In St. Paul, the Landmark Center Anchors a Capital City's Cultural Season
The old federal courthouse that St. Paul refused to demolish now runs the city's cultural calendar — courts of law traded for courts of music, weddings and winter festivals.
Every state has a building that proves preservation works, and Minnesota's stands on Rice Park in St. Paul. The Landmark Center, completed in 1902 as the city's federal courthouse and post office, is a pink-granite, red-tile-roofed Richardsonian Romanesque pile that survived a demolition threat in the 1970s because St. Paul citizens organized to save it. It has been the capital city's cultural living room ever since.
The building's past is pure Minnesota history. As a federal courthouse it hosted the trials of the gangster era, when St. Paul's famously tolerant policing made the city a haven for the likes of John Dillinger and the Barker-Karpis gang — cases that ended, fittingly, in the courtrooms upstairs. The restored Cortile, the building's five-story marble atrium, now hosts concerts, exhibitions and the winter rituals of Rice Park, including the Saint Paul Winter Carnival season that turns the square outside into the city's cold-weather stage.
The Landmark Center's tenants read like a roll call of Minnesota arts: the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's administrative home, the Minnesota Museum of American Art's project space historically, music schools, dance companies and the Schubert Club, whose museum of historic instruments occupies the second floor. On any given week the building holds a wedding, a court-history tour and a school recital simultaneously, which is exactly what its rescuers intended.
For Minneapolis readers, the Landmark Center is also a standing instruction. The Twin Cities' two downtowns took different paths — one toward the new, one toward keeping the old standing — and St. Paul's wager on Rice Park, the Ordway, the Fitzgerald Theater and the Landmark Center produced a cultural district with a coherence money alone cannot buy.
As the holiday season builds, the building's calendar fills and the park outside lights up. Minnesota's capital city does winter pageantry better than anywhere in the state. It learned how in a courthouse it refused to tear down.
