Non-Fiction Books

MILLETT, THE CURVE OF THE ARCH. THE STORY OF LOUIS SULLIVAN'S OWATONNA BANK. , 1985, xv 205 p. figuras.Encuadernacion original. Nuevo.

"An impressive sampling of the vanished buildings of the Twin Cities, tracing their history and including information on who the owners and architects were, how these structures were used, why they were torn down, and what occupies each site today. Highly recommended." —Library Journal Lost Twin Cities is an architectural and social history of the downtowns of St. Paul and Minneapolis. The richly illustrated text emphasizes the growth and development of the two downtowns in the nineteenth century and their subsequent alteration by urban renewal and other forces of change in the twentieth century.

From Larry Millett, author of the award-winning Lost Twin Cities , comes this fascinating new book that explores the history of Minneapolis and St. Paul from the vantage point of their streets. "Because of their relative stability, streets offer an incomparable framework for looking at the urban past and comparing it to the present," writes Millett in his introduction to Twin Cities Then and Now , which consists of seventy-two historic street scenes matched with new photographs taken from the same locations. Accompanying each scene is an informative essay that examines the often astonishing changes wrought by time and circumstance. The historic photographs, some published here for the first time, include views taken from as long ago as the 1880s and as recently as the late 1950s. Jerry Mathiason's elegant new black-and-white photographs complement these historic images and provide superb visual comparisons between then and now, while Millett's lively text puts each scene into clear focus. Twin Cities Then and Now also includes four specially prepared maps along with detailed informational graphics that identify hundreds of significant buildings and places visible in the photographs. Twin Cities Then and Now is an engaging, startling, and at times heartbreaking look at the dramatic march of progress in Minneapolis and St. Paul. For, as Millett also writes in his introduction, "to observe a city over time is to see, for better or worse, the remorseless power of change."

Fat men's races and fall-out shelters, murder victims and loose women, cheerleaders and immigrants, celebrities and children in distress were just some of the urban curiosities splashed across the pages of city newspapers during the Speed Graphic era (1930s–1950s). Championed by acclaimed news photographers like Arthur Fellig (a.k.a. Weegee), the Speed Graphic camera produced a new visual style that was as blunt, powerful, and immediate as a left hook. Driven by the desire to fill newspaper pages with sensational images, press photographers shot everything, day and night: automobile accidents, fires, murders, all the cop news that fought for a hot spot on the Front Page. And they covered uncounted numbers of social affairs—pictures called "grip-and-grins" in the trade: school events, sports, celebrities, oddities both of nature and humanity.

Thoroughly researched, meticulously written, and featuring 3,000 architectural structures of wide-ranging styles, this is the guide to the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Get ready to discover the great architectural mecca that is Minneapolis and St. Paul. The first comprehensive, illustrated handbook of its kind, AIA Guide to the Twin Cities is the ultimate source to the architectural riches of the metropolitan area. Organized by neighborhood and featuring a wealth of sites—from the highest point on the Minneapolis skyline to the modest St. Paul bungalow vibrant with historical and architectural significance—this invaluable reference has it all: illuminating entries for more than 3,000 buildings; behind-the-scenes details of the structures and their architects; lively information about local history and regional styles; highlights of important buildings nearly lost in time; sixty easy-to-read maps that pinpoint the location of every structure; dozens of planned walking and driving tours; and more than 1,000 photos that illustrate significant buildings and features.

In his popular Strange Days, Dangerous Nights, Larry Millett delivered Weegee-style images of midwestern noir from the photo files of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He returns in this new volume with a focus on the "dangerous"murder cases from the forties and fifties, memorialized in intimate and telling photographs. There is Arthur DeZeler, accused of bludgeoning his wife, Grace, and sinking her body in a northern lake. Laura Miller, single and pregnant, ran for help after gunshots killed her married lover. Arnold Axilrod, a mild-mannered dentist with a penchant for over-sedating his female patients, was arrested when the lifeless body of one of those patients was discovered in a Minneapolis alley. And, finally, there is Arnold Larson, the personable salesman with a winning smile and a bad temper. Millett traces these four sensational crimes from the moment the victim was found, through the search for the killer, to the court trial and resulting imprisonment or acquittal—there are two of each. All are copiously illustrated with shots from the bulky Speed Graphic camera, which yielded rich, textured views in an era when photographers enjoyed unrestricted access to police matters ranging from found bodies to jail cells. The images dramatically evoke these crimes of passion now more than a half-century old, offering a thrilling immersion into Minnesota noir.

Let architecture critic Larry Millett be your guide to one of the most picturesque neighborhoods in the Twin Cities, a treasure trove of architectural styles and storied homes. This guidebook will satisfy your cravings for details about the structures and the people who built them. This handy guide expands upon the information in Millet's AIA Guide to the Twin Cities to cover homes, churches, parks, museums, and commercial buildings in the neighborhoods on and near St. Paul's Summit Avenue. Millett provides details about the architect and date of construction along with lively descriptions of design features and telling stories of inhabitants. This informative guidebook is perfect for tourists discovering the Twin Cities or residents exploring what is right next door.

