The City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse stands at the helm of Saint Paul’s downtown, towering over a rare north-flowing bend in the great American artery: the Mississippi River. From a distance the building seems unremarkable. Its facade is a broad grill of vertical columns, an unassuming presence amid the congregation of staunch, utilitarian buildings of Saint Paul’s deceptively undistinguished skyline.
Like the rest of Saint Paul, one could be excused for not readily noticing the City Hall and Courthouse. It’s not that the building is uninspired or dull. There are just so many other glitzy, eager-to-please characters out there. As if the City Hall and Courthouse – a staid, workaday homage to modest elegance – is content to allow other buildings to hog the spotlight. In this way, the City Hall and Courthouse seems to know itself.
Its demure is not a false modesty – after all, it is a beacon of bureaucracy. Of law. Its very nature is to attract adjuncts of the court and civil servants who (hopefully) attend to its goings-on with a sack lunch and sensible shoes.
I had not been court-ordered to notice the building. At least, not yet. So I too had not seen the building except for in passing. (A visit to the court or city hall is a lot like visiting the proctologist – usually compelled by a very good reason, which probably isn’t sightseeing.) But looking closer to what, at first, seemed a hum-drum exterior reveals something much more complicated and superbly engrossing.
I first noticed the building while on a walk with my wife, our daughter and our dear friend visiting from Portland. It was a very cold autumn night. We were hurrying through the streets in the piercingly brisk air. Or, we were trying to hurry. But I had stopped. I was noticing these stunning metal inlays on the curb corners.
The inlays were made of two broad grids of stately metal lettering bound by parallel horizontal bars. Each declared a street’s name: “Wabasha Street.” “Fourth Street.”
I hurried against the cold to get a picture.
As I fiddled with my camera’s knobs, I thought of the city planners (or whoever) who might’ve green-lit this little installation. They probably could have just settled with regular old street signs, which were also present. These sculptures probably cost a pretty penny. They appeared to have been very well made, with care and exacting craftsmanship. But they weren’t by any stretch gaudy or conspicuous. Their unromantic job was to provide orientation. But their place in our path was arresting nonetheless – to gussy-up an otherwise anonymous corner sidewalk.
While my patient family hopped around in the cold, waiting on me, I imagined all the people who might have had a hand in creating and installing the sculptures. What did it mean that somebody would go so far out of their way to create them, and set them here?
I considered the architects and the designers who conceived the plans. There were the metalworkers whose unenviable task it was to hand over polished work to the brute mason to cement and screed their designs into the cruel, weather-beaten slab that is a Saint Paul Sidewalk.
And that was just the people who had a direct hand in crafting and applying the letters.
There’s the bureaucracy to imagine as well. Somehow, all of this was created on the taxpayer’s dollar, which I imagined is probably the most scrutinized, hen-pecked budget from which to work. And in spite of the odds, enough people who believed the pay-off was worth it got the job done.
And however many years later, I would be puzzling at these ornate curb-cuts, and fumbling with my camera, noticing, but barely comprehending their place in the humdrum of 4th and Wabasha.
Could anything like this be accomplished today? It seems unlikely. I think we’ve become too removed from our infrastructure. Both our practical need for infrastructure, as well as our emotional bond to a pride of place.
Still though, even during a rare bipartisan consensus for infrastructure there is no shortage of naysayers. People who, if this metal lettering were to be proposed today, would readily nix their plans. Either because of safety. (Someone could slip and fall!) Or due to some feigned allegiance to fiscal responsibility. Or, even worse, maybe the halcyon days of sweeping municipal designs are over because we’re just too damn tired.
If, while ignoring my family to fiddle with my camera toy, I have correctly reverse-engineered the bureaucracy that birthed these metal inlays, it’d be a wonder anyone still has the wherewithal to will a beautiful thing into being.
I shuddered at the thought. To imagine our cities dumbed-down to a grey, sexless plainscape by the litigious threat of slip hazards or the puckered purses of the proletariat – what I imagine the Soviets attempted to build during the great cold war – architecture and infrastructure that only seems to conjure the brutal wrath of depression.
