Miller Vocational High School opened in Minneapolis in 1932. The school was named after Mary Miller, an early settler whose family built the first house on the west side of the Mississippi. Boys and girls were taught nursing, dressmaking, typesetting, woodworking, and other trades inside the gorgeous Streamline Moderne building. According to the Minneapolis Star Journal, the school was considered “one of the most modern vocational schools in the country.”

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1970s

Average attendance at the school hovered around 2,300. Everything a student needed during the day was available within the four-story building. Whether you needed a haircut, medical care, shoe repair, clothes mended or made, a replacement door for a cabinet, or even a meal–chances are you didn’t have to look far to find a student that needed real-world experience doing exactly what you needed to have done.

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In the 1950s, the large auditorium on the southeast corner of the building was demolished to put in a parking ramp. The vocational high school closed in 1976. The building was sold in the 1980s to a developer that converted it into office and retail space. Renamed Century Plaza, Hennepin County used the building for offices until 2017. The county decided that the building had “reached the end of its functional life span” and decided not to spend any money renovating the building.

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2020

Since then, developers have expressed interest in both preserving or demolishing the 300,000 square-foot building. The three-acre property is prime real estate with its proximity to the Minneapolis Convention Center. Today, the future of the building is up in the air, but there seems to be a developer interested in repurposing the building into apartments.