Lost Minnesota: Stories of Vanished Places by Jack EL-Hai
University of Minnesota Press
reviewed by Mike Nardine
Originally published in The Reader Weekly
Mr. El-Hai writes a column for Architecture Minnesota entitled “Lost Minnesota” and many of the lost buildings in this interesting book have already appeared in that column. For those of us who are not regular readers of that no-doubt interesting magazine, this book contains eighty-nine illustrations of Minnesota buildings and communities that have vanished from this earth.
Don’t worry, Mr. El-Hai doesn’t bore us with architectural minutia like blue prints; instead there is picture of the dear-departed and a page-long story detailing the building’s birth, life and death. The Northland is represented by seven buildings including Duluth’s own Incline Railway which evidently had some exciting moments: “Tragedy struck, however, when a fire erupted in the railway’s powerhouse engine room in 1901. The flames leapt to the pavilion and burned that structure to the ground. Engineers frantically chained the car at the uphill end to the tracks, but the fierce heat snapped the links and melted the cable, sending the blazing coach on a runaway course down the hill to the Superior Street station. The car covered the half mile in ten seconds. It crashed through the stations masonry wall and exploded, shooting flames and debris into the air and into a nearby rail yard.” Bet they talked about that one for a day or two! How fitting that the incline station is now a bowling alley! Other lost places in Duluth include the First Methodist Episcopal Church and the Lyceum Theatre.
You might think from his column in Architecture Minnesota and this book, that Mr. El-Hai is greater Minnesota’s answer to Duluth’s own Dr. Ringsred. Not so. In the introduction he expounds on his own philosophy of building preservation, and it is surprisingly realistic: “My point is not that old buildings as a rule should stand forever. Many shouldn’t. If some of the properties in Lost Minnesota were around today, they would endanger our health and insult our aesthetics. Who in their right mind would prefer the old Kenwood Armory to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden that currently occupies the site?” Dr. Ringsred’s detractors might want to send him a copy of this book.