Whenever workers enter the construction shack, chill winter gusts precede them through the door, fluttering a sheet of paper tacked to the bulletin board.
”City of Saint Paul Building Permit No. 6151,” the document says. ”Ice Palace. Lake Phalen Island.”
A sturdy table beneath the bulletin board is strewn with heavy stacks of blueprints detailing one of the most ambitious ice palace projects ever attempted.
Precise lines depicting projectile-shaped towers, flying buttresses, massive walls and intriguing grottoes fill pages of plans. One tower, according to the blueprint, will soar 150 feet above Lake Phalen, a recreational body of water in sprawling Phalen Park on the city`s north side. If it were to survive the occasional thaws that have plagued the enterprise since workers set the first block of ice into place on Jan. 6, that ice tower supposedly would distinguish the palace as the tallest of its kind man has ever built. The record so far, experts say, is held by the ice palace constructed for the 1888 St. Paul Winter Carnival, the tower of which attained 140 feet.
Sharing space with the building permit on the bulletin board is a photograph of St. Paul`s very first ice palace, the showpiece of the inaugural Winter Carnival held 100 years ago.
The picture depicts a grim, medieval fortress with a central tower 106 feet high and an edifice 180 feet long. A caption says, ”This structure launched Saint Paul into the international limelight for civic celebrations throughout the world.”
In January of 1985, a full year before the 100th anniversary of that launching, leaders of the St. Paul Winter Carnival approached Charlie Hall, a veteran carnival booster and retired owner of the Mermaid Supper Club and Bowling Center. They asked Hall to find out if an ice palace exceeding even the 1888 model in size could be built in modern times. Hall, who knows a lot of construction people, learned the feat would be possible, and he exulted.
”I was brought up just a mile-and-a-half from where an ice palace was built in 1941,” Hall said during a pause in his promotional and coordinating efforts a few days ago. ”Now, that was a spectacular sight to behold.”
Hall is one of many old-timers around St. Paul who act as living repositories for memories of carnivals past. ”I remember when big companies would dress up their employees in bright-colored uniforms made of wool,” he said. ”All of them would march around downtown. Everybody would get into it back in those days.”
Local wage-earners, these days, may not be so willing to smother their identities in company-sponsored uniforms, but they do get into the spirit. More than 1,200 citizens have volunteered to work during the carnival period, Jan. 22 through Feb. 9, by arranging and supervising such activities as stock car races on ice, snowshoe softball games, hot air balloon flights, skating exhibitions, ice-sculpting contests and parades.
An additional 1,000 unpaid volunteers will be manning donated construction equipment to build the palace, a project that would cost an estimated $1.5 million otherwise.
To pay for some $200,000 worth of supplies and utilities that couldn`t be donated, benefactors have been snapping up $10 certificates attesting to their ”ownership” of one 24-inch by 48-inch, 800-pound block of ice palace ice.
Hall said 35,000 such certificates will have gone on the market before the carnival ends. Scarcely more than 30,000 blocks of ice actually will be used in the structure, but some of those will be broken into smaller pieces to fill in details, so there should be plenty of authentic certificates to go around.
The frenzy of pre-Carnival civic enthusiasm, though, could best be witnessed at the construction site itself. In the shadows of four 50-ton cranes provided by the main contractor, Austin P. Keller Construction Co., volunteer members of the St. Paul building trades scurried over the monolith, which had reached 8 feet in height early this month.
Fifty workers for each of the two 8-hour shifts per day, six days a week, sign on for a nominal $1 an hour (which is then contributed to the state`s workmens` compensation pool). At least that many citizens per shift turn up at Phalen Park to watch the activity.
On cold days, those observers sit in parked cars with the engines running and marvel as the cranes lift the blocks into place with giant ice tongs while workers secure the joints with ”mortar” made from slush.
On warm days, spectators worry that the potentially beautiful structure might trickle away.
”We`re running three to five days behind schedule,” Tom Keller, president of the construction firm, reported after an unusually mild weekend. ”These thaws have held us back.”
Hit by another thaw this week, contractors and designers agreed to eliminate some minor features and scale down the main tower to 116 feet, settling for the title of second tallest ice palace in history.
On a Monday after one warm spell, workers spent both shifts making sun-damaged walls level again, while the Lake Phalen ice, harvested by Ed Chaput and his crew, began to pile up, unused, near the base.
Chaput, 73, a St. Paul native, had come all the way from his winter home in Grass Valley, Calif., to lend a hand. He is one of the few experienced ice harvesters still breathing.
”I was in the ice business for 30 years,” he told one visitor, ”but when refrigeration came in, ice went out.”
Chaput had managed to obtain some of the obsolete circle saws and splitting bars he needed, and he was awaiting the arrival of an ”incline planer” he could attach to the top of the conveyer belt that carries blocks of ice up from the lake at a rate of 600 blocks a day. The planer would uniformly lop the murky tops off the blocks, which Chaput calls ”logs.”
”When ice freezes on the lake,” Chaput explained, ”you`ve got some snow over it in spots, so it varies in thickness and it gets that cloudy snow ice on the top, where it doesn`t freeze as fast. The contractors haven`t been hollering much about the snow ice; it passed all the strength tests. But it does melt faster than the good, clear, hard ice below.”
