Larry Millett Sees Gargoyles

Millett should know. Journalist, historian, novelist, critic, teacher—he is currently enjoying his most recent incarnation, as a latter-day Baedeker to the Twin Cities. In his new, more-than-600-page guide to Minneapolis and St. Paul architecture—sponsored by the American Institute of Architects, published by the Minnesota Historical Society, and excerpted here—he directs us around, through, and occasionally under some 1,500 municipal and commercial buildings, churches, homes, bridges, landmarks, and oddments, showing us, among other things, a great deal that the rest of us have missed over the years.      

Millett (pronounced mill-ET), at fifty-nine, is savvy enough to recognize book topics that require only trips to the library, or, easier yet, to Google.  Nonetheless, for the AIA Guide to the Twin Cities: The Essential Source on the Architecture of Minneapolis and St. Paul, he spent three springs, summers, and falls researching his sprawling subject from the seat of a bicycle. You may have seen him in your neighborhood, a handsome if somewhat scruffy-looking guy in windbreaker, jeans, and sneakers (one jean leg cinched with a rubber band to avoid disaster with chain and sprockets), wending his way around parked cars, maintaining a safe distance from surly dogs, and every now and again pausing to tell a bemused homeowner far more than she ever knew about her Tudor Revival.

His pal, architect Gar Hargens, who often accompanied Millett on his travels, says it was an interesting, sometimes amusing sight. “Larry,” he says, “would pedal along with his eyes on a row of houses, suddenly holler, ‘Hey, look at those eaves!’—then slam on the brakes and whip out his notebook and pencil.”          

“Together,” Millett writes in his author’s note, “we pedaled our way to many discoveries, the most breathtaking of which is that St. Paul really does have a lot of high hills.” (Also, though St. Paul is the smaller “twin,” it has 300 more streets than Minneapolis—one of the interesting facts you’ll learn from his guide.)  

Millett has a robust sense of humor, but he’s no fool, nor is he a newcomer to these parts. In the winter, when cycling was perilous if not impossible, he plumbed hundreds of library and archival sources, just as he’d done researching his exemplary architectural histories, not to mention his popular historical mysteries featuring Sherlock Holmes. “For a guidebook like this,” he explains, “you vacuum up information from a lot of other sources. I tried to collect all the basic existing data on the buildings I was writing about.” That meant poring over the Ramsey County Historic Sites Survey and National Register of Historic Places nomination forms and visiting staffers of local heritage preservation commissions and other knowledgeable sources.

By his own reckoning, existing information accounts for 90 percent of the entries in the book—which means 10 percent are “discoveries,” some of which he’d been making during his  years as architecture writer and critic for the Pioneer Press. Typical of the latter was the extremely atypical George Pilmer house on Iglehart in St. Paul. “After his wife died in the 1970s,” Millett recounts, “Pilmer, a Scottish-born plasterer who’d served on a submarine during World War II, turned his standard St. Paul bungalow into a Gaudiesque folly, with swirling plasterwork, parabolic arches, and little sculptures in the yard.” Millett says he discovered the house while biking around the neighborhood, killing time during his son’s baseball practice at nearby Dunning Field. “I turned down this unremarkable, ordinary street and thought, ‘What the hell!’ ” He originally wrote about the house for the paper. But it’s also included in the guide.

Another street-level “discovery” was a house on Bohland Place in a little-known corner of Highland Park—in Millett’s words, “a foursquare brick Miesian house built during the 1950s with the most amazing, undulating brick wall in front. Turns out it was built by a guy named Donald Haarstick, one of the early modern architects in St. Paul. He built it for himself on a rather obscure little street—a beautiful house just sitting there, totally off the local radar. I was on my bike one day, and there it was. Again, I did this kind of double take.”

Millett’s brick-sized guide, however, is not a grab bag of structural peculiarities and obscure treasures. It is a top-to-bottom, border-to-border exploration—organized by neighborhood and augmented by sixty maps and 500 illustrations—of our hometown cityscapes at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and the first book of its kind since Gebhard and Martinson’s now-out-of-print Guide to the Architecture of Minnesota first published in 1978. Unlike the latter, Millett’s guide focuses only on Minneapolis and St. Paul, excluding most of the suburbs and all of outstate Minnesota. But for longtime citizens and new arrivals alike, there is plenty to digest and enjoy, because each page brims with hard data, subjective observations, and welcome insights about not only the architecture, but its history and socioeconomic context.

It’s a guide, in short, that you’d expect from a guy who doesn’t limit himself to a single role in life or means of exploring his environment.