Fire destroys Lyndale Avenue building in Minneapolis
Aerial views of a gutted vacant apartment building on Lyndale Avenue the morning after the December 2022 blaze
December 2022 — Lyndale Avenue — Minneapolis, MN
A fire gutted a vacant apartment building on Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis, leaving only the exterior walls standing amid the surrounding snow. Investigators attributed the blaze to arson, and by the following morning the collapsed interior and scorched timber were visible beneath a fresh layer of winter snow.
The building had been vacant at the time of the fire, a detail that placed it within a pattern of arson incidents that had troubled Minneapolis in the years following the civil unrest of 2020. That period left a significant number of properties damaged, abandoned, or contested across the city's neighbourhoods, and vacant structures became recurring targets.
By the morning after the blaze, what remained was a roofless shell: exterior masonry holding the outline of a building whose floors, framing, and roof had burned through entirely. The winter conditions that set in overnight preserved the scene in a way that made the scale of the loss clear, with snow accumulating across the blackened footprint where the interior had been.
