On a bitterly cold January morning in 1974, 33-year-old Al Hofstede was sworn in as Minneapolis’ 41st mayor. That morning, the new mayor had driven to City Hall from the home on California Street NE that he shared with his parents. It was a short drive. City Hall, in the heart of downtown on 5th Street, was only about three miles away. But the social distance separating the modest working class district around California Street from Minneapolis’s glittering downtown was much greater.
Hofstede was not a newcomer to City Hall. He had served two terms on the Minneapolis City Council before being tapped by Minnesota Governor Wendell Anderson to head to the high profile Metropolitan Council. A Democratic Farmer Labor party activist for more than ten years, Hofstede had worked his way up the DFL hierarchy while remained firmly grounded in his heavily Catholic blue-collar neighborhood then known as “Nordeast.”
The new mayor’s career, which spanned the decades of the 1960s and the 70s, marked the end of a political era in Minneapolis. Hofstede, and many local politicians who came before him, had used the bonds of family, ethnicity, religion and social class to create a political base for themselves. In later years, many local elected officials in Minneapolis would lack the deep roots in the districts they represented ---roots that Hofstede was able to draw on to advance his own career.
Hofstede’s time in public office would also mark the end of an era in Northeast Minneapolis. After he left office, this collection of historic working class neighborhoods would gradually shed its blue collar image and reinvent itself as a lively arts district. Hofstede, himself, would help lay the groundwork for this transformation through his efforts to reshape Northeast’s physical landscape.[1]
The second oldest of five siblings, Hofstede grew up in a close knit, working class family. His father Al Sr. had been born in the Netherlands and moved to Canada with his parents when he was not yet five. Later the family relocated to Minneapolis, eventually settling in the northeast neighborhood where the future mayor was born and raised. The elder Hofstede, worked as a truck driver for 34 years. During the bitter Teamsters Strike, he was briefly jailed for his role in the 1934 job action. “I was branded a Communist by some people who wanted to make me feel un-American, but I love this country,” Al Sr. later recalled. “We were just trying to get a living wage for ourselves and our families.” [2]
Al’s mother, Florence, grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. Her Polish ancestry provided the Hofstede’s family’s link to Northeast’s large Polish-American community. “My mother was the quiet one, a real homebody” her daughter,” Carol Kostick, remembers. “Her job was to oversee the household and look after us children. My father had a much different personality. “He was very strong willed and he played a very strong leadership role in the family. We all looked up to him—Al, in particular. He viewed Father with great respect, both as a parent and a mentor.”[3]
“Our parents encouraged us to pursue a higher level of education than they had been able to receive,” noted Carol Kostick’s brother, John Hofstede. “My brother, Al, was perhaps the first in our large extended family to have completed college.” [4]
During Al’s boyhood days, he was surrounded by family members who had settled nearby in Northeast Minneapolis. Aunts, uncles and a grandmother lived within a few blocks of the Hofstede family home on California Street.
During those decades, in the 1940s and 1950s, Northeast looked very much as it had 50 years earlier. Cut off from the rest of the city by a loop in the Mississippi River, the area had developed its own identity. Architectural historian Larry Millett attributed Northeast’s uniqueness to what he called its “intimate tangle of housing and industry” where houses on one side of the street might face a grain elevator or a factory on the other side.[5]
Starting in the later decades of the 19th century, Northeast attracted thousands of immigrants, many from eastern and southern Europe, who were able to find work in the factories scattered through the heavily industrialized district. Workers’ homes, often on narrow 30-foot lots, were basic and straightforward, with little in the way of architectural embellishments. Lacking the lakes and parkways that enhanced many South Minneapolis neighborhoods, Northeast had to contend with a riverfront crowded with aging, unappealing industrial buildings.
