Meet the journalist and author who highlights St. Paul history — real and imagined

It’d be hard to find someone who knows St. Paul much better than Minneapolis native Larry Millett.

The longtime Pioneer Press reporter not only covered the city for decades, but thanks to a midcareer fellowship, he became expert in its architectural history. He was the newspaper’s architectural critic until his retirement from journalism in 2002. He used to even write clues for the St. Paul Winter Carnival’s medallion hunt.

An author for two decades, Millett has written 12 works of history and nine mystery novels with St. Paul people and places prominent in much of his work. Eye on St. Paul recently visited with Millett, 77, at Day by Day Cafe near his home in the city’s historic W. 7th Neighborhood. This story was edited for length and clarity.

Q: Tell me about your work as a journalist.

A: I was at the Pioneer Press for 30 years, and I was at the St Cloud Times for two years before that. Toward the last 10 years or so, I was taking a lot of leaves of absences to write books and do projects. So, I left at 55 just because I wanted to write books.

Q: Was your whole career about architecture?

A: No. I covered education for a while, not very well, I must say. But my favorite beat, I was the courts reporter for five years and covered the Marjorie Caldwell trial (for the Glensheen Mansion murders) and one of the (1972 Virginia) Piper kidnapping retrials. I really enjoyed that beat.

Q: When did you start doing architectural writing?

A: When I went to Michigan on a fellowship to study architectural history and theory. I was writing my first book on Louis Sullivan’s bank [in Owatonna] at the time. I started doing it part time, and I was doing it off and on from basically the late ‘80s until the time I retired.

Q: You retired at 55?

A: Yeah. Then I was writing the Sherlock Holmes books. And I’ve mixed Sherlock Holmes books with various architecture and history books. “Strange Days, Dangerous Nights” is still my favorite book. It’s a book about newspaper photographs from the ‘50s. I knew the old-time St. Paul photographers. I interviewed some of them. And I spent weeks in the Pioneer Press library finding amazing photos.

I’ve been doing architecture, history stuff mixed with the occasional mystery novel.

Q: What’s your favorite genre?

A: I always love writing architecture stuff, but I grew up reading mystery novels, classic mystery novels. So, the mysteries are fun to write. It’s a whole different process than doing a book about the real world.

Q: Do you set your novels in the Twin Cities?

A: Yes. They’re almost all set in Minnesota. The new one that’s out is called “Mysterious Tales of Old St. Paul.” There are three novellas all set in St. Paul in the 1890s. And I’m just finishing up “Mysterious Tales of Old Minneapolis,” which will be out next year. That includes a story set at St. Anthony Falls, another one involving Oscar Wilde when he visited the Twin Cities in 1882. And then another one about a lawyer who dies and in his will says, “I want to form a committee to find out who murdered me.”

Q: Regarding your work on Lost Twin Cities, is it accurate to say we’re quick to tear buildings down?

A: Yeah. I read a book on architectural obsolescence that said the average tall office building in Chicago, which has been incredibly destructive of its architectural history, lasted 29 years. Build something bigger, tear it down.

Q: Why aren’t they like that in Europe?

A: Part of it was those societies didn’t have the dynamic capitalism that the U.S. had, all that money in pursuing doing something different. It’s every American city. New York City, if you went down Fifth Avenue 100 years ago, was full of mansions. In the Twin Cities, there were a lot of mansions in downtown Minneapolis, and they were all torn down for commercial development. In some cases, by the people who built them.

Q: When we lose these buildings, what do we lose?

A: One of the things we lose is that sense of continuity. Buildings are one of the ways by which we date our lives. Especially significant buildings. And when you lose those, you lose a lot of the history of who we were as a people and the understanding of how we lived at a different time. Cities are very dynamic, especially American cities. They’re always changing.

Q: Is there a trick to saving a building?

A: If you have a historic building that is threatened, you have to have a community of people who want to save it. Even if it’s on the National Register, that doesn’t mean it can’t be torn down. But it makes it more difficult.

There’s a reason why cities hang around as long as they do. They’re resilient. Look at the situation in downtown Minneapolis, St Paul. It’ll get worked out. St Paul, I think, is going to have to significantly remake its downtown over a period of years. It’s going to end up looking more like a fairly dense residential district. It’s going to take a long time, but it will happen.

Q: When you’re doing research, what are the differences between fiction and nonfiction?

A: Well, if I’m doing a book like “Lost [Twin Cities],” I’m researching a lot of different places. I’m looking at old newspapers, old magazines. I’m looking at architects and architectural styles, looking at the history of how things were developing in downtown Minneapolis or St Paul. When I do research for one of my novels, I did one called “Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders,” I’ll research things like the Winter Carnival. It’s set in 1896, and I was hoping I could use a real ice palace. But turns out, the 1896 Ice Palace, melted before it was done. So, I made up an ice palace.

You’ll find the name of a certain well-known person who was in town. And you start digging into that, seeing if you can maybe insert them into the book. I insert a lot of real people into my books. James J. Hill is in a lot. I look for real places and people to incorporate into the novel to make it feel more real.