The lettering, I thought, was a very satisfying design, probably from the deco period. I’ve seen elements of art deco all over Saint Paul. Like the entrance to the former NSP company building, further down Wabasha.
What’s usually the case with Art Deco: where there’s some, there’s bound to be more. In spite of my family, waiting up for me in the cold, I started looking around for more.
And that’s when I noticed the building.
Above a main entrance of gilded brass were the words “Saint Paul City Hall, and Ramsey County Courthouse.” If it wasn’t the same font as the lettering in the sidewalk, then it was part of the same family. Below the letters, the big golden doors were both plain and ornate, they looked heavy but welcoming. Above the letters was a stunning mural of a crowd – a jangle of characters in profile, a bustling sidewalk perhaps, a rush-hour cross-section presumably illustrating the lives and histories of the Minnesotans the building represented.
There was a police officer, whistling at traffic, a fireman cranking at a hydrant. There was an elderly couple walking, bent into the wind. A man reading his newspaper. A paperboy. Miscellaneous workers carrying various tools of industry. There was a mother and daughter holding each other. They were unencumbered by other characters, as if to give them space and time of their own. They are sharing a moment of stillness apart from the noise swirling around them – people both trampling and lost in the trample. It is a chaos perhaps best depicted by a random disembodied hand, peeking out from the upper right corner of the frame.
Conspicuously obscured by the foreground characters, there’s the profile of a black man peeking out from behind the crowd. At least, I suspect he was black as his features were markedly different than the other jut-chins, and hard noses in the crowd. Unlike most of the other characters, he was hatless. The rest of his body was in there somewhere, but still – hidden.
In the mural alone, there was too much to take in while I made my family wait up. After all, it was late, and dark and very cold. They were getting ancy. Even my daughter, a scandalous slowpoke, was complaining that I always had to stop and take a picture of a thing.
The morning I returned to the City Hall Mural was early and bitterly cold. But I had my tripod and an hour to kill. I decided the only way to capture the mural, it’s full length and detail without any lens distortion, was to take three pictures, one of the left, center and right, and stitch them together later. This required a bit of choreography on the sidewalk. Thankfully, there were lines in the sidewalk parallel with the mural, so I only had to get my focus the one time, any shot down that same line should, in theory, be in focus. And again, it was early, so I wasn’t in anybody’s way, or attracting the attention of security.
But even at this hour, in the freezing cold, I had managed to gather a small audience.
After getting my focus, and setting the levels right, I noticed a man standing just behind me, following the aim of the lens to the mural. He looked puzzled.
I said, “Good morning?” But nothing. He just kept at the mural, squinting hard like he was expecting to see something more impressive. Eventually, shaking his head, he turned toward Wabasha and waddled away.
I set the exposure for 15 seconds with a 2-second delay. Even the slight pressing of the shutter shakes the camera. The 2-second delay gives it time to stop wobbling around before the shutter opens. And finally, with the settings dialed, I pressed the button and waited.
I imagined the open shutter, gobbling up all the light that comes its way. Even in the dim morning, a faint, faraway light can make an impression – if you give it enough time.
While the camera did its thing, I admired the mural – its comforting elements – the civic order, law, industry, community, the woman and daughter embracing.
There were words, carved elegantly: “Vox Populi.”
These elements then contrasted by a disquieting anonymity and inequity. It is a beautiful mural, even if it has complicated elements. Especially if it is complicated. It inspires both pride and remorse. A feeling of both belonging and not-belonging in a rich and contradicting heritage.
Is there anything more American?
To stand before the Saint Paul Courthouse and City Hall is to look upward. You’d have to be a jerk to not look up. This is probably not a mistake as most deco architecture seems designed for quiet grandeur. The building’s proud grid of vertical lines leads the eye upwards – if not heavenward, then at least to give a passerby a break from watching their shoes shuffling on the sidewalk.
After gathering enough photos of the mural, I poked my way further around the building. There’s little details and small flourishes all over the building. The carving of a beehive, a plaque with only a date “1931” in greened copper. I like that, no explanation.
Around the other side, on the front of the building facing the river, I found two small murals, vaguely Egyptian figures – their hard geometry, angular features, and ornate details confirmed further flourishes of Deco.