But Northeast compensated for its lack of public amenities with a strong sense of community, fostered by its neighborhood-based Catholic parishes. “The parish was the center of our life,” Hofsede’s boyhood friend,” David Flannery later recalled. “It was the center of our spiritual life, our social life, our school life. Everything revolved around the parish. There were events, celebrations. dances, summer picnics—they were all part of the parish. Everyone identified their neighborhood by the name of their parish.”[6]
“The influence of our parish priests and religious sisters was very strong,” noted Hofstede’s brother John, an ordained Catholic priest. “The Sisters of St. Joseph had a large convent in our parish where they staffed the parish grade school and a girl's high school. Near our parish site, the Little Sisters of the Poor staffed the St. Joseph's Home, the only Catholic nursing home in Minneapolis. The boys in our school would take turns as altar boys to serve at weekday and Sunday masses at the home. My brothers and I all did this,” [7]
For the Hofstedes, St. Anthony of Padua was their parish home. Located on Main Street NE, just a short walk from the Mississippi riverfront, the church traced its origins back to the city’s frontier days in the 1840s. The parish shared its name with nearby St. Anthony Falls. Both were named for the patron saint of Father Louis Hennepin, the Franciscan priest who discovered the falls in 1680.
Initially, the parish had served the Metis, Canadians of mixed French and Indian parentage, who settled along the riverfront in what later, became modern-day Minneapolis. By the Hofstedes’ time, St. Anthony of Padua had become a multi-ethnic parish, setting it apart from other Catholic churches in Northeast Minneapolis that had more pronounced national identities.
When they were growing up together in Northeast Minneapolis, David Flannery often tagged along with Al Hofstede on their daily trek to and from St. Anthony School. For Al, the school on NE Main Street was a little over a mile away. David had a slightly longer walk. He lived north of Lowry about three blocks from the Hofstede home on California Street.
David and Al met when they were in first grade at St. Anthony and became lifelong friends. “Everyone in school liked Al,” Flannery recalled. “Nobody picked on him. He was just this solid good kid. Even at seven or eight years old, he was this responsible little person. We would have made fun of other kids who were serious, but no one made fun of Al. He was always decent and kind. He was always to help you out if you were in trouble.”
Flannery remembers the time he was walking home from school with Al on a damp spring day. David was wearing his school shoes and he had left his overshoes back in his classroom. “In those days, you had two pair of shoes, school shoes and play shoes. The rule was that you always had to keep your school shoes clean. We were ready to cut through Bottineau Field, which was all muddy when I realized that I had on my school shoes. My folks would give me the dickens if I got them dirty. I was in big trouble. Al turned to me said. ‘That’s OK. I will carry you across the park’. And he did. That was the kind of kid he was. And he had a really strong back, even then.”[8]
“Growing up with Al, I never would have guessed that he would become a politician,” Flannery added. “He was so grounded, a really good kid, but he never put himself in the spotlight. He didn’t have that expansive personality that you would associate with a successful politician. Among our circle of friends, if you had told us that he would grow up to be mayor of Minneapolis; we never would have believed it.”
As a youngster and into his adult years, Al had a private side to his personality that was apparent only to close friends like David Flannery. The future mayor was a committed Catholic who had grown up in a devout family that took its religion seriously.
“The rest of us in our circle, we all grew up Catholic but we weren’t very pious,” Flannery noted “We did what our parents told us to do. But Al was different. Even as a boy, his Catholicism was very important to him.”
Hofstede’s religious commitment led him to enroll in a Catholic seminary in Missouri when he finished eighth grade at St. Anthony school. But after two years at the seminary, Hofstede realized that he was not cut out to become a priest. He returned home and spent his junior and senior years at DeLaSalle High School. At DeLaSalle, Hofstede linked up with a group of classmates who would move into Democratic Farmer Labor politics with him. They included John Derus and Lou DeMars, who become major figures on the local political scene in the 1970s. Chuck Neerland, Hofstede’s deputy during his first term as mayor, joined the group, along with Dick Miller. Miller attended Edison High School, but he was part of Hofstede’s circle of friends who moved on together to St. Thomas College in St. Paul. Miller would later take Hofstede’s Third Ward seat on the Minneapolis City Council.
