It was a historic, but ugly corner.
Well, almost historic. It was home to the first Best Buy store, and that has to count for something.
But why was the corner so ugly? The reason most commercial corners look ugly: There was no particular need for beauty.
Most suburban intersections have a collection of useful businesses — a fast-food outlet, a tire store, a mattress store, a small strip mall with a phone store and the obligatory chain coffee shop. What distinguishes one from the other is whether the Taco Bell is on the west side or the east.
So why is the corner of 66th Street and York Avenue S. in Edina worth noting? Because it's transforming itself. It's becoming more dense and more interesting.
If you were to stand in the middle of the street and do a slow 360-degree turn, you'd get a nice lesson in the history of suburban architecture. (You'd probably get hit by a car, though. So just read this and be safe.)
The northwest corner of the intersection has two 1970s-style office towers, each regrettable in its own way. The 3250 Professional Building is white with a gray mansard roof — the heavy, overhanging type overused in the 1970s. The Titus Building is a six-story tower that bulges out on top as if it's the command center for a vigilant group of crime-fighting executives who must monitor the Southdale area 24/7. Or 9 to 5.
It's the lawns that make these two buildings what I call the Mature Early Suburban style. In cities, office buildings are part of a hard, inorganic world; brick and glass and marble arrayed along concrete sidewalks. But the sylvan fields of Mature Early suburbia offered big expanses of green grass, just like the homes where their workers lived. It was a visual cue that everything was more relaxed, more friendly in suburban offices.