An Afternoon on the Observation Deck of Foshay Tower

- June 12, 2018

You know how you see something, sometimes every day for years and just keep going? That's how my friends and I were regarding The Foshay Tower (8th & Marquette) in downtown Minneapolis. The Art Deco tower, finished in 1929 just in time for the Great Depression, was commissioned/built by Wilbur Foshay, a businessman/entrepreneur, and designed after the Washington Monument. The building is now W Minneapolis - The Foshay, and you can get tickets in the lobby ($10 at the time of writing) and then you take the quasi-express elevator, with a special card key, to the 30th floor. There is a little museum, with artifacts from the golden days of the Foshay, including gold plated bathroom fixtures, the sheet music from a composition that Foshay commissioned from John Philip Sousa, the directory of tenants, and the pardons from two U.S. Presidents for Foshay himself, who had his own pyramid scheme going. We spent maybe around 20 minutes just walking through it and looking at 'old' Minneapolis. There are two flights of steps up to the observation deck. I thought we'd be looking out windows, but we were outside, in the beautiful late afternoon sun, looking out over downtown. It's not the tallest building anymore, but we loved walking around, getting a bird's eye view of the construction that will dominate our lives for the next months or years, depending on where we looked. There is a bar, called Prohibition, in the hotel, but we opted for Keys (where one of our friends treated us all to the largest rice krispy treats), also attached and accessible through the door on the left. We all agreed we had a great time doing something some of us had never done or hadn't done in years. There are limited hours of operation (11-5) and it is closed most of January and February, and since we're in Minnesota, I suppose that's not the worst thing (The information on Trip Advisor is different than the website, so double check). Check that off the bucket list.