Once home to dozens of grain elevators, Minneapolis has since seen most of them demolished by consolidation and progress.

With its flour-dusted glory days behind it, the Nokomis Mill is now prone to graffiti and trespassers who sometimes leave needles and syringes behind, which is why it has 24-hour guards, surveillance cameras, and 6-foot-high barbed wire fences. It would cost about $35,000 to remove some 60 sections of graffiti tags to comply with orders issued by the city, according to the Zachary Group.

“Nevertheless, vandals, squatters and criminals have continuously compromised the site for nefarious activities,” the Zachary Group wrote in a letter to the city. “It is our firm belief that there is no reasonable amount of money that can be spent to prevent the criminal activities without demolishing all existing structures.”

The 2.4-acre complex is located on “ancestral homelands of the Dakota people” and the Minnehaha-Hiawatha corridor, which was part of the Fort Snelling Military Reservation established in 1819 at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. “We believe fervently that these beginnings of stolen Native American land where this grain mill sits need to be reconciled,” Albers wrote in his appeal.

Demolishing the property would amount to “erasure of people’s history,” he said. As an example, he points to the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews at the remains of the site of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

He argues there are viable economic alternatives to adapt the buildings for re-use. For example, the former Layhart grain elevators were converted into housing, the former Bunge elevator was converted into a housing cooperative, and the Mill Ruins apartments and museum are an example of adaptive re-use. He’d like to see the corridor converted into green spaces and bike paths.