Saint Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse

The Saint Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Holabird & Root, and built between 1930 and 1932, for a reported $4.00 million dollars, in Saint Paul, MN.

Its precise street address is 15 Kellogg Boulevard West, Saint Paul, MN. You can also find it on the map here.

The Saint Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Saint Paul and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Saint Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on February 11^th 1983.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1994 and 2023.

Holabird & Root was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Thomas Ellerbe & Company.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Saint Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse a reality:

• Foley Brothers as the Main Contractor
• Lee Lawrie, John W. Norton, and Albert Stewart as the collaborating Artist

The Saint Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Saint Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse was completed in 1932, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Saint Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concreete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a three-story base with a central twenty-story tower that has further setbacks at its top. The Indiana limestone cladding was done in the American Perpendicular style, with a central area accented by thin vertical lines of windows and dark spandrels that give the building an elevated appearance. This verticality is emphasized even further by thin lines of metal that mark the window lines and shine when the sun light is reflected on them.

Five glass doors topped by a silver glass screen and flanked by two limestone reliefs give access to the building.

Other materials found at the Saint Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse include, marble, used in different colors, white on the hallway floor, and blue Belgian and black on the three-story pillars, gold-leaf, found on the mirrors adorning the ceiling, and wood, found in exotic varieties such as Koa Hawaiian, Peroba Southern American, and Avodire West Africa.