It didn’t last long. One month. Thirty days in the dead of winter.

But while it stood, and especially while it rose from the ground until it soared higher than anything like it had ever done, the St. Paul Winter Carnival Ice Palace of 1986 was an act of communal magic, an all-too-temporary testament to the virtues of fantasy.

There won’t be an ice palace this year; there wasn’t one last year. They come along infrequently and skeptically. You wouldn’t want to put your money on an ice palace. There’s not much future in ice.

There wasn’t any future at all in the idea when it came to Winter Carnival honchos in 1985, except that former King Boreas Charlie Hall wasn’t very busy and he seemed like a guy who could get things done. Build us an ice palace, Charlie.

I was fishing with Charlie one day that summer when he let me in on it. There hadn’t been a real ice palace since 1939 and again in 1940. It was time for one in 1986.

How big is this thing going to be, I asked.

“The biggest ever. Fifteen stories high.”

That’s nice. Who’s going to pay for it?

“The public. We’ll sell ice blocks for $10 apiece. We’ll get us a big corporate sponsor.”

Good luck. Where you going to get the ice?

“Out of Lake Phalen. We build it on the island at Phalen and cut the ice out of the lake.”

Nobody will ever see it way out at Phalen. And who’s going to do all this building, I wanted to know.

“We’ll get volunteers. There are hundreds of construction workers who are out of work in the winter. They’ll be happy to help.

That was it. As much as I liked the guy, Charlie was – and is – incurably optimistic. If he was really, really lucky, he’d get a few East Siders out there with bags of ice cubes.

And summer turned to fall, fall turned to winter – an unseasonably warm one at first – and it was time for the ice palace. First they had to build a bridge to the island at Phalen, then they had to drive more than 400 timber pilings into the soft ground and cap it with a 500-cubic-yard pad of concrete to support 4 million or 5 million pounds of ice.

But Charlie had enlisted the help of some key builders – Col. Ed Rapp and Bob Fletcher Sr. of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Ellerbe Architects, contractor Tom Keller and electrical contractor Bill LaLonde, among many others. Somewhere he found Ed Chaput, an old ice harvester who was willing to share the secrets of his craft.

“And we went to the Labor Temple downtown and made our pitch for volunteers,” Charlie says today. “They agreed, and on the way out of the temple, one skeptical tradesman said, ‘Put our names in granite, will ya?’ ”

Then the big sponsor, Pepsi-Cola, backed out. Not enough fizz in this bottle, Pepsi apparently thought. Then the liability insurance fell through. Then the weather went sour. Then there was too much snow.

But the workers showed up, 700 of them, day and night, in all kinds of weather. Bricklayers, carpenters, electricians, laborers; everyone wanted to be part of this this thing.

“Problems had a way of working themselves out,” Charlie recalls. “Bob Fletcher’s son (now the Ramsey County sheriff) rounded up some snowmobilers and they packed down a big spot on the ice so we could harvest blocks.”

By Jan. 6, a conveyor system was built and the first of 10,000 710-pound blocks of ice were stacked on the concrete pad. Four and a half miles of electrical wiring were installed for 1,200 colored lights. On Feb. 5, the last block was laid, the insurance straightened out and the palace was ready for company.

There’ve been Winter Carnival ice palaces since; two of them on Harriet Island, and one of those came during a Super Bowl year in the Twin Cities. In 2004, a magnificent ice palace was built next to Xcel Energy Center.

Those were professionally planned extravaganzas that turned out well, or poorly, depending on whom you ask. But the palace of ’86 was an accidental miracle. It was a big community skyrocket that was fired aloft and lit up the sky for one brief, exuberant moment and then came down and went boom.

More than 1.5 million people visited the palace and photos of it were seen literally around the world. For a long time it held the record for the tallest ice structure ever made.

I realized what Charlie and all those volunteers had done the night I stood outside the park and watched the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Wheelock Parkway and Arcade Street. It was 4 a.m. and the streets around the park were full of people who wanted to see the ice palace.

On Feb. 20, Vulcanus Rex and his Krewe showed up as they always do and demolished the ice palace as part of the ritual that ushers in spring. The wrecker’s ball was swung and the 128-foot tower came crashing down.

“I couldn’t watch,” says Charlie. “I didn’t need to see that.”

But if you go to Phalen today, you will see a replica of the ice palace along the drive near its site. This $60,000 monument has inscribed on it the names of every worker who was part of this enchanting episode in the life of the city.

“I remembered what that tradesman asked me back at the union hall,” says Charlie. “The monument is made out of granite.”

And on the monument are these words:

“A Labor of Love.”

Retired Pioneer Press columnist Don Boxmeyer can be reached at donboxmeyer@comcast.net.

Copyright 2007 Pioneer Press.