huge number,” says Gustafson. “To me, it was just about preserving it for their sake.”