David CazaresFrom MPR News editor Bill Wareham:
Hostess announced today it plans to go out of business, prompting cries of anguish from Twinkie lovers everywhere. Personally, I won’t be shedding a tear – not because I don’t like Twinkies, but because I enjoyed a lifetime’s worth in about a three-year span in a place I like to think of as Hostess heaven. I don’t need to eat another.
Officially, it was known as Continental Bakery #143, located at 12th Street and 3rd Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. It was an imposing brownstone building, strategically located kitty-corner from the old Vocational High School, where I learned the craft of radio from 1975 to 1978.
(Photo courtesy of T.J. McGovern)
It closed 25 years ago to make room for the Minneapolis Convention Center. A former Continental Bakery #143 worker wrote about the place for Daily Kos a couple months ago:
Despite being spread over three stories and a basement, it was a versatile bakery that could bake any bread from Wonder White to whole grain organic. In fact, in its last years a customer requested a line of whole grain bread and we baked and delivered it for them. Same with buns, and we made everything in the Hostess line of Twinkies and Pies except donuts, butterfly rolls, and the HoHo/Ding Dong variations.
Importantly, from my perspective, it had an outlet store, with cut rate prices on Twinkies, Ho-Ho’s, Hostess pies, Sno-Balls and all sorts of other Wonder bakery products (whether they were baked there or not). If memory serves right, it was a rare day that one or more KBEMers didn’t head across the street and return with a haul of baked goods. And even if my memory is faulty, I’m pretty sure these last few pounds I’ve been trying to lose the last 30 years can be traced directly to Continental Bakery #143.
