One of the pleasures of living in downtown Saint Paul is the opportunity to live an everyday life with architecture. The neighborhood forms masses of shapes against the sky, and there are wonderful interior shapes with atriums of different heights and colors. The use of materials, of form and function, light and detail, are endlessly interesting, before you even start considering the history of how and when they rose. Consider all those choices, made by architects and business people in service to their own ideas, ambitions, what they aspire to, what they are bound by.
Residents walk by and through those buildings every day. We see how urban geography can shift in response to the private sphere. These buildings are owned. Choices are still being made.
I’m thinking particularly today about the First National Bank Building in downtown St. Paul, an art deco beauty of marble walls and ornate elevators. As it was being built in 1930, it had to compete for materials with the under-construction Empire State Building in New York. It was the city’s tallest building for 55 years; it is topped by the regionally iconic 100-foot tower that flashes a red “1st” as far as 75 miles away.
Now the building has changed hands, and one small casualty is apparent by the elevators, and on its skyways. There are no spring flowers.
Four years ago, when I was starting the Motley Peg series of small essays, I “did a little piece”, as writers say, about walking on the snug skyways during a late winter storm, with snow skittering along outside and the wind howling between the buildings. I happened upon (and don’t the most wonderful things occur that way?) two women pulling garden carts full of flowers to fill the ornamental planters in the First National. “Pots of semi-tropical plants in pink and orange and yellow and deep glossy green,” I said. Kalanchoe and cyclamen in bright varieties called “Widow’s Thrill” and “Fantastic Flaming Katie.”
In early March in Minnesota, there is no color in the landscape, and even when it is not snowing sideways, everything is still hard and gray. At this time of year, we are hungry for color and life; there are only so many spring bulb gardens you can put on your dining room table. So I followed these women as they worked and, “glancing over my shoulder, fingered my way past the leaves and pushed a finger deep into the wet soil. It smelled like spring.”
Not this year. The building has changed hands and the planters are empty, just plastic grass surrounding a hole. People shake their heads, guessing that the new owners don’t want to spend any money at all.
Managers, whoever you are, it wouldn’t take much to fill those planters, now huddled empty and forlorn against those beautiful walls. It would be an act of citizenry, of liveliness, adding color to the environment, reminding us all that spring WILL come.
After a quick count on the several levels and hallways, I can testify that 98 six-inch pots of flowers would do the job. There’s a local florist just one building away. I’ll bet you can get them wholesale.
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Photo by the author.
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