A rumor, yes, just a rumor, but nonetheless chilling, has it that agents representing either Minneapolis or the 2018 Super Bowl host committee are planting the idea about building the 2018 Winter Carnival ice castle in Minneapolis.
The Minnesota Super Bowl Committee, which allowed the NFL owners to beat them to a bloody financial pulp to bring the game here in 2018, promised, among the cards they held, that the St. Paul Winter Carnival agreed to build an eight-story ice castle for that year’s carnival. I mean, that was a big component of the presentation to woo these freeloaders, that we know how to do winter, let’s all have fun, we have ice and snow and a palace and it will be just so much excitement!
The committee’s bid documents, you will remember, were kept close to the vest. We don’t really know what the likes of U.S. Bancorp CEO Richard Davis and former Carlson Cos. Board Chair Marilyn Carlson Nelson or even the Wilfs might have promised the NFL owners. The Wilfs would have promised them the moon if they could get somebody else to tow it out of the sky and deliver it to the Nicollet Mall.
Did they intimate that the ice castle would be built in Minneapolis?
That cannot happen. It is not too early to serve notice that the 2018 Winter Carnival ice castle cannot be built in Minneapolis.
Unthinkable.
I have been playing telephone tag with Rosanne Bump, president and CEO of the St. Paul Festival & Heritage Foundation. We finally connected.
“It is our plan that the ice castle in 2018 will be built in St. Paul,” she told me.
“That’s not strong enough,” I said.
She said, “The ice castle will be in St. Paul.”
I have no reason to believe that Ms. Bump would sell us across the river and I fully expect that she will meet the Super Bowl Committee with her arms crossed.
But people tend to get carried away with the false promises of a Super Bowl and its supposed two weeks of international attention, the imagined boost to the local economy and the just-as-imagined lift to what is called our civic pride. I say “imagined” because the Super Bowl was held at the Metrodome in 1992, featuring a Washington win over Buffalo. I am unaware of any local who can point to an old pay stub and say with certainty that the money was due to hosting the Super Bowl.
In 1992, the Carnival had a magnificent ice castle on Harriet Island. It was one of the great ones in the carnival’s history. It made the covers of national newspapers at the same time the Super Bowl was being held here. It was such a beautiful and glimmering castle that it stole the thunder from the same national photographs of the dreary Metrodome.
It was killing them in Minneapolis. It really was. St. Paul had been effectively shut out of any Super Bowl planning. Bob Carter, then the head of the carnival, essentially got the message that Minneapolis had the Super Bowl covered and you people over there in St. Paul have a carnival, so you go ahead with your charming little gathering of kings and queens and Vulcans. OK. That year the carnival also featured that stupendous castle.
Well, that castle became the Super Bowl scene grabber. Television couldn’t resist it. It ended up that Carter was the one who had to tell Marilyn Carlson Nelson — yes, she was wearing a cheerleader outfit back then, too — that no, the carnival could not set aside a time when limousines hauling NFL owners and other league freebooters could arrive on Harriet Island for a private viewing of the castle.
Let us remember something. More than 1.75 million people visited the ice castle in 1992. Those numbers came from the carnival and the official St. Paul police count based on 1.4 million people who went to the ice castle at Lake Phalen in 1986.
We were standing in line for days and nights to see that castle on Harriet Island. Carter met the league with his arms crossed. Get in line like everybody else.
The NFL is bigger now, more ruthless, more demanding and greedy. You think they care about our carnival?
Bump, you ready to hang in there?
Let’s stay on this, people. It’s our carnival and we will darken the names of anybody who lets us down.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5474. Soucheray is heard from 1 to 4 p.m. weekdays on 1500ESPN.
Copyright 2018 Pioneer Press.
