Design: Vice and Virtue

One St. Paul corner continues its historical morality play.

Frogtown Square evokes Tropical Deco at University and Dale in St. Paul.

Image credit: Photo by Kerri Derr

Recommended by the Editor

Design: Outside the Usual Box

Feature: Cozy-weird Urban Castle

By: Larry Millett |   September 2011   |  From the print edition

Travelers along University Avenue in St. Paul may have noticed a new building at the northeast corner of Dale Street that looks like a refugee from the sun-kissed shores of Miami Beach. The structure, a mixed housing and retail complex called Frogtown Square, includes thin projecting parapets, decorated panels beneath the windows and a rounded corner pavilion sporting a cylindrical tower. These are all prominent features of the Tropical Deco-style hotels and other buildings from the 1930s for which Miami Beach is famous. I have no idea why the architects—Trossen Wright Plutowski of Minneapolis—took their tropical plunge at Frogtown Square, but I am content to view their exotic creation as merely the latest manifestation of the strange architectural karma that has always seemed to haunt the intersection of University and Dale.

For many years the intersection’s chief architectural presence (catty-corner from the site where Frogtown Square now stands) was the Faust Theater, a Tudor Revival fantasy that in its later years became an infamous porno house. This was at a time when sin was still permitted in St. Paul—good government has now, rest assured, all but wiped it out—and for years the Faust was the scene of protests and occasional mayhem. Weary of the theater’s richly vulgar presence, the city eventually bought the place and tore it down, only to replace it with a library and housing complex of such stunning dullness that it seems to have been designed, like an outsized architectural sackcloth, to atone for the Faust’s many sins.

But something of the Faust’s rampant id now seems to have resurfaced in the rather far-out design of Frogtown Square, which occupies a site with its own naughty history in the form of an establishment once known as the Club Belmont. The Belmont was a strip joint where naked dancers once cavorted behind glass. Later, the old club building was turned into a police station, thereby replacing vice with virtue. Now virtue has in turn given way to a building seemingly inspired by Miami Vice.

The moral of these strange transformations, if there is one, is that cities, despite the all-too heavy hand of planning, have a way of surprising us when we least expect it. Architectural purists will no doubt moan over Frogtown Square, but I’m not bothered. Weirdness is the standard architectural currency at University and Dale, and Frogtown Square in that regard feels right at home.