“DeLaSalle did give rise to a lot of politically active people in those days,” Neerland recalled. “It wasn’t like a secret DeLaSalle fraternity. But the school did provide the link that brought all of us together. But there was a deeper connection. Some of the social justice teachings of the Catholic Church—and we were all Catholics—did motivate us. Those teachings were very appealing to some of us. Social action – and even political action- was a way to express our Catholicism – beyond merely going to church every Sunday.”[9]
For Hofstede and other young men who had grown up in the St. Anthony of Padua parish, their local priest, Rev. Alan Moss, served as a community mentor. During his years at St. Anthony and later at nearby Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Moss played an important behind the scenes role in helping to shape development along the Minneapolis riverfront and in the adjacent lower Northeast neighborhoods. In the mid 1960s, he rallied support for a city-sponsored urban renewal effort aimed at halting the decline of the aging neighborhood surrounding his church on Main Street.
The city’s original plans for the two-phased St. Anthony renewal project called for substantial demolition in a wedge shaped project area bounded by the Mississippi River, Central Avenue and NE Broadway. The plan met with strong community opposition when it was initially unveiled in February 1964. But Father Moss and other local leaders recognized that the Northeast community had to do more than say “no” to urban renewal, if the community was to stem the loss of its long-time residents to the booming suburbs. Moss recruited Hofstede, Miller and other another St. Thomas student, Joe Strauss, to go door-to-door, urging support for a revamped plan that provided loans and grants to project area residents, enabling them to stay in their homes. The plans eventually approved by the city did provide those incentives.[10]
Despite the support generated for St. Anthony renewal by Father Moss and his crew of young organizers, the project remained highly controversial in Northeast Minneapolis. The area’s alderman, DFLer Richard Kantorowicz, supported the project, putting his political career on the line during the 1965 city election campaign. Hofstede, Miller, and Strauss pounded the payment, rallying Kantorowicz. Their efforts paid off. At the June 8 election, he won re-election, but just barely, besting his Republican opponent with just over 51% of the vote.
Hofstede’s work as community organizer and a DFL activist in 1965 set the stage for his move into elective politics – a move that began sooner than he may have expected.
Richard Kantorowicz served only six months in office as Third Ward alderman after his narrow re-election win. In December, he resigned to become a municipal judge. His resignation created a vacancy that the Minneapolis City Council needed to fill by appointment. Well-liked by his neighbors, with a proven record as a political activist, Hofstede, then just 25, was endorsed by the Third Ward DFL Club to replace Kantorowicz. But the Republican-dominated City Council had another name in mind. In February 1966, the Council chose Robert Denny, a Northside salesman and political newcomer, to fill the vacant Third Ward seat. The next year, Hofstede decided to challenge Denny in the upcoming city election. As the council race was getting underway, the Minneapolis Star’s Gordon Slovut ticked off Hofstede advantages, noting that Hofstede was a DFLer, a Catholic with Polish ancestry and the son of a union activist, all attributes that Republican-leaning Denny lacked.[11] On election day, Hofstede put his advantages to good use, handily defeating Denny.
Hofstede launched his City Hall career in 1967 at a time when Minneapolis and urban centers all over the country were facing an epidemic of racial violence. On July 20, just weeks after he was installed as the new alderman for the Third Ward, North Minneapolis erupted as a group of African American youth began torching mainly Jewish-owned shops along Plymouth Avenue. Hofstede’s ward, which spanned the Mississippi River, included a large swath of North Minneapolis. The ward’s western boundary at Bryant was just a few blocks from the center of the disturbance on Plymouth.
While the racially tinged incident did not affect Hofstede’s mainly white constituents – at least not directly, the aftermath of the disturbance did pose a difficult political choice for the young alderman. Minneapolis Mayor Art Naftalin, a staunch civil rights advocate, nominated a young black activist named Ron Edwards to serve on the city’s Commission on Civil Rights. Edwards had aligned himself with a militant faction of the black community that viewed the Plymouth Avenue disturbance as an uprising rather than as a riot. When the news broke that Edwards had several misdemeanor convictions on his record, Naftalin’s nomination created a backlash in City Hall. Hofstede’s fellow Northeaster, the First Ward’s Don Risk, mounted an effort to block Edward’s appointment. Hofstede was one of only three members of the Minneapolis City Council to speak up in support of Edwards, a move that many of his constituents may have questioned.
