1501 Birchmont Drive Northeast
Bemidji, MN, USA

National Register of Historic Places - David Park House

Statement of Significance:

The Park House is architecturally significant as one of residential. Streamline Moderne design.
Although Minnesota has its share of well-designed. Art Deco theaters, public buildings, and office blocks, there are few, good, residential examples of either the "Streamline" or "Zigzag" variants of the style. Recent architectural surveys of Minneapolis and St, Paul, for example, have identified only about four noteworthy examples. During the 1920s and 1930s, most Twin Cities architects were firmly wedded to historicism, and, with few exceptions, practitioners in the rest of the state followed their lead. 1 One exception, however, was Edward K. Mahlum.

Born in Seattle in 1909, Mahlum grew up in Norway, where he developed an interest in "modern" functionalist architecture. Returning to the United States at the age of 18, he enrolled at North Dakota State College in Fargo to pursue an undergraduate degree in architecture. Under the direction of Homer Huntoon, the school's architecture program had just broken with the historic revival tradition, and students were encouraged to look at contemporary American and European design. Mahlum felt at home in the new program. As he explained many years later, "I grew up with modern architecture — we didn't have American Colonial in Norway." Receiving his B.S. in architecture in 1934, Mahlum briefly worked as a draftsman for the federal government and then, in 1935, joined the architectural firm of Einer Broaten & Magnus 0. Foss in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Except for a six-month period spent traveling in Europe, he served as the firm's head designer until the summer of 1938. Encouraged by the two principals to follow his modernist bent, Mahlum designed several Art Deco structures in Minnesota, including the Clearwater County Courthouse in Bagley and the High School Auditorium in Bemidji.

During this period, Mahlum also produced a striking Streamline Moderne house for Bemidji businessman David Park, owner of the city's largest creamery. Completed in 1936, the Park House is a bold, two-story, horizontal composition displaying sweeping reversed curves on the front facade in a classic Streamline Moderne manner. The design's horizontal emphasis is reinforced by banded windows linked by ornamental striations encircling all facades. The main entrance, sheltered in a concave curve of the wall, is framed by stout, half-round, fluted columns supporting a false, fan-shaped balcony with curvilinear, metal railings. Immediately above the balcony is a tall, narrow window, which continues the vertical thrust of the entrance into the second story, effectively integrating the building's horizontal layers into a unified design. It is interesting to note that Mahlum had used a similar, but less dramatic, columned entrance in a two-story, brick, streamline residence constructed in 1937 for a Fergus Falls physician, Dr. W. A. Lee. In the Park House, however, Mahlum replaced the brick of the earlier building with poured concrete producing a smooth monolithic white surface that accelerates the flowing lines of the building's front facade.

The Park House was not the only residential design that Mahlum executed in Bemidji. The building's contractor, Adolph C. Nasvick, was so taken by Mahlum's work that he commissioned Broaten and Foss to design a house for himself on the lot immediately north of the Park House. In the Nasvick House, constructed about 1939, Mahlum abandoned the Streamline idiom for a "boxy"

International Style design. Sitting side-by-side, the Park House and the Nasvick House make a unique, modernist statement in a residential district otherwise given over to period revival designs.

In June 1938, Mahlum left Broaten and Foss to accept a position with Clarence H. Johnston, Jr., Architects, one of the largest and most prominent architectural offices in the Twin Cities. Although generally known for its conservative period-revival work, the firm was then completing two Deco-inspired buildings at the Minneapolis Campus of the University of Minnesota: Coffman Student Union and the Bell Museum of Natural History. Mahlum went to work as chief interior designer of both structures, quickly finding that his modernist outlook clashed with the firm’s prevailing design principles. When Johnston offered him a partnership in 1940, Mahlum, in his own words, "got a headache" at the thought of accepting. That same year, he moved to Seattle to establish his own practice, leaving behind in the Park House one of Minnesota’s outstanding examples of Streamline Moderne residential architecture.

NOTES
1. The St. Paul examples are listed in Patricia A. Murphy and Susan W. Granger, "Historic Sites Survey of Saint Paul and Ramsey County, 1980-1983," unpublished report prepared for Ramsey County Historical Society and Saint Paul Heritage Preservation Commission, 1983, pp. 339-340. For residential Art Deco in Minneapolis, see David Gebhard and Tom Martinson, A Guide to the Architecture of Minnesota (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 72. Gebhard and Martinson also note a cluster of three Moderne houses in International Falls (p. 205), and isolated examples in Grand Rapids (p. 202) and Hibbing (p. 204). Unfortunately, there is no historical, information on the design and construction of these houses.
2. The discussion of Mahlum’s training and career is based on author’s telephone interview with Edward K. Mahlum, February 8, 1987, as well as Mahlum’s "Application for Associateship" with the American Institute of Architects, April 21, 1939, on file at Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota. Corroborating details concerning Mahlum’s work with Broaten and Foes were furnished by the firm’s structural engineer during the late 1930s, Charles Budge, in a telephone interview with the author, January 14, 1987. Neither Mahlum nor Budge was able to provide a complete inventory of the firm’s projects or precise dates of construction. The date of the Park House was confirmed by David Park’s daughter, Mary Morton, in: a telephone interview 31 October 1987. Mrs. Park still resides in the house. The Clearwater County Courthouse has been remodeled beyond recognition, but the Auditorium in Bemidji is intact. It displays a curved front with classical columns and a Greek fretwork frieze below the parapet
3. 3. The Lee House has been locally designated as a historic site by the Fergus Falls Heritage Preservation Commission; see James Gray and Marjorie Barton, Building from the Past (Fergus Falls: Heritage Preservation Commission, 1985), p. 84.
4. There is one other example of Art Deco residential design in Bemidji: a one-story, flat-roofed, boxy building with glass-block windows aid zig-zag linear detailing at 1403 Bemidji Avenue. By an unknown designer, the building lacks the dramatic flair of the Park House.
5. Although the interior of Coffman Union has been completely redone, Mahlum's work on the Bell Museum survives pretty much intact. Gebhard and Martinson characterize the interior as "a tasteful and understanding version of PWA Moderne," calling particular attention to the building's "sculptured relief panels and the metal light standards by the entrance" (p. 51). According to Mahlum, he was responsible for the overall concept of the sculptured work.