Saint Paul By Bike

August 20, 2023

14.1 miles

Macalester-Groveland, West End

On this ride, stopping to see Saint Paul’s favorite bovine, the odd streets in Victoria Park and a sensational tour of a one-time brewery-turned-apartment complex and a conversation with two artists who live there.

Rosie the cow stands watch at the corner of Randolph Avenue and Warwick Street without exception in a way that only the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outdo. Of course she is always properly attired for the weather and holidays. On this lovely summer day, Rosie was ready for a trip to the beach.

Victoria Park

Although it’s been around since 2014, the Victoria Park neighborhood in the West End continues to develop. Once the site of the large Exxon-Mobil tank farm, it now features apartments, condominiums, senior living facilities, a charter school, an athletic field and a park.

The subdivision is unusual for Saint Paul; curvy streets with names that appear to randomly change based upon a whim.

Victoria Way, for example, stretches through nearly the entire neighborhood (with a gradual 100 degree curve) except for the one block between West 7th and Kay/Adrian where it’s named Thurston Street. Kay Avenue, meanwhile, bends in the opposite direction at a larger angle and ends at the Victoria Way/Thurston Street intersection.

Four roads — Kay, Madison, Perlman and Thurston — were added to the lexicon of Saint Paul street names with the construction of the subdivision. Kay Avenue is likely named for Harry Kay, who created a new method to process potatoes. Kay and his family moved to Saint Paul in 1953. When he died in 1983, his company, Processed Potatoes Inc., then headquartered in Minneapolis, employed more than 1,000 people. His legacy survives through the Harry Kay Foundation, which supports Jewish organizations in Minnesota and Israel.

A Neighborhood of Breweries

The West End became a prominent spot for breweries in the late 1800s. Fresh water from underground and sandstone caves near the Mississippi River offered the proper conditions to brew beer and keep it cool in the days before refrigeration. Commercial brewing in Saint Paul began in 1848 when Anthony Yoerg, a German immigrant, started turning his home into a brewery.

Other breweries with names like Banholzer, Bruggemann, Funk, Schmidt, Stahlmann, and Wurst, operated in the West End in the 1800s or 1900s, and some beyond that. Schmidt Brewery was the longest operating and by far the largest of those breweries.
While all of those breweries are long gone, there remain vestiges of the heyday of West End brewing. The lovely brick and stone dwelling at 398 Duke Street is one of them. The Melchior Funk house was built in 1887 for the brewer and his wife Wilhelmina. Today the Italianate-style structure houses three condominiums.

The Old Schmidt Brewery

The exclamation point of old West End breweries is the towering building — which could pass for a medieval castle — that has housed Schmidt Artist Lofts since 2014. The exterior of the century-old brewery and ancillary buildings look very much as they did when two million barrels of beer came out of the copper brew kettles every year.

The building’s interior, however, underwent sweeping changes in the monumental conversion from brewery to apartment homes for several hundred people.

Two artists — painters, MaryBeth Garrigan and Petra Johnita Lommen — each have their own apartment in the former brewery bottling house. They invited me to talk, see their art and tour the building.

MaryBeth has been interested in the visual art for decades, starting in high school, where she made sets and large backgrounds for the theater.

She studied studio arts at the University of Minnesota, but between her mother getting ill and department politics, she opted to switch majors to her second love, animal science. Still, she loved art and kept painting.

A litany of avian-and animal-related jobs came after college for MaryBeth, including at: the U. of M. Bell Museum, the Peregrine Falcon recovery program at Cornell University, Como Zoo, as a falconer, the U. of M. Raptor Center, and the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, MN.

MaryBeth served as the director of the Eagle Center from 2000 to 2012, when she retired. “I’ve done what I’ve came to do. And then when my husband started getting sick, I retired because it’s a 24-7 job and I just needed to be spend time with Mark.”

Happenstance led MaryBeth to the Schmidt Artist Lofts. She returned to the Twin Cities in 2013 and was living with her brother. She was painting and preparing to start teaching at the American Indian Magnet School in Saint Paul. “My cousin called me and she’s like, ‘Mary Beth, you gotta come visit.’
“And I go, ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m in this really cool place, the Schmidt Artist Lofts, and I don’t know how I got here, but it’s really cool.’
So, I went to visit her and I was like, ‘Oh, this is the place I need to be.”

An interesting postscript is that MaryBeth’s two daughters, both of whom are also artists, and a friend moved into their own apartment in the Artist Lofts.

Petra moved to the Schmidt Artist Lofts after her own meandering career. She, too, went to the U of M to study art, and graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Fine Arts focused on painting and drawing. Petra intended to teach at a college or university but her inability to get a tenure-track position led to a career change.

A friend who worked at the Science Museum of Minnesota suggested she apply for an open job in the museum bookstore. Although Petra didn’t have any training or experience in the sciences, she’d enjoyed planetariums and astronomy and was enamored with dinosaurs as a child. She got the bookstore job but intentionally stayed away from the dinosaur exhibits. “I kept avoiding the dinosaur hall. I kept walking by it, thinking, ‘I’d really like to go in there, but I’m afraid it’s like a black hole. If I walk in there, I might not ever leave.’”