Let architecture critic Larry Millett be your guide to some of the most picturesque areas in the Twin Cities, a treasure trove of architectural styles and storied homes. This guidebook will satisfy your cravings for details about the structures and the people who built them. AIA Guide to the Minneapolis Lake District includes walking tours of Lake Harriet, Lake Calhoun and Uptown, Lowry Hill, and Lake of the Isles. Each tour is copiously illustrated with current and historic photographs and paired with a detailed map. This deeply informative guidebook is perfect for tourists discovering the Twin Cities or residents exploring what is right next door.

Let architecture critic Larry Millett be your guide to the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul, whose architectural histories display the uniqueness of these far-from-identical "twin" cities. Whether gazing at the historic Landmark Center near St. Paul's Rice Park or discovering the Mill City Museum, built in the shell of the Washburn A Mill along the Minneapolis riverfront, these guidebooks will satisfy your craving for details about the structures and the people who built them. AIA Guide to Downtown Minneapolis includes walking tours for Nicollet Mall, the Warehouse District, the central riverfront, and the Elliot Park and Loring Park neighborhoods. AIA Guide to Downtown St. Paul offers up the central core, Rice Park, Lowertown, and capitol districts. Each tour is copiously illustrated with current and historic photographs and paired with detailed maps. These deeply informative guidebooks are perfect for tourists discovering the Twin Cities and residents exploring what is right next door.

Let architecture critic Larry Millett be your guide to the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul, whose architectural histories display the uniqueness of these far-from-identical "twin" cities. Whether gazing at the historic Landmark Center near St. Paul's Rice Park or discovering the Mill City Museum, built in the shell of the Washburn A Mill along the Minneapolis riverfront, these guidebooks will satisfy your craving for details about the structures and the people who built them. AIA Guide to Downtown Minneapolis includes walking tours for Nicollet Mall, the Warehouse District, the central riverfront, and the Elliot Park and Loring Park neighborhoods. AIA Guide to Downtown St. Paul offers up the central core, Rice Park, Lowertown, and capitol districts. Each tour is copiously illustrated with current and historic photographs and paired with detailed maps. These deeply informative guidebooks are perfect for tourists discovering the Twin Cities and residents exploring what is right next door.

In Lost Twin Cities, Larry Millett brought to life the vanished architecture of downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul. Now, in Once There Were Castles , he offers a richly illustrated look at another world of ghosts in our midst: the lost mansions and estates of the Twin Cities. Nobody can say for sure how many lost mansions haunt the Twin Cities, but at least five hundred can be accounted for in public records and archives. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, entire neighborhoods of luxurious homes have disappeared, virtually without a trace. Many grand estates that once spread out over hundreds of acres along the shores of Lake Minnetonka are also gone. The greatest of these lost houses often had astonishingly short lives: the lavish Charles Gates mansion in Minneapolis survived only nineteen years, and Norman Kittson’s sprawling castle on the site of the St. Paul Cathedral stood for barely more than two decades. Railroad and freeway building, commercial and institutional expansion, fires, and financial disasters all claimed their share of mansions; others succumbed to their own extravagance, becoming too costly to maintain once their original owners died. The stories of these grand houses are, above all else, the stories of those who built and lived in them—from the fantastic saga of Marion Savage to the continent-spanning conquests of James J. Hill, to the all-but-forgotten tragedy of Olaf Searle, a poor immigrant turned millionaire who found and lost a dream in the middle of Lake Minnetonka. These and many other mansion builders poured all their dreams, desires, and obsessions into extravagant homes designed to display wealth and solidify social status in a culture of ever-fluctuating class distinctions. The first book to take an in-depth look at the history of the Twin Cities’ mansions, Once There Were Castles presents ninety lost mansions and estates, organized by neighborhood and illustrated with photographs and drawings. An absorbing read for Twin Cities residents and a crucial addition to the body of work on the region’s history, Once There Were Castles brings these “ghost mansions” back to life.

Stripped of its original Tiffany light fixtures, lamps, and stained-glass panels, a Lowry Hill mansion was returned to its original grandeur after an owner bought back many of these furnishings. A family in Winona has spent three decades slowly uncovering a landmark Victorian's hidden beauty. Minneapolis graphic designers have meticulously restored a Frank Lloyd Wright gem, even fabricating never-before-built cabinets, furniture, and rugs Wright originally designed for the home. In Lost Twin Cities and Once There Were Castles, Larry Millett retrieved Twin Cities architecture vanished in time, giving us a view into buildings and homes lost to demolition, accident, and neglect. In Minnesota's Own, he and photographer Matt Schmitt invite us into homes from across the state that have been lovingly preserved, saved so that they can remain jewels among the state's living architecture. From Duluth to Bemidji, Red Wing to the Twin Cities, Millett and Schmitt travel throughout Minnesota, highlighting homes designed by architects such as Edwin Lundie, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Purcell and George Elmslie and with sumptuous ornamentation by local craftspeople including interior decorator John Bradstreet and woodcarver Johannes Kirchmayer. Homes originally owned by Daytons, Hills, and Ramseys find themselves in new hands that have taken great care in their upkeep and preservation. Minnesota's Own welcomes readers into twenty-two of these homes through over two hundred color photographs and Millett's captivating stories of their construction, original owners, and restorations.

