Those faces carved in Minneapolis City Hall are absolutely grotesque

There are a fair amount of sculpted people around the Cities, but none of them are having any fun, except for Mary Tyler Moore. She tosses her tam with a happy smile. The rest of the statues are civic guys standing on plinths with serious airs. The statuary on the Capitol dome look grave and important; the bas-reliefs at the University of Minnesota’s Burton Hall, allegorical representations of the arts and sciences, appear vaguely bored.

City Hall is home to the Father of Waters, an enormous fellow who seems resigned to spending another hundred years of people rubbing his big toe for good luck. But on either side of the seven-ton colossus you’ll find a host of impish sprites and crotchety characters, leering and jeering and peering at everyone who waits for the elevators: the 41 grotesques.

They reside in the carved foliage in the capitals above the elevator banks. Some are lost in thought; others seem consumed by sudden suspicion.

According to the City Hall’s website, they are the work of sculptor Andrew Gewond, and as the site notes, they’re not entirely unique in town. The Masonic Temple (Now the Hennepin Center for the Arts, Hennepin and 6th Street N. ) has some as well, although they have considerably less personality.

Both the Temple and City Hall were products of the late 1880s — the Temple was completed in 1888, the same year City Hall was designed. Both are in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, a revival of old motifs and materials that drew from European structures in the 11th-13th century. It seems peculiar that a New World city like Minneapolis should cast its gaze back to France in the 1200s, but the style was both new to America, and hence modern, and it connoted stability and strength. We’d only been a state for 30 years, but look what we’d accomplished.

If the building had been Gothic, we might have gotten gargoyles. What’s the differences? Gargoyles originated as waterspouts, gargling out the run-off rain. Grotesques were just for decoration and amusement. Sculptors might carve a particularly naughty grotesque high and away from the commoner’s view, perhaps to startle a repairman a hundred years hence. We are fortunate Mr. Gewond did not decide to include someone mooning the civil servants who waited for the elevator, although you’d like to think the thought occurred to him.

The Richardsonian Romanesque style would soon be eclipsed by classical styles that brought Roman gravitas to the streetscape, and that meant pediments populated with stone-faced mythical figures embodying our best traits and aspirations. They represent what we like to think we can be, upright and noble. The grotesques are what we know we really are: delighted, contemptuous, surprised, weary, romantic, or just plain normal. There’s a face in the 41 for every mood a Minnesotan’s ever had.

They’re worth a trip if you’re downtown, if only to consider what the stone faces have seen over the years. Perhaps they might be impressed by the parade of dutiful officers who have waited for the elevator to take them up to their solemn and important tasks.

And perhaps not.