Facing only token opposition, Hofstede was re-elected to his Third Ward seat by a wide margin in 1969. But that year, a political earthquake rocked City Hall. Charles Stenvig, a police lieutenant running as an independent, shocked Minneapolis’s civic establishment by getting himself elected mayor. Stenvig’s call for law and order resonated with a city electorate alarmed by the harsh rhetoric of Edwards and his fellow black militants. During his stealth-like campaign, Stenvig pointed to what he saw as the city’s lax response to the 1967 Plymouth Avenue disturbance. Hofstede may not have known it at the time, but he and Stenvig would clash repeatedly during the next decade.
Hofstede settled into his City Hall job during his second term, but spent much of his time swept up in DFL politics. Early on, he linked up with another young politician on the make, State Senator Wendell Anderson, who was running for governor in 1970. The handsome, athletic Anderson exuded the glamor that Hofstede lacked, but both men were linked by their common backgrounds. Anderson had grown up in a blue-collar working class family on St. Paul’s Eastside, while Hofstede had similar roots in Northeast Minneapolis. Hofstede served as Anderson’s campaign manager, and found himself appointed to a major state job after Anderson’s gubernatorial victory in 1970.
The young Minneapolis alderman was now the chair of the Metropolitan Council, the four-year-old regional agency charged with coordinating the growth of the seven county Minneapolis St. Paul metropolitan region. Some Council watchers questioned Hofstede’s appointment, wondering whether he had the experience needed to oversee the Council’s policy heavy agenda. But the Minneapolis Tribune was willing to give Hofstede the benefit of the doubt. “(He) is more than young- he is bright,” the Tribune noted in a February 4, 1971 editorial. “Many feel he is one of the most promising DFLers Minneapolis has produced in recent years.”[12]
“Al was a different type of an appointment,” noted Chuck Neerland, “He wasn’t viewed as an intellectual. He understood public policy but he wasn’t very articulate about it. Al got very high marks from the one of his fellow commissioners, Dave Graven. Dave raved about Al and how astute he was in managing the broader political issues facing the Council. I was close to Dave. His endorsement of Al encouraged me to go on to work with him in City Hall. “[13]
After two years at the helm of the Metropolitan Council, Hofstede was ready to get back into elective politics. On May 24, 1973, Hofstede announced that he was challenging Minneapolis’s two-term incumbent mayor, Charles Stenvig, in the November 6 city election. Hofstede wasted no time lambasting Stenvig, calling the incumbent mayor’s administration, “a government that did not govern. “ The challenger declared that crime had increased in Minneapolis while Stenvig was mayor. “That’s an issue he ran on four years ago but it is still a problem.” ”[14]
Over the next six months, Hofstede continued to hammer away at what he claimed was Stenvig’s “do nothing” record. Hofstede’s message found a willing audience, enabling him to defeat incumbent mayor on election day, November 6, with a margin of just over 4,000 votes. In assessing Hofstede’s victory, the Tribune observed, “the desire of Minneapolis voters for change was unmistakable, Mayor Stenvig chose to applaud the status quo and for the most part campaigned by huddling with his supporters. Yesterday’s impressive victory by Democratic Albert Hofstede resulted, we believe from a contrasting approach. Hofstede tackled the issues, pointing out both the problems and opportunities in the city and saying what he hoped to do about them.[15]
In his inaugural address on January 2, Hofstede signaled a new activist approach as mayor, differing sharply from the approach of his predecessor who was content to let the City Council set the city’s policy agenda. Hofstede called for a series of initiatives aimed at promoting business expansion, industrial development and the rehabilitation of the city’s aging housing stock. The new mayor said he did not intend to rely on public opinion, as Stenvig had done, to duck the responsibility for making tough decisions. That approach, he said, merely substituted “empty gestures” for thoughtful decision making.[16]
While the city’s “strong council, weak mayor” structure limited Hofstede’s powers, the new mayor was able to play a significant role in at least one policy area --housing, through his control of the quasi-independent Housing and Redevelopment Authority (HRA). Early on during his first year in office, , he became an enthusiastic booster of the city’s urban homestead program which made vacant residential properties available, virtually without cost, to potential homeowners who agreed to live in the properties and bring them up to code. Hofstede also backed an overhaul of the Cedar Riverside Urban Renewal Project in order to provide more neighborhood direction for the controversial project.
