Rice Park, the grande dame of downtown public spaces, is all dressed up in lights to welcome the Winter Carnival ice palace and Super Bowl guests curious to see how we celebrate winter on this side of the river.
So this is a good time to remind ourselves of the history and beauty of Rice Park and the architecturally interesting buildings that surround the 1.6-acre space that is so appealing to wedding parties.
Three of those buildings — the St. Paul Hotel, Landmark Center and the George Latimer Central Library — represent the elegance of structures built at the turn of the 20th century. Landmark Center and the library are on the National Register of Historic Places. The 33-year-old Ordway Center for the Performing Arts is literally the new kid on the block, but it looks like it’s ready for a 19th-century ball when its lights turn the building into a glowing jewel at night.
If you are hosting visitors for all this midwinter excitement, or you just want a little history, here’s a reminder of how civic involvement helped bring these buildings to life.
RICE PARK
The American Planning Association writes that the park’s “period lamps, statuary, benches, center fountain and adjacent national landmark buildings lend a European feeling to the space.”
Established in 1849 when Minnesota was still a territory, Rice Park was donated to the city by territorial delegate and later U.S. Sen. Henry M. Rice and territorial pioneer John Irvine. The park’s first amenities — a fountain and bandstand — were added in the 1870s and electric lights were installed in 1883.
The park underwent renovations in 1965 and 2000. During the ’65 facelift, the St. Paul Women’s Institute donated the park’s centerpiece statue of a woman standing in a fountain, designed by Alonzo Hauser. (The institute was run by Agnes Kennedy Ridder, wife of Dispatch and Pioneer Press publisher B.H. Ridder Sr. Our women’s department staff, who covered the Women’s Institute, always referred to it as “Mrs. Ridder’s fountain.”)
Come spring, after the Vulcans defeat King Boreas and the monarch’s palace has melted away, the park will undergo another $2 million makeover.
In the meantime, visitors can peruse the snow-covered bronze statues of St. Paul native Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters Marcie, Woodstock, Peppermint Patty, as well as a life-size statue of another favorite son, author F. Scott Fitzgerald, looking pensively toward the library.
GEORGE LATIMER CENTRAL LIBRARY
This majestic, dignified building is considered one of the city’s great Beaux-Arts monuments.
The public library began in 1856 when the newly formed Young Men’s Christian Association opened a reading room, and by 1863 several organizations had merged into the St. Paul Library Association. In 1882, the city council appropriated $5,000 to establish the free public library that by this time had a collection of 8,051 books. (And thus begins our reputation as one of the most literate cities in the country.)
In 1900, the library moved to the old Market Hall at Seventh and Wabasha streets and remained there until a fire destroyed the building, including the library and most of the collection of 158,000 books. By that time, construction of a new library was underway at 90 W. Fourth St. Ground was broken in 1914 for the structure, which cost about $1.5 million.
In 2014, the building was renamed the George Latimer Central Library in honor of former St. Paul Mayor George Latimer, a staunch supporter of the library.
LANDMARK CENTER
St. Paul’s own castle began in 1892 and was completed in 1902 to serve as the Federal Court House and post office for the Upper Midwest.
Designed by Willoughby J. Edbrooke, supervising architect of the U.S. Treasury Department in 1891-92, its steeply pitched roof was designed to shed snow. The Romanesque-Chateauesque building features turrets, gables and dormers, corner towers with conical turrets and two massive towers, all of which remind local kids of a fairy tale.
Among miscreants tried at the courthouse were members of the Barker-Karpis gang.
By 1972, the beautiful building at 75. W. Fifth St. that features a five-story courtyard and 20-foot ceilings was in sad shape. Marble walls were painted over, tile replaced marble mosaic and asbestos covered the cortile skylight. Thanks to civic-minded city/county leaders and private citizens, led by Betty Musser, the building was reopened to the public as Landmark Center in 1978 after being restored to its original elegance. Owned by Ramsey County and managed by the not-for-profit Minnesota Landmarks, the renovated building represents the beginning of the historic preservation movement in St. Paul.
(My favorite Landmark-Winter Carnival memory. During a fancy black-tie Carnival dinner in the cortile, the Prince of the West Wind shot his fake gun and a rubber chicken fell all those stories, legs and wings flapping, and flopped onto the floor. The guy sitting next to me, who was from out of town, looked baffled and said, “My wife is never going to believe this.” I didn’t think it was peculiar at all.)
ST. PAUL HOTEL
Directly across from the Ordway, the Italian Renaissance Revival St. Paul Hotel is considered one of the nation’s great luxury hotels.
Its history dates to John Summers, who let travelers from all over the world stay in his home, which became the 60-room Greenman House in 1871. After fire destroyed that structure in 1878, a more modern, fireproof building, The Windsor Hotel, became known as one of the finest in St. Paul. But by 1906 the Windsor had lost its original identity and served as an arcade and theater. Lucius P. Ordway, 3M Co. founder, recognized the need for a hotel in the growing city and secured ownership of the building.
