Is This Minnesota’s Ugliest Building… Or Its Most Beautiful?

Last week, MinnPost columnist Bill Lindeke wrote a piece about the Spruce Tree Center, located on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. The column triggered some nostalgia because I remember seeing that building every time we went to the State Fair when I was a kid... we'd be stuck in traffic in front of it on the way there and, sure enough, on the way back as well!

It looked like a giant stick of spearmint gum that someone had dropped on the floor long enough to make it dirty and inedible. Besides the color choice, the other thing that makes the building unique is the bathroom-tiled exterior. It's not everyday you see a tile-sided skyscraper (ok, ok may be not quite a skyscraper) in Minnesota.

So many of those car rides were spent in the back of my dad's various cars, vans, minivans and trucks. I had to ask him if he remembered the place as well as I did

Plot twist: Not only did my dad recall the place, but he actually did the tile on the building for four months in 1987!

I asked him if he remembered the building, not expecting him to have worked on it at all, when he replied the Spruce Tree Building was his first time being on a scaffold so high up. He had previously done all ground-level work.

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He said that the tile was a bit different than normal bathroom tile in that it was rated to be frost-resistant.

In the future my dad went on to help tile Mall of America, Target Field, US Bank Stadium and hundreds of other, better looking buildings in Minnesota- so don't hold it against him! After all, he didn't design the thing!

The aforementioned Lindeke column, which is a really good read, talks about the owners of the building having a 'stockpile' of green tiles in case any need replacing.

The building’s exterior is composed of thousands of small emerald green tiles, exactly the kind you’d find in your home redecoration project.

 

They were imported from Germany and embedded in matrices fitted into concrete panels, adorning the exterior.

 

The building managers keep a stockpile on hand in case of damage.

What happens when the stockpile runs out?!