From the genteel elegance of Christ Lutheran Church in Minneapolis to the lowbrow wonder of Porky's Drive-in in St. Paul, the Twin Cities and other Minnesota communities are nothing short of a living museum of midcentury modernism, the new style of architecture that swept through much of America from 1945 to the mid-1960s. Renowned Minnesota architecture critic and historian Larry Millett conducts an eye-opening, spectacularly illustrated tour of this rich and varied landscape. A history lesson as entertaining as it is enlightening, Minnesota Modern provides a close-up view of a style that penetrated the social, political, and cultural machinery of the times. Extending from modest suburban ramblers and ranch houses to the grandest public and commercial structures, midcentury modernism expressed new ways of thinking about how to live, work, and play in communities that sprang up as thousands of military members returned from World War II. Millett describes the style’s sources in the work of European masters like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, as well as the midwestern innovations of Frank Lloyd Wright, and its refinement at the University of Minnesota under the guidance of Ralph Rapson and other modernists. He shows us its applications in twelve midcentury homes in Minnesota and takes us through its many permutations in sites as different as Barry Byrne’s St. Columba Catholic Church in St. Paul and Eero Saarinen’s sprawling IBM complex in Rochester. This is Minnesota modern at its historic best, a firsthand, in-depth history of a singularly American sensibility and aesthetic writ large on the midwestern region.

When the Pioneer Press Building opened its doors in 1889, it was news. The twelve-story skyscraper, the tallest at the time in the heart of St. Paul—featuring the first glass elevator in the country—merited a forty-page special edition of the Pioneer Press , whose editors modestly proclaimed it “the greatest newspaper building mother earth carries.” A year later, another architectural monument, the Endicott Complex—which wraps around the Pioneer Building—opened its doors. Designed by rising St. Paul architect Cass Gilbert, the Endicott included two office buildings linked by a one-story L-shaped shopping arcade crowned by a stained-glass ceiling. Journalist and architectural historian Larry Millett tells the story of these two icons of downtown St. Paul from conception through numerous alterations to their present incarnation as vibrant cultural and living spaces in the city’s center. He describes how the Pioneer came to be designed by noted Chicago architect Solon Beman, who in 1910 added four floors to create a sixteen-story light court that remains one of Minnesota’s great architectural spaces. Millett also describes Gilbert’s meticulous work in designing the Endicott complex, which was inspired by the Renaissance palaces of Florence. Gilbert would later go on to produce such masterpieces as the Minnesota State Capitol and the Woolworth Building in New York. As entertaining as it is edifying, Heart of St. Paul combines architectural history with the rich human story behind two buildings that have played a prominent role in the life of the city for over a century. The book includes an introduction by Kristin Makholm, Director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, which has found a new home in the buildings.

The story of one of Minnesota’s most famous and most mourned buildings, set against the history of downtown Minneapolis When it opened in 1890, the twelve-story Northwestern Guaranty Loan Building was the tallest, largest, and most splendid commercial structure in Minneapolis—a mighty stone skyscraper built for the ages. How this grand Richardsonian Romanesque edifice, which later came to be called the Metropolitan Building , rose with the growth of Minneapolis only to fall in the throes of the city’s postwar renewal, is revealed in Metropolitan Dreams in all its scandalous intrigue. It is a tale of urban growing pains and architectural ghosts and of colorful, sometimes criminal characters amid the grandeur and squalor of building and rebuilding a city’s skyline. Against the thrumming backdrop of turn-of-the-century Minneapolis, architectural critic and historian Larry Millett recreates the impressive rise of the massive office building, its walls of green New Hampshire granite and red Lake Superior sandstone surrounding its true architectural wonder, a dazzling twelve-story iron and glass light court. The drama, however, was far from confined to the building itself. A consummate storyteller, Millett summons the frenetic atmosphere in Gilded Age Minneapolis that encouraged the likes of Northwestern Guaranty’s founder, real estate speculator Louis Menage, whose shady deals financed this Minneapolis masterpiece—and then forced him to flee both prosecution and the country a mere three years later. Dubious as its financial beginnings might have been, the economic circumstances of the Metropolitan’s demise were at least as questionable. Anchoring Minneapolis’s historic Gateway District in its heyday, the building’s fortunes shifted with the city’s demographics and finally it fell victim to the fervor of one of the largest downtown urban renewal projects ever undertaken in the United States. Though the long and furious battle to save the Metropolitan ultimately failed in 1962, its ghost persists in the passion for historic preservation stirred by its demise—and in Metropolitan Dreams , whose photographs, architectural drawings, and absorbing narrative bring the building and its story to vibrant, enduring life.