Out on the lake that day, volunteers with chain saws carved a 500-log ice raft out of the surface, setting their blades so that a 7-inch base would remain. Then they tamped snow between the edges of the raft and the remainder of the lake to prevent water from seeping in among the blocks. After floating the raft through an open channel to a point near the conveyer belt, they would pry the individual blocks loose from the base and send them on their way, up the conveyor belt and then down a 50-yard wooden chute that empties into the construction site.
Chaput watched the work progress and winced. ”When we ran ice 30 years ago,” he said, ”we ran 7,000 or 8,000 logs a day with maybe 10 percent of the crew we have out here. But then, in those days, everybody knew their job.”
At least, the logs that day were hard. A perfect temperature for palace- building is a steady reading in the teens. At extremely low temperatures, ice becomes brittle and easily breaks. It will soften and begin to melt in sunlight at any point beyond 20 degrees. Too many days in the first couple of weeks had exceeded that limit. Sometimes it seemed as if the fiery god Vulcanus had intruded much too soon.
Vulcanus plays an important role in the mythology of the St. Paul Winter Carnival, and the myth is a crucial part of the palace design. Story-tellers in 1886 concocted the first version of the tale. Tom Martinson, 41, who calls himself the ”resident mythologist” of Ellerbe, Inc., the Minneapolis architectural firm that won a state-wide competition for the palace design, added further embellishments.
So it came to pass that the palace towers would each symbolize the breezes governed by Boreas, king of the winds, whose annual fest, the St. Paul Winter Carnival, always succumbs in the end to an attack by Vulcanus, the god of fire.
In July, shortly after Winter Carnival operatives had selected the site and sent out a call for competition entries, a team from Ellerbe visited the area, and Tom Martinson began fitting the palace into the myth.
”What we ended up with is not a building but a land populated by enchanted people,” Martinson said the other day.
Karl Ermanis, the architect who executed the design, said the mixture of mythology and ice enabled him to break away from one ice-palace tradition.
”Many of the palaces of the past, particularly in St. Paul, were done in architectural styles in fashion at the time,” Ermanis said. ”In the 1880s, Romanesque was quite fashionable, and it required large blocks of masonry, which made that style appropriate to the building material.
”We didn`t want this one to look like it had any place in time or culture. We wanted to give this a fantastic quality, something that would let the beholder decide what the nature of it was.”
On Lake Phalen Island, engineers and other workers have tried to make the fantasy come true. By December, they had driven 412 timber support pilings into the uneven earth and covered them with a foot and a half of concrete foundation. Then, this month, the volunteers began piling up the first ice logs for a palace that would rest entirely upon itself–a slippery
proposition.
Steel structural elements were out of the question, because metal conducts heat, and no one could be certain how much weight the walls of ice might bear, because 98 years had passed since the last tall ice tower had been built.
Ellerbe employees Scott Thorpe, the project manager, and Michael Shekhner, the structural engineer, spend at least half their time on the site, making sure the material copes with the strain.
”We learned that ice shrinks–we call the process `creep`–under a constant load,” Shekhner said. Ice bearing great weight compresses permanently in what engineers call ”plastic deformation,” meaning the ice cannot spring back to its original shape when the weight is released.
”The plastic deformations pile up; they become cumulative,” Shekhner said. ”This happens to many materials, but the creep in ice is very bad.” To ease the burden, walls at the base were made to a thickness of four feet. The towers resting upon those walls were to be hollow and light, but not too light.
”If that 150-foot tower were a solid prism with no hollows in it, we estimate it would shrink 11 feet in two months,” Shekhner said.
”Yet, the overall mass of the tower is enough to compensate for wind load,” Scott Thorpe added. If the architects had made the towers excessively wispy, another nasty tendency of ice would have come into play: Under tension, such as that caused by wind, ice will safely compress in those areas hit directly by the wind, but the surfaces behind them will try to fly apart.
”Ice is very bad at handling tension,” Shekhner said. ”We have to constantly fine-tune the structural elements to keep all those forces in balance.”
Some Ellerbe employees prefer to focus on the dream quality of it all. Even Thorpe, who keeps his nose to the blueprint most of the time, said,
”This is the collective recall of our childhood fantasies.”
Another member of the Ellerbe team, publicist Kate Leslie, likes to conjure up images of light and shadow and mood that onlookers might experience. (Carriers of Winter Carnival liability insurance insist that carnival-goers be kept away from the central interior, which will remain unfurnished.)
”There will be three prime moments for looking at this spectacle,” Kate Leslie said. ”Just before sunrise, right after a snowfall, you will see soft little cushions of snow resting on the towers and the flying buttresses. In bright sunlight, the palace will look icy and cold. Finally, people will want to view it at night, during the lighting ceremony, when the palace will first be lit from within and fireworks will fill the sky. And we`ll have fireworks again on the last evening, during the storming by Vulcanus.”
If Vulcanus doesn`t turn on too much heat prematurely, everyone involved with the project expects the palace to remain standing until the middle of February. Then, to prevent accidents, floods and an unpleasant collective memory of a beloved, if temporary, landmark slowly succumbing to the temperatures of spring, the palace will be swiftly removed.
”We might blast it,” said construction chief Tom Keller. ”I know a demolition company that says it could implode this sucker.”