Later, in an effort, which had special importance for him personally, Hofstede persuaded the City Council to join him in rejecting state highway department plan for an extension of Interstate I335 into Northeast Minneapolis, his home neighborhood. Into his second year as mayor, the Tribune gave him good marks, saying that he was “extremely well liked, a good judge of his own limitations and… making his mark and an administrative innovator and party healer.”[17]
That summer, Hofstede took what was probably the most consequential action of his first term when he vetoed a council action scuttling the much-debated City Center redevelopment project. City Center represented the city’s first effort to use tax increment financing to rejuvenate its aging downtown core. A slim council majority opposed the project. Hofstede’s veto kept City Center alive. It was later completed after he was out of office. [18]
Earlier in the year, Hofstede had signed a seemingly innocuous city council resolution that received little public attention at the time. The resolution established the last Saturday in June as Gay Pride Day. “At the time, Al asked me if I thought he should sign the resolution,” Neerland recalled. “I told him I thought it was the right thing to do, but he could pay a political price for doing it. There were already rumors floating around that Al was gay because he was single and living with his parents. He signed the resolution, anyway, but I was right. He did pay a price.”[19]
By the fall of 1975, the mayor and his circle of close advisors had moved into campaign mode, preparing for the upcoming city election and a rematch with Stenvig. Buoyed by private polls that showed Hofstede beating Stenvig handily, Hofstede campaign began showing signs of overconfidence. But some Hofstede supporters, outside of his inner circle, were not so sure that confidence was warranted. The mayor’s campaign group was clearly not prepared for the harsh personal attack that Stenvig aimed at his DFL rival during the final days leading up to the November 4 election. In a letter mailed out to 100,000 Minneapolis residents entitled “Compare and Contrast, “the campaign missive noted that Stenvig was married, while Hofstede was single, Stenvig was a veteran and Hofstede wasn’t, and that Stenvig had signed Veterans and Flag Day proclamation while Hofstede had signed the Gay Pride resolution.
On election day, Stenvig shocked the city’s political establishment by staging a comeback and eking out a narrow victory over Hofstede. At a time when gay rights were not yet a mainstream movement, the Pride resolution had given Stenvig an effective weapon to use against the incumbent mayor. In a letter to the editor following the election, one former Hofstede supporter maintained that Hofstede had “signed his own death warrant” when he signed the resolution.
The Minneapolis Star chastised Hofstede for what the paper said was his lackluster campaign, “The mayor did not live up to his own responsibility for mustering the voters,” the Star maintained. “Two years ago earlier he had campaigned with almost missionary zeal, successfully transmitting his concern for the city and its future to prospective voters. This fall, despite prodding from the news media and others, he and his campaign staff shunned the exposure, the delineation of issues and the presentation of programs that had helped draw voters to the polls in 1973.”[20] Hofstede, himself, was philosophical about his loss, saying, “In this business, you have to be willing to lose some and win. I think I served the city well and I am proud of the things I started.”[21]
In the days following the November 4 election, Hofstede did not spend much time musing about his unexpected defeat. At the end of the month, he announced that he was taking a job in the private sector as a vice president at Northeast State Bank. But the bank job was clearly a placeholder. Hofstede was already making plans for a rematch with Stenvig. A year later in November 1976, he was ready to announce the rematch. Now, he faced a new obstacle. Another DFLer, Lee Munnich, a leader of the party’s left leaning Southside faction, was also planning to challenge Stenvig. At the April 30, 1977 DFL convention, Hofstede and Munnich battled, each other to obtain the 60% vote of the delegates required for a party endorsement. Hofstede finally reached the 60% threshold, but only after six ballots. Then in November, demonstrating more energy and determination than he had shown two years earlier, Hofstede succeeded in wrestling the mayoralty away from Stenvig again.
