At Como and Carter, next to the St. Anthony Park neighborhood’s library, the remains of an old tree trunk have been carved into a statue of a boy reading a book, an owl perched on his back.
A few blocks northwest, sightings of a real owl—a great gray with a five-foot wingspan—have delighted the Park’s bookish inhabitants, a mix of professors, creative professionals, and university farm-campus students. Lately, many of them, toting high-powered binoculars and dog-eared copies of Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Birds, have been spotted roaming the Park’s hilly streets, trying to catch a glimpse of the spectacular creature.
Just outside the corner’s combined Dunn Brothers and Finnish Bistro—where café au lait mingles with sweet, cardamom-rich pulla rolls—a battered wooden kiosk with a shingled roof provides ethnographic clues to the neighborhood. Handmade signs announce organic produce, private piano lessons, preschool French, a statewide rally for public school funding, a lecture—“Circuses: No Fun for Animals”—by a PETA activist, feng shui classes, and a new flower store, claiming, “We deliver love.”
The good life, even the exceedingly comfortable life, is clearly evident here, but it’s steeped in earnestness and civic-mindedness. And no wonder. The corner’s architectural jewel, its anchor, is the St. Anthony Park branch library, a splendid 1917 Beaux Arts-style Carnegie that stands like a luxury liner on a triangle of lawn, just kitty-corner from the kiosk.
Inside, banks of windows frame the neighborhood’s trees, and green window seats are offered at each end of the main room. In the children’s section, three primitive watercolor paintings of the library are displayed. All depict the façade’s essentials—the six elegant, arched windows with glistening panes, and the black cast-iron staircase railings. One child has colored the panes a dazzling flame blue, exactly capturing the windows’ inner glow and reflection.
The past and the future are visible from the library’s front staircase. There is the commodious St. Anthony Park Home for the elderly, built in 1903 by the Children’s Aid Society of Minnesota as an orphanage for children coming west on the orphan trains; Milton Square’s half-timbered buildings, home to the restaurant Muffuletta, apartments for University grad students, and Micawber’s Books, one of St. Paul’s only remaining independent bookstores; the blue awnings of the original Bibelot Shop; and, everywhere, trees.
Charles Pratt, who helped develop St. Anthony Park in the late 1800s, is largely responsible for the neighborhood’s park-like setting and nature-loving sensibility, insisting that neighborhood lots and blocks be “laid out in accordance with the topography of the ground, due regard being had to the natural beauties of the situation.”
A quilt displayed in the library’s basement commemorates St. Anthony Park’s 1987 centennial and dutifully honors its trees. A notice reads: “Trees of St. Anthony Park represented in quilting: birch, poplar, hackberry, elm, linden, gingko, mulberry, sugar maple, red maple, red oak, white oak.”—Julie Hessler
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