By Mary Mergenthal
Kristin Anderson, professor emerita of Art & Design at Augsburg University, will present her latest St. Anthony Park architecture history talk at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 11.
Anderson’s free presentation on University Grove will be held at St. Anthony Park Lutheran Church, 2323 Como Ave.
Located next to the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus, University Grove is an enclave of about 100 houses built for the institution’s faculty and staff, primarily between 1929 and the 1970s. The land belongs to the university, which leased it for a nominal annual fee. Residents were required to build architect-designed homes on the leased lots.
The result is a small neighborhood that the New York Times once called “a living time capsule of vernacular modern architecture in America.” Included in the Grove are homes by regional modernists including Vienna-born and MIT-educated Lisl Close and Cranbrook-trained Ralph Rapson.
Anderson is a longtime St. Anthony Park resident. She has been taking neighborhood residents and friends on monthly visual tours of SAP history for over two years.
Beside the in-person session at the church, Anderson’s talk can be accessed live online, with a recording available for one week after the session. Use the SAPLC YouTube channel at Bit.ly/Sap-history.
You can also access the church’s YouTube channel by clicking through from Saplc.org to the Worship link, and then to the livestream link.
One update: The January SAP history session on Commonwealth Avenue has been rescheduled for 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 29. Live location and online access details remain the same.
Mary Mergenthal lives in St. Anthony Park and is a former editor of the Bugle and currently the newspaper’s obits editor.
Photo cutline: This house in University Grove, an area adjacent to the St. Paul Campus, designed by Lisl Close, will be one featured in Kristin Anderson’s March 11 history presentation. Photo by Kristin Anderson.
