It may be razed/Instead of saved/Say so long to/Burma Shave

Nothing appears imminent but it appears that the days of the original headquarters and plant on E. Lake Street of the company that made Burma Shave may be numbered.

Minneapolis Public Schools has purchased the building at 2019 E. Lake St., plus remaining housing on the same half-block, which is sandwiched between Lake and the South High School athletic field. The site likely will become a new adult basic education base for the district.

Few would likely even know the nondescript two-story white building that dates to 1900 but for a nearby Museum in the Streets plaque unveiled in 2012 by the Lake Street Council. It commemorates the original site of a company that made a shaving cream advertised with popular roadside signs featuring such epigramatic sentiments as: If you / Don't know / Whose signs / These are / You can't have / Driven very far.

The first of the often-puckish signs went up in 1925 along southern Minnesota highways and the last of an eventual 7,000 sets across the county were removed in 1963, according to a 1994 article in Hennepin History magazine.

Steve Sandberg is one of those lamenting the probable loss of the building, which is listed with thousands of others in the city's historic resources inventory. But it has no formal historic designation. Sue Hunter-Weir, an area resident of member of the city's Heritage Preservation Commission, said demolition of the building would be a loss. But she said she doubts that the commission would vote to recommend that it get preservation designation because the exterior has been substantially altered, despite its interesting history.

"I would love it if they could save it," said Sandberg, who lives a few blocks away. He was in the building years ago, and admires its post-and-beam construction. "Whenever I do go into an older building, it just seems to have so much character and connection to the past. Not to say that you can save every older building."

"If it was restored, people would love it," he said. If it can't be preserved on site, Sandberg would love to see the building move six blocks west on Lake to the former site of Gustavus Adolphus Hall, razed in 2009. He lives in the Phillips community in a house he moved there from a Richfield neighborhood erased by airport expansion.

"It would take a pretty big last-ditch effort to save it," Sandberg said. Instead, he's begun thinking of a jazz-style funeral for the building, complete with appropriate Bruma Shave-style signs.

The district will begin planning for the site yet this year, according to Mark Bollinger, deputy chief operating officer for the district. He said the prime purposes of buying the area was to expand adjacent properties such as the high school, fieldhouse and parking, and to consider a new building for adult basic education and Transition Plus, which works with post-high school special education students.

The district in August sold to Hennepin County for $8 million the six-acre site at E. Lake Street and Hiawatha Avenue that currently houses its South Side adult classes. It has up to eight years to vacate the former Brown Institute building. However, its rent starts rising after three years, giving the district an incentive to move on the Burma Shave site. The Transition Plus program is currently at 3320 Elliot Av. S.

The county plans to break ground on Nov. 2 for a new human service center that will be part of a larger redevelopment of the Hiawatha-Lake site. This phase also includes street-level retail, a transit plaza, an initial 114 rental housing units of a planned 500, and parking.

Both Burma Shave, which debuted in the mid-1920s, and its advertising signs, initially were made in the Lake Street plant. But in 1940, the firm moved to a new plant in Bryn Mawr. That building overlooking Bassett Creek, later became the home of Accent Signage Systems. It achieved notoriety in 2012 when a fired employee with a gun killed six people and wounded two more before taking his own life. It was one of the state's worst mass shootings.