"Installing it in the convention center is a severely compromised decision," he said. PODCAST Listen: Why did Minneapolis' famous flour boom go bust? The Curious Minnesota podcast explores how Minneapolis became a flour milling capital and why it didn't last. With just 5% of the organ's inner workings reinstalled, work halted and was never resumed. Cash quickly evaporated and the city filed - and won - a lawsuit. Cost-conscious city leadership accepted what in hindsight was an absurdly low bid from a well-meaning but inexperienced contractor. When the organ's carefully planned reinstallation began in the early 1990s, however, disaster struck.
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Of that amount, $488,000 was privately raised through 3,200 donors and a series of benefit concerts, including a gala performance featuring the Minnesota Orchestra. In the late 1980s, nearly $750,000 was spent extricating the Mighty Kimball from the auditorium (the move was dubbed the "Great Minnesota Organ Transplant") and making it ready for its new home in the convention center. Still, there was a bit of a renaissance in the 1980s, when a fervent group of supporters rallied to save it. Kimball built its last pipe organ in 1942, and the Mighty Kimball didn't get a lot of post-World War II use. works on some of the organ's 10,000 pipes in 1957.īut it wasn't long before the public's interest in pipe organs waned. Kimball ultimately settled for an additional $24,000 for the largest pipe organ it ever produced, meaning the company collected 50 cents on the dollar. After paying roughly $26,000 - nearly half of which came from donations by Minneapolis schoolchildren - the city's finances were flattened by the Depression. should have demanded a payment-in-full clause on its $100,000 price tag, which approaches $1.6 million in today's dollars. "Nothing comparable in size or arrangement has ever been built," the chair of the city's organ committee, A. Shortly before the building opened, a fundraising drive was launched to pay for a grand pipe organ. The Minneapolis Auditorium opened to great fanfare in 1927, hailed by one local business leader as "one of the greatest civic attractions we have." It was home to concerts, exhibitions, meetings and sporting events - including Minneapolis Lakers basketball games starting in the 1940s. Money, or a lack thereof, is the thread that runs through the Mighty Kimball's history.Ī crowd at the opening of the Minneapolis Auditorium in 1927. "It can go from a whisper - something very transparent, like incense - to the roar of a salvo of cannons." Paul by American Public Media and broadcast on 100 public radio stations nationwide. "It's ravishingly beautiful, and it has the potential to move hearts and souls with its music, if given half a chance," said Michael Barone, the host and senior executive producer of "Pipedreams," which is produced in St. Instead, its myriad pieces quietly occupy a warren of rooms that were originally intended to house its complicated mechanics. To this day, an elaborate bronze plaque in the building's lobby thanks people who donated money for "the preservation and reinstallation of the Mighty Kimball organ." The plan was to reassemble it inside one of the convention center's domed exhibition halls. In 1987, shortly before the Minneapolis Auditorium was razed, the organ was carefully dismantled, catalogued and stored in wooden crates.
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