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.
Larry Millett has for several decades impressed locals as one of our more interesting—and protean—hometown journalists. Beginning in the early seventies, he was a general assignment, courts, and education reporter at the Pioneer Press. Then, seeking to broaden both personal and professional horizons, he snagged a fellowship and studied for a year at the University of Michigan. The subject he chose was architecture (history and theory), a field about which he’d been reading extensively on his own.

At the same time, he was working on a book he’d begun at the paper, The Curve of the Arch: The Story of Louis Sullivan’s Owatonna Bank, about one of the historic Prairie School’s most intriguing icons. Foretelling a happy predilection, the book, published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press in 1985, was no sere academic monologue. “The idea was to explain how this fabulous building happened to be in this small town in Minnesota,” he says.

The Curve sold only a few thousand copies, but he learned how to write a compelling book. “Writing a book is a lot different from writing a newspaper story,” he says. “There’s a lot to know, including what not to do. And you can only learn by doing.”

While working his day job at the PiPress (after returning from Ann Arbor, he became the paper’s first architecture critic), he researched and wrote Lost Twin Cities (first published by the MHSP in 1992 and now in its seventh printing). The press published a sequel, Twin Cities Then and Now, in 1996, and, three years ago, Strange Days, Dangerous Nights, his grand, gory, pungently annotated collection of black-and-white newspaper photos, mostly from the forties and fifties. There also have been five period fictions published by Viking Penguin, beginning in 1996 with Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon, inspired by the spectacular commercial success of the suspense novels by John Camp—AKA John Sandford—an erstwhile colleague at the paper and one of Millett’s closest friends to this day.

“I’ve now written at least four different kinds of books,” Millett says, adding, unnecessarily, “I like to try different things.” He thinks of himself as “first and foremost a narrative writer, working with historic narrative.” In terms of subject, his “bug,” he says, is architectural history. Lucky for us.

In 2004, I edited the excerpt of Strange Days we ran in this magazine, and last year, Millett said some nice things for the jacket of my book, Dial M: The Murder of Carol Thompson, at the request of our common publisher, but I don’t know him well. I can say, based on recent experience, it’s probably impossible not to enjoy his company or learn a lot about what you think you already know. He talks as fluidly and engagingly as he writes (not often the case with writers) and, without coming across as either a know-it-all or a windbag, seems to know much about an astonishing number of subjects. 

Importantly, he is one of us, actually claiming a dual citizenship of sorts.  He’s lived much of his adult life on the West Side of St. Paul, but was born and bred in Minneapolis (he grew up on the first floor of a long-gone duplex at 26th Street and Colfax Avenue North). Before attending St. John’s University in Collegeville and earning a master’s degree at the University of Chicago, he attended Catholic schools on the North Side, then took the bus to and from DeLaSalle High School.

“That’s when I witnessed firsthand the destruction of the Gateway,” he says, referring to the razing of one of downtown Minneapolis’s oldest sections in the name of urban renewal—obviously a seminal experience for the architectural historian as a young man.

Though his “people” go back to the Mill City’s pioneer days, they were Dohertys and Milletts, not Washburns and Crosbys, so Larry’s father, with an eighth-grade education, labored as a currency teller at the Federal Reserve bank downtown and the family (including Larry and his sister) never owned a car. Thus, Larry learned the city’s shape and texture from the sidewalk and the window of the streetcar and bus.

He also read a lot and swears he was always interested in design. “As a kid, I drew reams and reams of house plans,” he recalls. “Not elevation sketches, because I wasn’t a particularly good artist. But I loved to figure out how to do a room, hide a closet, that sort of stuff. At some point, at that young age, I thought about becoming an architect. But I didn’t know anybody who was an architect. I had an aunt who taught at St. Catherine’s and a geologist uncle who examined some of the moon rocks, so there were educated people in the family, but they weren’t people I saw everyday. On the other hand, my mother, though she had only a high school diploma, was interested in words and puzzles, so at least part of my interest in being a writer had something to do with growing up in an environment where words were important.” Describing himself as “pretty much self-directed,” he says he got into journalism mainly because he “couldn’t think of anything better to do.”

