by Jack Hoeschler, 2018

Sally Ordway Irvine always loved live theater and was a steadfast supporter of the Guthrie as well as the small Chimera Theater in St. Paul. 

While we were working on the St. Paul Hotel renovation, she called me one day to ask what I knew about architect Dewey Thorbeck. I knew He’d been a lead designer of the Minnesota Zoo but wondered why she asked.

She reported that Jim Borland, Director of the Chimera theater, wanted her to meet Dewey. Sally and Borland wanted to propose construction of a new theater for the Chimera. It would be located on the site of the Wilder Foundation building, diagonally across from Landmark Center and on the west side of Rice Park.

Jim was a great community theater director, willing to do whatever it took to produce a show.  But the Chimera was small for such a proposal.  In addition, we were in the thick of redevelopment planning for the St. Paul Hotel, and Sally was a key funder of that project.  I suggested to Sally that she might consider deferring the Chimera proposal. 

That, of course, wasn’t like Sally, and she to pledge anonymously $50,000 for a feasibility study for Chimera.

When word got out that the Chimera had an anonymous angel donor of that magnitude, other brains kicked into gear.  Pinchas Zukerman, Artistic Director of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra at the time, was already looking around town for a new concert hall. Likewise, the Minnesota Opera, under the board leadership of Louis Zelle, was also casting about for a new home.

Dick Slade, President of Northwest Bank of St. Paul, was chair of the Arts & Sciences Council, the umbrella fundraiser for Chimera as well as the Chamber Orchestra and the Schubert Club.  He and others thought that the needs of larger organizations were greater than those of the Chimera.  Therefore, the Arts & Science Council took command of Sally’s money and headed up the feasibility study.            

They hired Frank Marzitelli, a well-known democratic fixture around City Hall (former union representative, St. Paul City administrator, and Minnesota Commission of Transportation) to lead the effort.  Frank was also secretary of the Landmark Center Board and a “close personal friend” of Rosalie Butler, a prominent St. Paul City Council Member.

The Arts and Science Council began making plans for a larger concert hall.

The Arts Council also hired Henry Blodgett, former project coordinator for Louis Zelle on his Main Street development in Minneapolis.  Henry lived adjacent to Sally in a wonderful duplex on St. Paul’s Portland Ave. and his main charge was to ensure that nothing untoward happened to her, the anonymous angel of the project.  He also knew the Who’s Who of St. Paul and was asked to raise additional money.

It didn’t take Jim Borland long to realize that he had lost control of his idea for Chimera. His his dream was looking more like a concert hall than a theater.   Instead, he decamped to Costa Rica with his wife to start a dinner theater.  The next thing we heard was that Jim had disappeared along with lots of money from the dinner theater. Shortly thereafter, his wife (and her lover, the bartender of the dinner theater) were arrested upon suspicion of murder. It was thought that they had put poor Jim into a barrel and tossed him into a flood swollen river that ran to the sea.  After a year in jail, the two were released because no body could be found.

Meanwhile, back in St. Paul, Henry Blodgett called me to ask whether I thought he/we could reintroduce Ben Thompson to Sally to hustle the design work for Ben.

Ben was a St. Paul boy who, after his mother ran off to New York City with a woman (in those days no one said more about that sort of thing), had been sent to boarding school in Connecticut and California by his father, the President of the First National Bank in St. Paul.  During the summers, he would return home and couch surf from one friend’s home to another.  His father didn’t seem to have much more interest in him than did his mother. 

Talented sons of the establishment generally manage to land on their feet, even without much parental help, and Ben went to Yale to study architecture.  He was a sufficient star that he ended up on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and as a partner with Walter Gropius in The Architecture Collaborative (“TAC”), a leading voice for modern design after WW II.

Ben was also the creative force behind Design Research (“D/R”), the leading voice in post-war European lifestyle design.  Most notably, D/R introduced Marimekko fabrics and other Danish design ideas to America. The D/R building in Cambridge that Ben designed was a breakthrough in its use of frameless glass curtain walls.

Henry’s daughter worked as an important assistant to Ben, and Ben was eager to get a shot at the design work for this promising project.  I knew about Ben’s design for the D/R store in Cambridge and thought that this was a good idea.  I called Sally and she was thrilled to meet with us around her dining room table.

Ben did a great job of pitching his ideas for a theater as a grand social space.  Before we knew it, he’d convinced Sally to fund an exploratory trip to Europe to visit the great opera, concert, and theater halls of the continent.  Regrettably, I didn’t get to go but Henry did.

After that trip, Ben was commissioned to design the theater.  One of his inspiring water color concept drawings is on display in the second-floor lobby of the Ordway. (He had a real talent for inspiring patrons with generalized concept drawings and pictures of analogous features or projects in a three-projector slide presentation.)  His final design repeated his bold use of glass front on Rice Park that he had used in his D/R building.

In the midst of all this planning, panic broke out when the Pioneer Press disclosed the identity of the mystery millionaire angel.  This caused significant distress for the family as fears of kidnapping and ransom ran wild.  Happily, the scare proved to be no more than that, and Sally and the Irvine family stayed solid as the primary benefactors of the development.

The building was finally completed and was wonderful. It was called The Ordway Music Theater in a nod to Sally, who loved theater.  It seats 1900 guests and includes two large rehearsal halls, magnificent lobbies on each floor encircled by glass overlooking Rice Park to create the grand social space that Ben always envisioned.  It proved to be the perfect way to complete the eclectic architectural circle around one of the finest urban parks in America.