On January 2, 1978, the new mayor was a changed man when he was sworn in as the city’s chief executive for a second time. Now, he had a wife by his side, having married his long-time girlfriend, Barbara Nerison two years earlier. Then, part way into the first year of his new term, Hofstede became a father when his daughter Emily was born on October 7. When he returned as mayor, Hofstede also had new powers, which enhanced his position in City Hall. A city charter amendment adopted in 1976 gave the mayor the authority to appoint a city budget director and a planning director. Hofstede had another new responsibility as mayor. He was called on deliver the first-ever state of the city address. That address occurred on January 27. During it, he declared that the state of the city was” good, but in need of help, and it is we who must provide the help.” He went to propose a series of initiatives during his second term including the establishment of a municipal finance commission to advise the mayor and city council, and a plan to provide below-market rate home mortgages for aspiring homeowners. Soon after taking office, Hofstede voiced concern about the decline in the city’s population from its high point of more than 500,000 in 1950 to under 360,000 in 1978. In order to reverse this decline, he said that he wanted to make housing development the number one priority over the next ten years.
The mayor had an opportunity to address the city’s development needs more directly when the controversial Riverplace development began moving through the approval process in City Hall, The $40 million mixed use project on the east bank of the river at Hennepin Avenue had been put together by Hofstede’s fellow DeLaSalle graduate, Bob Boisclair. Hofstede supported Boisclair’s project, which was also promoted by another DeLaSalle classmate, City Council President Lou DeMars. The project failed financially, bankrupting Boisclar, but Riverplace’s two high rise residential towers, completed after Hofstede left office, led to a residential boom along the riverfront that continued well into the 21st century.
While Hofstede pursued an activist agenda during his second term, he continued to struggle with his bland public image. In a feature entitled “What Makes Al Hofstede Tick?,” the Star’s Robert Gunther wrote that “opinion polls show that while the public generally rates him favorably, few either strongly dislike or like him. On TV he often comes across as a turnip.” Gunther went on to note, “Hofstede is difficult to decipher from media reports and his reserved low key approach doesn’t make it any easier to get to know him as a person.” Hofstede himself acknowledged to Gunther that he was not an easy person to get to know: “I don’t like to hurt people, that why I don’t share my emotions with a lot of people. Very few people know the real Al Hofstede.” [22]
In January 1979, Hofstede said that he intended to run for re-election and began gearing up for another mayoral campaign. Then, in a dramatic move five months later, Hofstede had a change of heart and said he would be bowing out as mayor at the end of his current term. His surprise announcement occurred only two days before the city DFL city convention, which had been expected to endorse him for a third term. The announcement created turmoil in the DFL, which now had to find a new candidate on short notice. In an interview with the Minneapolis Star, Hofstede said he had been thinking about not running for some time. “In this business, you have to want to (continue in office). And when you have to start defending your past mistakes and you lose your edge, it is time to get out.”[23] Hofstede’s daughter, Emily Koski, believes she was one of the reasons her father decided to end his political career. “I had just arrived on the scene and I think Dad may have realized that his family was important to him, maybe more important than being mayor. There was life after politics. “[24]
Hofstede left office in 1980 but he didn’t leave City Hall. After retiring he was often there lobbying for the clients of his consulting firm, North State Advisors. Many of those clients were high powered real estate developers working with the city on downtown redevelopment projects. The former mayor also found time for a full range of public service activities. He served on the boards of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority and several Catholic organizations including the Board of Catholic Charities, Our Lady of Lourdes Church and St. Thomas University... His most important post retirement efforts focused on Catholic Eldercare, the senior care facility on the site of the church he had attended as a young boy, St. Anthony of Padua... Hofstede had helped establish the non-profit agency in 1983. In 2017, the facility was renamed the Albert J. Hofstede Campus in his honor.
In 1987, his family was struck with a tragedy when his wife, Barbara, died from cancer at the age of 44. Her death left Hofstede alone with two young children, Emily, 8, and Albie, 6. Hofstede later remarried. His second wife, Emma, was with him until his death in 2016. In 2007, he was diagnosed with cancer but was able to continue his civic and professional activities until he was stricken with pneumonia nine years later.
Albert Hofstede died on September 3, 2016 at the age of 75. Later that year, Minneapolis City Council President Barbara Johnson penned a tribute to her former colleague. She wrote, “Al led many of the civic fights to make Minneapolis a greater city. As mayor, housing was his signature issue. He made the need to renew, reinvest and recreate the housing stock of our city a core function of city government. Al possessed incredible experience and wisdom. But he was the kindest, most humble and decent person you could meet in public service. And for a city to lose such a person is a great loss.”[25]