While the exterior has its moments, it is positively modest compared to the interior.
Through the back entrance, beneath that yawning, complicated mural, was an ornate passage of marble and florid brass. The heavy interior doors opened to a massive hall of more brass and more marble and arches and columns on each side. There was a polished marble floor leading to a focal pinnacle: a massive marble statue of an indian.
The statue is just plain shocking. It is bewildering, both in its gigantic scale and gorgeous design. Even in the marvelous interior of the city hall and courthouse, it seems alarming to encounter such an artifact in a government building. It’s as if someone thought to decorate a DMV with the Arc of the Covenant
From its Wikipedia page: The Vision of Peace (Indian God of Peace) weighs approximately 60 tons, stands 38 feet high, and was carved from creamy white Mexican onyx. The statue sits on a revolving base which turns the figure 132 degrees every 2.5 hours. There are 98 sections fastened to a steel I-beam and supported by three-quarter inch bronze ribs.
The statue is surrounded in mirrors. Both sides of the hall are mirrors, as well as a mirrored ceiling. Combined with the highly polished marble floors, the hall is a reflecting galaxy of bifurcate symmetry. Beyond its jumble of juxtaposition, the mirrors transform the already gigantic inner hallway to appear even larger – as if the walls are not walls, but fractaled passageways. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the city hall and courthouse as a metaphysical anomaly, a hub to several portholes to dimensions beyond.
Standing at the base of the statue, looking up, the sepia-tinted mirrored ceiling allows an additional, top-down perspective of the statue’s undulating marbled curves and chiseled, pointed features. A heavy brow and broad shoulders. And then there’s you up there. Or a mirrored image of you, standing on the ceiling and gaping downward and probably trying to wrap your head around how a space like this would come to be.
There is an implication here. Exactly what the implication portends is unclear. Whether it is strength, or majesty, order, unity, beauty, or whatever – the commentary of this marvelous tableau nods at the commonwealth which the building represents. The interior design, just like the judicial branch and municipal board housed therein, is up for interpretation.
Two people could visit this scene and – depending on how each sees themself fitting in this great machine – one could rightly be inspired with awe and majesty, while the other could easily imagine horror and abandon.
Again, a perfectly American design – I wouldn’t change a thing.
Architectural historian Larry Millet once described the Saint Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse as "A masterpiece of American Art Deco."
From the MNopedia page:
Beauty had been part of the plan all along. The architects, Holabird and Root of Chicago, were masters of moderne, also called art deco, the then-fashionable style famous for sleekness of form and simplicity of ornament. Chicago's magnificent Board of Trade is their masterpiece.
For exterior decoration they hired Lee Lawrie, the most successful American architectural sculptor of his time. Lawrie had designed sculpture for the Nebraska and Louisiana capitols, and almost all the outdoor sculpture at Rockefeller Center in New York. For Ramsey County he designed the medallions—a star, a beehive, a castle, and others—that circle the building. He also created the relief sculptures at the north and south entrances.
Over the north entrance Lawrie composed a street scene of regular people under the motto vox populi, voice of the people. For the stylized figures that flank the south doors he used an Assyrian style to suggest good government and both the urban and rural parts of Ramsey County.
References:
St. Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse: https://www.mnopedia.org/structure/st-paul-city-hall-and-ramsey-county-courthouse
Chicago Board of Trade Building: https://www.architecture.org/learn/resources/buildings-of-chicago/building/chicago-board-of-trade-building/
Architects John A. Holabird and John Wellborn Root Jr.: https://www.architecture.org/learn/resources/architecture-dictionary/entry/holabird-and-roche/
Art Deco Architecture: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/worlds-most-beautiful-art-deco-buildings
Side note, related (kind of) for further context, the art of the period – Diego Rivera’s Detroit Institute of Art’s Detroit Industry murals: https://www.decopix.com/art-deco-detroit-part-4-diego-riveras-detroit-industry/
Further down the rabbit hole, for a detailed description of Rivera’s murals: https://homepages.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/michigan/detroit/riveramurals/intro.html
Carl Milles's God of Peace: http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display.php?irn=10850310
Soviet Architecture: https://www.archdaily.com/tag/soviet-architecture