Main Street History: What Happened To Northwest Airlines' Old HQ?`

EAGAN, MN — In 2018, the Minnesota Vikings moved from their cramped Eden Prarie campus to a 40-acre property in Eagan. On it, team owners Mark and Zygi Wilf have built a state-of-the-art NFL practice facility and headquarters, plus a luxury hotel and bar, other retail, lakes, and residential housing.

It's extremely rare to find so much available land in a major metropolitan area like the Twin Cities. But it's also rare for an 84-year-old international airline to declare bankruptcy and leave its old headquarters building vacant for nearly a decade.

Northwest Airlines began in Minnesota as a tiny outfit flying postal service routes in the Midwest. But decades later, at the end of its corporate history, the company was acquired by Delta to create the largest airline in the world.

On Feb. 2, 1925, the United States Congress passed the Air Mail Act of 1925, paving the way for the commercial airline industry.

The new law allowed the United States Postal Service to contract out its air mail operations to private aviation companies. Less than a year later — on Sept. 1, 1926 — Minnesota native Col. Lewis Brittin founded Northwest Airways to become one of those companies.

After a bidding war with other aviation companies, Northwest was awarded a federal contract to deliver mail from Chicago to Minneapolis and back.

The company operated out of the modest Speedway Flying Field, which wouldn't become the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport until decades later.

Northwest Airways' first fleet was made of just two open-cockpit airplanes, which Brittin didn't own but rented. The small planes were a Thomas Morse Scout and a Curtiss Oriole — both open cockpit — according to the Northwest Airlines Historic Center.

But the company expanded quickly, and Northwest Airways started flying passengers on July 5, 1927, from the Twin Cities to Chicago. Its first international flight was from the Twin Cities to Winnipeg in 1928, according to the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS).

Millions of miles of flight later, in 1985, Northwest moved its headquarters out of MSP and built a four-story, 266,000-square-foot complex in Eagan. It would also be its last.

As the MHS documents, after a long and prosperous history, Northwest's fortunes started to turn in the late 1990s:

• In 1998, a pilots' grounded all of the airline's flights for nearly three weeks.
• The airline was already in a precarious situation when Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks destabilized the entire commercial flight industry. Americans were worried about flying and added security requirements raised costs.
• The Iraq war further depressed commercial flight demand

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, spiking fuel costs. Northwest reduced wages and sold off aircraft, but it wasn't enough and the airline went bankrupt later that year.

In 2007, facing possible extinction, Northwest executives agreed to merge with Delta Air Lines. All Northwest hubs, planes, and flight routes would be turned over to Delta.

The Northwest headquarters building in Eagan was finally demolished in 2018, though not before an urban explorer snapped some final pictures.

While Northwest's name and logo are no longer visible anywhere in the sky, the airline's legacy lives on.

Northwest was a pioneer in commercial airlines, creating jobs for thousands of people across the state and country. And years after the merger, Minneapolis remains Delta's third-largest hub.

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