File:Pillsbury A Mill from Stone Arch Bridge, Marcy-Holmes, Minneapolis, MN - 51781409954.jpg

English: Built in 1881, this Romanesque Revival-style former factory for the Pillsbury Milling Company was designed by LeRoy Buffington. The initial structure, built of rusticated limestone, was, at the time, the largest and most advanced flour mill in the world, and was the result of extensive research by Charles Alfred Pillsbury. The seven-story mill was powered by water from the nearby Mississippi River, which drops over Saint Anthony Falls, providing ample hydraulic pressure to power industrial machinery. The mill complex was expanded throughout the late 19th Century and 20th Century, attaining its present size with several grain elevators, a large Pillsbury sign on the roof, a nine-story annex building, and sky bridges between the grain elevators. Despite its historical significance, the building was not built properly to account for the vibrations of the machinery, and as a result, the exterior walls began to shift and bow in during the late 19th Century. In 1905, the exterior of the mill had to be fortified with a concrete buttress on the rear facade, and several sections of the building’s wood structure had to be rebuilt with steel columns and beams. The exterior of the building features a rusticated limestone facade with arched window openings, large roman arched openings in the center and at the corners of the top of the building, double-hung windows, a bracketed cornice, a large concrete buttress structure on the rear facade, a central penthouse with a stepped parapet, and pilasters and corbeling on the 6th floor. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1966. The building is also a contributing property in the Saint Anthony Falls Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. The mill continued to produce flour for Pillsbury until 2003, when it closed. The building has since been adaptively reused as affordable live/work artist lofts under the direction of Miller Dunwiddie Architects, and involved the installation of a hydroelectric turbine within the millrace beneath the building, which provides for most of the building’s electrical demand, and helped to allow it to achieve LEED Gold certification upon completion of the project in 2017.