“I look back on my life and realize that the architecture and history writing didn’t start until I was in my thirties, but it went back to things I was interested in when I was a kid,” he muses. “I think whatever you’re interested in when you’re twelve is probably what you’re going to be interested in when you’re forty or fifty or sixty, though maybe not exactly in the way you once envisioned it. You just have to try things out, let things evolve, see what happens.”

Today Millett is doing his guiding on foot and later in my car because the wind chill is too damn vicious for even a couple of natives. Bicycles are out of the question.

First, at Millett’s direction, we hoof around a local attraction that at least one international authority, the Guinness Book of World Records, says is unique on the planet: a city block with four separate churches on it. The landmark is news to me. Even though we’re in Northeast Minneapolis, not exactly my turf (I’m a Southsider born and bred), it’s a part of my hometown I thought I knew something about. To my chagrin, I knew nothing, until this moment, about pretty (and today snow-covered) Logan Park on Northeast Broadway at Monroe or the four old churches that ring the otherwise residential block across the park on 13th Avenue. In fact, venerable, richly ethnic Nordeast is full of sites unknown, not to say unexamined, by me—and, I’ll bet, by most of you and by many Nordeasterners as well.

Millett, for his part, talks as though he grew up on these chilly streets (he grew up a couple of miles due west, on the other side of the Mississippi), combining fine points of structural detail with broad social history in the same running commentary. “To me,” he says, “Northeast is the most interesting neighborhood in Minneapolis, and that’s because it’s mostly prezoning. You bike along a street up here, turn a corner, and right in front of you are three houses next to a grain elevator. You turn another corner and there’s a big manufacturing facility, a bar, a church, and a house.” And, as though his eyes see deeper into the urban landscape than mine, he knows what was there, but is now gone—dozens of “Lost” items, along with miscellaneous “Points of Interest,” are included in the guide. His is an infectious amalgam of learning, experience, and enthusiasm that calls to mind a Tom Friedman without the Frequent Flyer miles.

In the car now, cruising up Washington Street, Millett tells me that the neighborhood’s famous presidential street-name system was the brainchild of nineteenth-century civic leaders who thought it would be a good way to teach immigrants not only about America’s chief executives, but also the order in which they served. On Jefferson Street, he tells me to stop in front of a small porched residence, which he points out is the Werner and Thekla Muense house. The now-deceased Herr Muense, he says, was a wood carver from Germany, who stuffed his home with elaborate carvings of people and animals, many of which still crowd the tiny yard.

A few blocks away, Millett directs me into an empty parking lot off 4th Street, then turns my gaze upward to the roofline at the rear of All Saints Catholic Church, an old Polish parish where some thirty gargoyles ring the top of the apse, quite literally cheek to jowl. The faces, he says, were carved into the Minnesota limestone during the late 1930s by one Barney Cullen, who for some reason was given artistic carte blanche by the church or the archdiocese and chose to include the disparate and decidedly unecclesiastical likenesses of Joseph Stalin, Frankenstein’s monster, and Charlie McCarthy (the ventriloquist’s dummy). “The guy was told to have fun with the sculptures,” Millett says. “Well, it’s pretty obvious he did.”

We see the neighborhood’s “monuments” too—a typically eclectic array that runs the gamut from the Grain Belt brewing complex and the former Cream of Wheat plant that’s now upscale apartments to the much-loved Ritz Theater that’s now home to Ballet of the Dolls. But, as his buddy Gar Hargens points out, “while Larry respects and appreciates the big stuff, he really loves the smaller things, especially the idiosyncratic and vernacular. He’s a very smart, well-educated guy, but there’s also a lot of Everyman in Larry.”

Ask Millett what he thinks, and he’ll tell you. (His likes and dislikes are apparent in the guide.) He believes, for instance, that the golden age of architecture in the Twin Cities was between 1895 and the 1920s, the heydays of the great local architects Cass Gilbert, William Purcell, and George Elmslie and also the greatest period of architecture in both downtowns. “You had so many wonderful public buildings, plus the Beaux Arts and Prairie School gems, yet also much of our Victorian legacy. Nineteen-twenty-one was also the peak year for streetcars, and ours were streetcar cities. Yeah, I would have loved to have wandered around in downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul in the ’20s. That was before the Foshay Tower and St. Paul’s city hall”—erected in 1929 and 1932, respectively, and two of Millett’s favorite surviving Twin Cities landmarks. “But there would have been a lot of great things to look at.”

