A few weeks ago a St. Paul developer turned down Ramsey County’s invitation to buy the former county jail and West Publishing buildings in downtown St. Paul. That guy, Jerry Trooien, is bullying his way through options for his billion-dollar “Bridges” proposal for a spanking new luxury hotel, condos, and shops, but declined the offer. Perhaps he doesn’t know the storied history of that West building. I might be able to entice him with a little slice of its history, if he only knew to ask. My first publishing job was at that riverside West Publishing building.*****
I had taken the Amtrak from Grand Forks, North Dakota, to the Fairview station in St. Paul the night before my interview. Earlier that week I had set my interview outfit: a gray polyester skirt suit, a white blouse, one of those bow ties women were wearing then, and some very sleek maroon pumps, serious pumps. I looked like that early 80s version of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally.
After a night on the couch at my brother’s girlfriend’s place, I took a cab into downtown St. Paul and asked the driver to stop right before that long block of dark granite. I wanted to get a feel for the place before going in. I was thrilled with the idea of working along the river I had heard so much about. (After I lived in St. Paul awhile a bunch of French and Belgian businessmen were in town for a winter meeting with city officials and the mayor took them down to Harriet Island where they could walk out onto the frozen ice. One of the Frenchmen got down on his hands and knees in his long wool dress coat and leather gloves and kissed the ice. He said he had always dreamed of the great Mississippi and here he was now walking on it!)
I grew up on Strategic Air Command bases, in the middle of prairies and tumbleweeds. I thought if I got this editor’s job I’d have romantic views of the river and the bluffs and all the people bustling by. I didn’t know then that much of the office space was cut deep into the core of that riverbank, having been converted from the loud and cavernous printing and binding facility West had operated for much of the twentieth century. Setting the machinery into the bluff like that buffered the noise of the busy printing presses for the hardworking young lawyers at their desks up on the seventh, eighth, and ninth floors. But now for us young, modern office workers that seaspace was like working inside a snow tunnel: white, dense walls, no windows, still air, muffled sound.
Does everyone remember their first great boss? Doug Grainger was mine and he and his assistant director interviewed me in his corner office, facing the river. It was morning so the sun was on the east of the building, dim and low, and I remember wondering why they didn’t have the blinds open to that glorious view. It wasn’t until after I was hired that I asked why all these executives with the spacious corner offices never opened their blinds, and it was Doug who told me it was because the inmates in the adjacent Ramsey County Jail would masturbate in front of their corner windows, especially if they saw a group of people from West peering over. (Once I pulled down a single blind during an especially long meeting just to see if I’d see anything but all I saw were those stacked columns of cell windows and inmates lying inert on their double bunks, their hands over their faces.)
It was a great place to have a first job. Patriarchy, money, scandal, litigation, criminals, sex, romance, anxiety, sweeping change.
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