Historic North Loop

Loop Back: Booth Fisheries

If your great grandparents were in Minnesota eating oysters in the 1920s and 30s, there’s a good chance those oysters came via the North Loop. Specifically, from a tall brick facility along 5th Street North known as Booth Fisheries, built in 1914.

Booth was a large wholesale seafood distributor based in Chicago. Best known for its oysters harvested from the Atlantic, Booth had cold storage facilities in most big cities including Minneapolis and St. Paul.

While they sold oysters by the can and bucket, Booth also distributed white fish, much of it caught from the Great Lakes. The company had large operations in Duluth and Bayfield, Wisconsin.

A team of horses from Booth Fisheries caused a ruckus downtown in 1922, but a quick-thinking patrol officer jumped in to stop them.

Booth Fisheries was in this building from 1914 to 1933. It then moved a couple blocks away to a building on 3rd Avenue North that no longer exists. The I-94 viaduct now passes over that block. But this building continued to operate for several more decades as Booth Cold Storage.

Please visit the Historic North Loop section of this website for many more fun photos and articles about our neighborhood’s history.

By Mike Binkley, North Loop volunteer*

(*not an actual historian; I just pulled together information from newspaper archives, public records, online searches and most helpfully, the digital archives at the Hennepin County Library)