By contrast, though hardly sentimental or nostalgic, he’s disappointed by most of the newer buildings in his hometowns. “Except for some of the big showpiece projects like the new Walker, Central Library, and Guthrie,” he says, “I don’t think we’re doing much interesting architecture right now. Architecturally, the new urbanism has been a big mistake in both cities. I don’t want to see another brick box that’s supposed to be historical. Just look at most of the buildings going up today—everything seems insubstantial compared with so many of the buildings of years ago. Nothing’s wrong with traditional design, but most of what’s offered today as traditional just isn’t very good. They trick it up with a piece of cast stone somewhere and say it’s Colonial.

“I’m not a snotty kind of critic,” he says. “I like a lot of the things I see. But I often say that the worst thing that can happen to a city is that it acquires too much taste. The problem with the suburbs isn’t so much one of bad design, it’s that there are too many controls, they’re too regulated—they just replicate themselves every twenty years. Cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul are never going to be duplicated. They’re the product of their histories.”

Millett’s written guide is the product of a consortium, comprising, as he describes it, “a publisher, an organization, and several donors”—most prominently, his friend and former co-worker John Camp. Together, he says, they raised “about $100,000” to keep him going for the nearly three years it took him to complete the project. (Millett retired from the Pioneer Press in 2002.)

Writing a guidebook was yet another animal for him to tame. “It was a very complicated process,” he says. Besides his own digging, volunteer researchers sent him a steady stream of information and his editors bombarded him with queries, all the while he was trying to find time to write. “My first draft was basically a series of statements interrupted by frequent questions,” he says with a laugh. “Unlike a normal history, you’re dealing with a lot of relatively short pieces. You have to be very concise—and how many one-line descriptions can you write for a Craftsman foursquare house?” The book was scheduled for a spring 2007 release because the National Trust for Historic Preservation is convening in St. Paul in the fall. As the deadline loomed, Millet says, he was trying to write fifteen to twenty entries a day. “It really got to be a slog.”

“I was supposed to write 1,000 entries,” Millett says, laughing again. “Well, I ended up doing 3,000, which we cut to about 1,500. That’s the peril of writing a book entry by entry—the pages add up.” Everything considered, he figures he wrote about 300,000 words, which is almost three times the word count for Lost Twin Cities. Happily, the research is all destined for a massive online database that will eventually be available through the Minnesota Historical Society.

Though the state chapter of the AIA is the book’s sponsor and the historical society holds the copyright, the critical calls were entirely Millett’s. “Unlike a lot of guides that are more or less written by committee, this book has a personality—mine,” he says. “I don’t expect everybody to agree with all my opinions, but the idea is that you’re going out with someone who is interested and who’s offering some description and judgment.”

It’s late January, and Millett is speaking like a seasoned writer who is finally, after a long “slog,” beginning to emerge from under an onerous assignment. “I don’t think a non-native could have written this guidebook the way I wrote it,” he says. “What I’ve tried to do is write a book that locals can use to discover things about their cities that they didn’t know—things that maybe only a few other locals know—and, at the same time, give people who are coming here from other places a lot of useful background. There’s always a danger that a native is going to lose perspective, is going to be provincial, but I tried to avoid that. I don’t claim that these are the most beautiful cities on the face of the earth or that our architecture is finer than anywhere else. In fact, I say there are maybe fifty buildings in the Twin Cities that you could argue are nationally significant by virtue of the quality of their architecture. Most of the other notable stuff is either very good or typical of its kind. This isn’t Florence. Yet these are interesting cities, each with its own character, but both are also typically Midwest in many ways.”

Millett, I should add, teaches urban and architectural history at St. Paul’s College of Visual Arts. “A city,” he tells his students, “is more than just a collection of streets and buildings—it’s a whole way of living and, for those who have been here for a long time, a whole set of memories, and all of that is part of our urban experience. We all live in the past, present, and future, and our cities are where that time has unfolded in visible ways.”  

Mpls.St.Paul Magazine senior editor William Swanson wrote about heart attacks and marathoners in the March issue.