Over its 130-year history, the Winter Carnival has brought 36 Ice Palaces to St. Paul — some more palatial than others.
This year’s palace in Rice Park will be on the smaller side, just 400 blocks of ice. Although plans called for 1,000 blocks to be harvested from Lake Phalen, the weather didn’t cooperate. Construction began Saturday and is expected to wrap up sometime today.
But there have been plenty of impressive Ice Palaces in past years. From the Pioneer Press archives, here are 14 of the most spectacular:
1886: Originally designed for a festival in Montreal, the first Winter Carnival Ice Palace was built in the style of a medieval castle, complete with towers, turrets, battlements and embrasures. It was 180 feet long by 160 feet wide, and its massive central tower was 106 feet tall. It was the first ice palace ever built in the U.S., and it was St. Paul’s first “skyscraper.” It also was one of the first buildings in the city that boasted electric lights.
1887: Architect Charles Joy created a Romanesque fantasy in the shape of a Latin cross, 194 feet wide and 217 feet tall. Its octagonal, 115-foot tower was held up by eight flying buttresses, which allowed the walls to be thin and transparent. From it flew the carnival flag, emblazoned with a white polar bear on a blue background.
1888: The grandest of all St. Paul Ice Palaces required two months of labor and 55,000 blocks of ice. The wedding of George G. Brown and Eva Evans was held within its walls, with 6,000 guests in attendance. F. Scott Fitzgerald, born in 1896, is reputed to have researched the 1888 castle as a setting for his 1920 short story, “The Ice Palace.” Rising to 15 stories, the palace took more than four months to melt.
1896: Wildly ambitious, the structure called “Fort Karnival” turned out to be a disappointment. A major January thaw forced the builders to compromise on the design, and whole sections were left unfinished. On the positive side, the castle housed a restaurant and featured two side-by-side toboggan slides that ran its entire length. On the final night of the Carnival, more than $7,000 in fireworks were ruined in an unusual February thunderstorm.
1917: One of two forts built that year, the structure in Rice Park demonstrated that modest ice buildings, when surrounded by urban buildings, look even smaller. A Greek-cross design, the fort’s four entrances provided a walkway enclosure for day and evening strollers. This was the first Ice Palace seen by Fitzgerald, and it inspired him to search out examples of a more ambitious past.
1937: Local enthusiasts defied the Depression and used WPA labor to build a large palace that was 193 feet long, 86 feet wide and 60 feet high. The handsome modulated design by city architect Cap Wigington called for 30,000 blocks of ice. When it melted, major flooding and road damage resulted at its site near the Capitol.
1939: Designed by Lloyd Berquist, built near Lake Como and named “Arabian Nights,” the palace was a gingerbread fantasy that was 240 feet long and 80 feet high. It was built in three weeks by 200 laborers who had to endure dangerous winds.
1940: Cap Wigington used a tall hill in Como Park to make the 75-foot-high castle seem even taller. The palace was funded by a $14,000 WPA grant. Long lines of gawkers waited to have their letters postmarked from a branch office located inside, establishing a letter-mailing tradition.
1941: Taller than the 1940 structure, but placed on the same hilltop in Como Park, the 1941 Ice Palace was threatened by warming weather. A meltdown was averted by St. Paul school children, who plastered the lower courses of ice with newspapers. The castle, constructed by 268 workers using 30,000 ice blocks, included an 80-foot tower.
1975: Bob Olsen, then a student at St. Olaf College, organized a castle-building project at the current Town Square site in downtown St. Paul. Made from 3,000 blocks of ice and modeled after the designs of Cap Wigington, the castle was 37 feet high and cost $14,000 to build. Olsen is now the Winter Carnival’s unofficial historian and author of an illustrated book on St. Paul ice palaces.
1976: Architects Craig Rafferty and Jeri Zuber created a 40-foot-high castle of folded walls and planes that broke from the carnival tradition of imitating medieval structures. The castle was erected on the same downtown site as the 1975 structure, and both suffered from the problem of urban scale.
1986: Designed by Ellerbe Architects, the centennial Ice Palace featured a slender, sharply pointed central tower that ascended nearly 129 feet. It was erected next to Lake Phalen by 750 laborers and was the first to use prefabricated parts and computerized lighting.
1992: At 166 feet tall, the tallest Ice Palace ever built was designed to impress the football fans spilling over from Super Bowl XXVI, which was held at the Metrodome. With construction costs of $1.1 million, the undertaking bankrupted the St. Paul Winter Carnival Association, despite drawing an estimated 2.5 million visitors. When the structure was demolished after its 12-day run on Harriet Island, five front-end loaders worked for 24 hours to dump 7 million pounds of ice chunks into the Mississippi River.
2004: Built across West Seventh Street from Xcel Energy Center during the 2004 NHL All-Star Game, this was the first Ice Palace since 1941 that the public was allowed to walk through. And they did — about 500,000 people turned out. Construction costs totaled $10 million — this includes the value of donated labor and materials — and involved 27,000 blocks of ice cut from Lake Phalen. In contrast to the financial disaster of 1992, this Ice Palace turned a tidy $600,000 profit.
David Hawley contributed to this article. Nick Woltman can be reached at 651-228-5189. Follow him at twitter.com/nickwoltman.
Copyright 2016 Pioneer Press.
