Critical DMs: Highland Park home revives Dayton’s holiday magic
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Critical DMs are lightly edited Slack conversations by members of the MPR News arts team about Minnesota art and culture.
This week, arts editor Max Sparber and senior arts reporter Alex V. Cipolle discuss a display of elves rescued from the iconic Dayton’s holiday show, on display through the windows of a private home in St. Paul through Dec. 25.
Max Sparber: The weather outside is frightful
But the elves?
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Alex V. Cipolle: Warm and cozy in a house in St. Paul.
Sparber: I was going to say delightful, but you are also accurate.
It’s a big moment for Dayton’s just now.
Cipolle: A documentary and a Christmas display revival.
Sparber: The documentary is from PBS and is called “Remember the Magic,” now streaming. It’s the history of Dayton's iconic 8th-floor holiday event.
The elves that you mentioned were rescued from the event, repaired, and are now on display in the windows of a private home in Highland Park.
Cipolle: And you ran into the homeowner and animatronic revivalist at a screening of the documentary, correct?
Sparber: I did! His name is John Pihaly, and he rescued 30 Dayton’s elves.
For a lot of people, these are going to be iconic characters. When Dayton’s became Marshall Field’s and then Macy’s, they ran this elf show over and over again, so many Minnesotans have seen it many times.
Cipolle: It’s something I grew up going to. Downtown Dayton’s was a magical place. Go see the holiday display and then grab some grub at the Skyroom. What a grand time for department stores.
Sparber: I didn’t go annually, but went often enough to have very strong memories of it. I was a kid, so I think I assumed every department store everywhere did this.
They didn’t. The Dayton’s event was so unusual that the figures from the year they did Roald Dahl are at the Roald Dahl Museum in England.
Cipolle: Wow!
I’ve heard that they also used to have live tigers and bears in storefront windows, sort of like Harrods in London ... not sure if that’s true but certainly speaks to a different era of grandiosity in department store history. [Note: They did have bears near the 4th Street entrance.]
Sparber: Even by department store standards, Dayton’s was unusual. I grew up with a different legacy of the store. They had a contemporary art gallery for a while, and I grew up in a house that had some really choice pieces from the store.
Cipolle: There’s something so cosmopolitan about it all.
So why did John decide to revive these scenes at his home?
Sparber: The PBS documentary has a whole section on collectors of stuff from Dayton’s 8th-floor event. People have very strong feelings about this. It’s like a super-nostalgia. At the screening, people boo-ed and hissed when Macy’s was mentioned.
So John is one of many people who are obsessed with the Holiday show and try to track down stuff from it.
But what he has done with it is really unique. He’s sort of giving Minnesota back its 8th-floor show.
He enclosed his entire deck and painted it to look like storefronts, and has created dioramas of the repaired elves.
Cipolle: The display at his home is magical. Dare I say it even rivals the original? To be able to walk through a beautiful old snow-covered neighborhood in St. Paul and come across this holiday world is a delight. It’s an art installation. It’s a house as snow globe. It’s a nostalgia destination in a place you’ve never been.
Sparber: John met with one of the original creators of the 8th-floor display, Constance Crawford, who is also one of the main voices of the documentary. She went through his collection of elves with him and discussed what had originally been done with them, and then they both came up with ways to display them.
That’s like finding a bunch of old Bing Crosby Christmas songs and bringing in his original producer to produce a new album.
It’s not the original thing, but it’s as close as we will get in this life.
Cipolle: I love the idea that there will be folks commuting or taking their dog for a walk who will randomly come across this display.
Sparber: Just going to Highland Park to get some knishes from Cecil’s and suddenly ... elves!
Cipolle: When we saw it, on the evening of the first major snowfall this year, several people were milling about. Kids, grandparents. You mentioned that John says they sometimes get hundreds of people?
Sparber: They even have buses full of people from retirement homes pull up. John gets on the bus to explain why he did this, and then they tell him their memories of going to Dayton’s to see the display.
Cipolle: And John has put up little wayfinding signs for little self-guided tours.
Sparber: He’s done a lovely job with it. I got emotional seeing it.
Cipolle: Me too. Verklempt! I think the biggest nostalgia punch was the vintage Santa Bear in one of the vignettes. I haven’t thought about the stuffed animal since I was a kid and we had our own.
Sparber: At the documentary screening, they had a photograph that was done to promote Santa Bear. It was celebrity weatherman Willard Scott dressed as Santa, and the photo was taken by Annie Leibovitz.
What companies are doing anything like that now?
Cipolle: So Dayton's hired Annie Leibovitz and Willard Scott? That's my 90s-themed sentence of the day ...
Sparber: One thing the documentary makes clear is that this show helped underwrite the presence of an entire artistic community in Minneapolis. They spent 11 months on it and it required an army of artisans to put together. When that went away, it took away a significant and dependable source of income.
People are still traumatized by it. People were crying at the screening.
Cipolle: It is sad. We’ve talked about how much of a decrease there has been in corporate financial backing of the arts in Minnesota. This is a stark example. To end a tradition that was ostensibly quite successful and popular ...
Sparber: It was good business for Dayton’s. A half-million people would pass through the store.
Cipolle: Does the documentary say why the department store stopped doing it?
Sparber: It’s hinted at. Partially the decline of brick-and-mortar shops in the internet era, partially new management that didn’t have the ties to the local community or the interest in the arts that was a Dayton family signature.
We keep hearing that corporate giving is way down. I wonder if it’s in part because corporations have become so multinational. They aren’t embedded in the community the way they once were, the money flows up and out of the state, rather than back into it.
Cipolle: The silver lining here is the new display shows how a few dedicated individuals can revive holiday magic for an entire community. It’s a little Christmas miracle.
