619 S 10th St
Minneapolis, MN 55404, USA

The Hinkel-Murphy House for Lease

The Hinkel-Murphy House with "For Lease" sign. Sometime in the 1990s, photos from the City of Minneapolis.

The Hinkel-Murphy House - Boarded up

The Hinkel-Murphy House was boarded up in the 1990s, the exact date is unknown. The photo is from the City of Minneapolis.

The Hinkle-Murphy House - National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance:

The Hinkle-Murphy House is pre-eminently significant as the first Georgian Revival House in Minnesota to have come down to us. Donald Torbert credits Whitney and his close friend, Harry Jones, with the introduction of "colonial" houses to Minneapolis in 1888. If "colonial" is understood in its usual loose sense to include later Georgian revival, however, Whitney actually takes the plum for designs two and three years earlier.

The first of these designs was executed in 1885 for John Crosby. The Crosby House was the second commission of Whitney's independent practice. Trained in the Boston office of Carl Fehmer, William Channing Whitney had come to Minneapolis in 1878 to form a partnership with James Plant. The independent practice that followed was marked immediately by a strong antipathy to the reigning Queen Anne style^ and an equally strong sympathy for early American architecture then being re-introduced on the East Coast. For John Crosby, Whitney designed a foursquare masonry house (now demolished) in a severe and rather dry version of Bullfinch's Boston townhouses. This commission was shortly followed by a house for William Hinkle directly across the street, the first display of Whitney's great early talent for assembling correct "period" detailing into original and vigorous compositions.

The Hinkle project is particularly significant for its specific indebtedness to McKim, Mead and White's William Edgar House completed in the same year that the house for Hinkle was begun. Whitney abstracted the essential motives of the main elevation—central portico with flanking balustrades, half-round approach steps, overhead Palladian window, arched second story windows, and classical cornice—and fused them into a facade more classically ordered than his model. Like the majority of Whitney's Georgian designs, the Hinkle design drew on the "Adam" phase of post-colonial architecture, which was far more suitable practically to the city than the picturesque colonial tinderboxes soon to arrive, just as it was more suitable to the cityscape aesthetically than the giant order fronts that fueled the egos of the newly wealthy. Of Whitney's Minneapolis colleagues, only Frederick Kees and George M. Goodwin (both also office-trained in Boston) produced early classical designs in masonry that matched Whitney's restraint. But their houses, for John Wunder and S. H. Linton, respectively (both demolished), post-date Whitney's house for Hinkle by five years.

Whitney was also an earlier and more consistent advocate of American neoclassicism than either Jones or Cass Gilbert, both of whose classically fueled careers ultimately eclipsed Whitney's. Jones' first Georgian Revival design, the 0. H. Freeman House in Washburn Park (1888, extant) was simply the first of many sentimental Minneapolis versions of the Longfellow House in Cambridge inspired by the poet's immortalization of a local waterfall. Jones' other early "Old Colonial Style"^ residences were duly mixed with Queen Anne.

619 South 10th Street, Minneapolis, MN, USA

The Hinkle-Murphy House is an early Minnesota example of Federal Period Georgian Revival architecture. A photograph taken shortly after its construction in 1886-1887 was published in the Northwestern Architect, July 1888.