Petra told herself she was an artist, not a dinosaur expert. Surprisingly, that combination is exactly what museum staff wanted. “They said, ‘Oh, we’d really like you to come down because you are an artist and we’d like you to see this pose on these Pseudodontorn birds that we’re working on to see if it looks correct.'”

Petra accepted the invitation to visit the lab and not long after, was hired to work there. Eventually, she worked her way up to being supervisor of the dinosaur hall. Among her career highlights were writing three scientific papers that got accepted by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, being a part of the team that dug up the Lyle Woolly Mammoth in southern Minnesota and assisting with the move of the Science Museum to its current Kellogg Avenue spot. After 10 years at the museum, Petra left to teach and paint.

For Petra, the selection of the Schmidt Artist Lofts was intentional. She read about the conversion of the brewery to apartments in the newspaper and thought it would be a “cool” place to live. She applied for an apartment in December 2014 and was told there were a staggering 600 people on the waiting list for a spot. Petra added her name to the list and much to her surprise, she got a call from apartment management almost immediately. “I got home and all of a sudden they called and said, ‘We seem to maybe have an opening, and you gotta jump through all these hoops, like produce a resume and all that stuff [to] prove you’re an artist.’” So Petra created a 30 page document detailing the exhibitions and museum shows she’d done.

Then the waiting game was on. “A couple weeks would go by and I’d keep calling up every day. ‘Do you still have that place? I want that place.’”

At long last, Petra got the call inviting her to look at an apartment. “They took me down and said, ‘This is the only place we have.’ It was really small, but I said, ‘Yeah, I want that.’ So I took it right away.” Her new apartment, it so happened, was next door to MaryBeth’s, whom Petra met as she moved in.

Years later, both women enjoy living at the former brewery. MaryBeth summed it up. “It’s camaraderie of art and creativity and meeting other artists.”

Creating Art

Among the requirements for renting an apartment at Schmidt Artist Lofts is that at least one member of the household is approved as an artist. However, they do not have to make their living as an artist. Painters, sculptors, musicians, photographers, writers, dancers and other performers are among the accepted types of artists. There are also income restrictions on residents.

Petra and MaryBeth create their own works individually but they work together quite often as well. The collaborative painting began several months after they met, somewhat by accident. As Petra explained, “I do figurative things with people and things, so I don’t really do animals. I just wanted to do an owl in homage to my mother who had died.”

She asked MaryBeth to paint the owl for her, but MaryBeth said no. After 30 years of working with birds, she explained that she doesn’t like to paint them.
So Petra painted the owl, which elicited quite the reaction from MaryBeth. “‘That’s horrible,’” she said MaryBeth told her. “‘I’ll have to paint it. I hate that. It looks like a bowling pin.’”
Petra said that MaryBeth added, “You’ve got to make it look like the silhouette at least, so people can recognize it’s an owl.” They both laughed at the recollection, making it clear that Petra took no offense to the criticism.

As we talked, I noticed that their collaboration extended beyond art to our interview, with them both answering questions. Regarding working together on paintings, Petra responded, “Songwriters do it all the time. The Beatles!”
And MaryBeth continued, “That’s Lennon,” pointing to Petra, “and I’m McCartney.” she added, with an ebullient laugh.

The way in which the partnership manifests itself depends upon the painting, according to Petra. “Every one we’ve done has a different type of twist. It’s not a formula.”
MaryBeth elaborated. “Sometimes it’s a problem-solving thing when we work together. Sometimes we know what we want to do and we work together at the same time. Or sometimes I’ll do something and then Petra will add to it, so it can be very different for each one.”

Their painting partnership, which they’ve named Ugly Daisy Studio, has proven successful. They’ve had showings at galleries at the Schmidt Lofts and elsewhere. Their piece “Cast Your Fate To The Moon” won the 2022 Greater Yellowstone Crane Festival Poster Design Contest.

“I thought there’s no way we’re gonna get into this because they all want Audubon type of things or duck stamps and we’re so surrealistic.” In reality, said Petra, the opposite occurred.“They liked it because of that, because it had a more spiritual, strange mysticism.”

Another collaboration — this time including musician Jerry Kosak — will officially be unveiled at a June 2024 event.

Here are some other works by MaryBeth and Petra.

Touring the Buildings

The Schmidt Artist Lofts space is immense – about 410,000 square feet, with 260 rental units (no two the same) spread over three buildings. The former brew house, the tall, sprawling castle-like building, remains the centerpiece of the complex, and sitting just east is the old bottling house. Thirteen three-bedroom townhomes, newly constructed for the artist lofts project, are less than 100 feet farther east.

After finishing our interview, the three of us wandered through the buildings and onto one of the roofs of the vast former brewery. Petra and MaryBeth showed off the plethora of galleries, studios, meeting spaces and other fascinating spots.

My sentiments lean strongly toward historic preservation especially with a landmark structure. Thanks to all of the private and public entities that came together against difficult odds to make the Schmidt Artist Lofts, an ambitious and expensive project, an unequivocal success. Fortunately, the Schmidt Artist Lofts gives us one fewer reason to lament the destruction of an irreplaceable piece of Saint Paul architecture and history.