“St. Paul’s Million-Dollar Hotel” opened with ceremony on April 18, 1910, with Ordway, James J. Hill and Archbishop John Ireland in attendance. It has hosted presidents, including John. F. Kennedy; celebrities such as Minnesota native aviator Charles Lindbergh, movie stars and gangsters.
In 1919, after the state Legislature ratified the 19th amendment, women who advocated the vote celebrated with a jubilee banquet in the hotel. In 1920, KSTP Radio broadcast live from the Casino Ballroom, which continued into the 1950s.
During the gangster days in St. Paul, the 1920s and ’30s, some colorful characters played a role in the hotel’s history. Leon Gleckman, known as the Al Capone of St. Paul, maintained his headquarters for business dealings in a suite, and Mike Malone, a U.S.Treasury Department official who infiltrated Capone’s syndicate in Chicago, also rented a room to observe Gleckman’s activities. (This anecdote is repeated on many websites, but none explains whether the men knew they were living in the same building. That’s material for a great novel.)
In 1937 a young bandleader named Lawrence Welk began playing at the hotel on Saturday nights, and the same year cowboy star Gene Autry and his horse checked in. There is no record of where Champion — the horse — slept.
By 1950, the hotel and the city suffered as people and businesses moved to the suburbs. It closed in 1979, but the business community realized the importance of the historic hotel and new owners redesigned and restored it.
Today the St. Paul Hotel, a member of Historic Hotels of America, is known for old-style hospitality. The in-house restaurant, the St. Paul Grill, is a meeting place for St. Paul’s Big Names.
ORDWAY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
Home to the Minnesota Opera, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Schubert Club, the Ordway is the ingenue of Rice Park.
In 1980, Sally Ordway Irvine (granddaughter of Lucius P. Ordway) dreamed of a European-style concert hall offering “everything from opera to the Russian circus.” She contributed $7.5 million, a sum matched by other members of the Ordway family, along with 15 Twin Cities corporations and foundations that were principal funders of the $46 million complex, then the most expensive privately funded arts facility ever built in the state. Benjamin Thompson, St. Paul native and internationally known architect, designed the building to project “a visible contemporary image” that also fit harmoniously on a site facing Rice Park. It opened to the public Jan. 1, 1985, as the Ordway Music Theatre but the named was changed in 2000 to reflect the vast array of performing arts that take place under its roof.
Everyone should experience, at lease once in their life, the feeling of royalty you get when you walk down the Ordway’s magnificent grand staircase. Even if you’ve just seen “Spamalot.”
In 2015, the Ordway Concert Hall, lauded for its acoustics, was opened on the side of the main auditorium.
WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE
SCIENCE MUSEUM OF MINNESOTA
The story of the Science Museum, used by more than a million people from around the world every year, is one of frequent moves.
It was formed in 1906 when businessman Charles W. Ames met with a group and discussed “the intellectual and scientific growth of St. Paul.” Originally named the St. Paul Institute of Science and Letters, it was first located at the St. Paul Auditorium on Fourth Street. It moved to the Merriam Mansion on Capitol Hill (how many of us remember that cutout of a mastodon outside the building’s second floor?), and then to St. Paul-Ramsey Arts and Sciences Center on 10th Street in 1964. In 1978, the museum expanded across the skyway into space on Wabasha between 10th and Exchange.
Finally, in the early 1990s, plans were formed for a new and more modern facility next to the Mississippi River, at 120 W. Kellogg Blvd. The museum opened on Dec. 11, 1999.
MINNESOTA CHILDREN’S MUSEUM
Learning through play — by nurturing real-world skills children need to become engaged citizens — is the goal of this happy place for kids. The original museum, founded by Marialice Harwood, Kate Donaldson and Suzanne Payne, was in downtown Minneapolis known as Minnesota’s AwareHouse. They pledged there would be no “Do Not Touch” signs anywhere in the building.
By 1985, the museum had moved to an old blacksmith’s shop in St. Paul’s Bandana Square, where attendance the first year was 200,000. By the early 1990s, the museum again outgrew its space and an even bigger museum opened in 1995 in the current location, 10 W. Seventh St. Beginning in 2015, the museum underwent still another expansion. It reopened last June after being closed since December of 2016, and there is now 35 percent more space for visitors.
AND NOT TO BE MISSED
Another day might be reserved for the two structures that define St. Paul and its history — the newly-renovated Minnesota State Capitol and the Cathedral of St. Paul.
You should end your day by driving across the Wabasha bridge to Plato, up the Ohio Street hill to Cherokee Avenue and to the West Side end of the (closed for construction) High Bridge. On a clear night you can see the lights of the Capitol and Cathedral domes dominating the landscape along with those from Summit Avenue and the downtown lights below. It’s beautiful.
Copyright 2018 Pioneer Press.
