John Harrington, former Minnesota Public Safety commissioner and St. Paul police chief, is this year's King Boreas in the St. Paul Winter Carnival. (Leila Navidi/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

King Boreas brings the cold, according to the St. Paul Winter Carnival’s 139-year-old legend, but the man I was instructed to call “Boreas 88” in writing — to maintain the secrecy of the Winter Carnival’s biggest annual surprise — met me in a warm and sunny office lobby just off Transfer Road in the section of St. Paul where warehouses and railyards give way to breweries.

Secret’s out: This year’s King Boreas is John Harrington, the former St. Paul police chief, state senator, Metro Transit police chief and state Public Safety commissioner.

Now two years removed from a five-decade career in law enforcement, Harrington still has a police officer’s affect. Posing for a portrait this week, photographer Leila Navidi asked a straight-faced Harrington if that was really his biggest smile.

“I’ve been a cop for 50 years, darlin’,” Harrington said. “Smiling doesn’t come in the job description.”

Boreas is supposed to be regal anyway, he said. Leave the levity to the Vulcan Krewe.

Even if his face does not show it, Harrington is excited about finding a new way to build community in St. Paul.

“It’s the natural extension from my time as a cop,” Harrington said, where he spent years in leadership emphasizing the importance of relationships in public safety.

“Relationships start with a handshake, or the breaking of bread,” he said, “or showing up to somebody’s festival.”

Harrington and the Winter Carnival as a whole are making an effort to reach out more to St. Paul’s residents of color to make all St. Paulites feel like they have a place at the city’s annual festival.

Retired from police leadership and the middle-of-the-night, sometimes world-shifting emergency calls that go with it, and with all seven of his children “launched,” Harrington said he feels like he can finally take on bigger volunteer jobs.

“This might be the one time in my life where this is feasible,” he said. “A new phase of my life, where we get to do some really fun, and I hope impactful things, with the city of St. Paul.”

Since leaving the Department of Public Safety during a cabinet shake-up in 2022, Harrington has been running a nonprofit focused on distributing grants to help people fix broken taillights and other minor car repairs that can result in getting pulled over by police. He is chipping away at a doctoral thesis he has been trying to finish for years, and finding different ways to be active in St. Paul.

Belonging in the cold

When the Winter Carnival began more than a century ago, Harrington said, part of the festival’s mission was to help new immigrants “get more integrated into the joy and fun of a winter season,” he said.

That purpose — making winter fun — has not really changed. But St. Paul has. Harrington remarked that when he joined the St. Paul Police Department, the most common non-English language in the city was German. By the time he retired, St. Paul had thriving enclaves of Latino, Hmong and Somali immigrants.

Bringing some joy to a brutal Minnesota winter is still important, he said, sharing in the beauty of the season with newcomers who may not have experienced freezing weather.

“There’s not a lot of ice sculpture going on in Mogadishu,” Harrington deadpanned.

As the reigning King Boreas for the next year, Harrington said he is looking forward to taking a lead on the Winter Carnival’s work to reach newer communities in St. Paul. He pointed to the Lunar New Year celebration in St. Paul that typically coincides with the Winter Carnival, asking why the two events aren’t more connected.

Harrington said he plans to spend much of the next year attending other festivals in the city and trying to make inroads for the Winter Carnival, in hopes the carnival next year will be even more diverse.

Maybe the next generation of St. Paul children shivering at the Grande Day and Torchlight parades will be able to see themselves as part of the city’s winter celebration, Harrington said. Maybe a young Somali girl will be able to dream about being Queen of the Snows, he said: “I’m really hoping that I can inspire some little Hmong kid to think, ‘I can be Boreas.’”

The rest of the Winter Carnival royal family, announced Friday evening: