Viewpoint: Reflections on St. Paul’s historic airport beacon

(September 2023)
By Peg Guilfoyle

Our apartment faces east from downtown St. Paul and the summer sunrise pours in, bringing a fine long view of the Mississippi River curving southward toward New Orleans, with high bluffs on its eastern shore. It’s a landscape – a riverscape – of geology and sky and history, of trains and a historic airport, topped by burial mounds and a land-based lighthouse.
By some accidentally perfect relationship of bluff, apartment and windowsill height, when I am lying in bed at night and the city has fallen dark, a distant rotating light of red and white appears just at my eyeline, rhythmic and steady. I look at it when I’m falling asleep. It’s the Mounds Park Airway Beacon, built in a place of powerful presence.
According to one bureaucratic description of the beacon’s site, “The Indigenous burial ground that is currently called Indian Mounds Regional Park has been a sacred site and place of burial for over a thousand years…. It is significant to living Indigenous peoples as a cemetery where their ancestors are buried. It is a place of reverence, remembrance, respect and prayer.”
It is good to read that acknowledgement in the official government language of the city. It also makes one wonder about the 1929 construction of the beacon right in the middle of the series of blufftop mounds. Wouldn’t the beacon have needed an excavation? Footings? Might the digging have interfered with the cemetery? I saw nothing of this in the contemporaneous newspaper record. The Indian Mounds Cultural Landscape Study and Messaging Plan notes that the beacon was built “on top of a mound” and some electrical lines intruded into “some of the mounds.”
I call that desecration.
The Mounds Park beacon is 110 feet tall and crowned by a 24-inch mirror that flashes every 10 seconds. It is said to be visible for 40 miles. Between 1923 and 1933, some 600 beacons were built across the country to aid early aviation pilots trying to find their way from airport to airport. Many included huge concrete arrows set into the ground and painted bright yellow, signaling the way for pilots peering down in all kinds of weather and light. One such arrow, 70 feet long and pointing toward Holman Field, exists in Cottage Grove, though its companion beacon tower was taken down in 1954.
A national flight system – and certainly night flight aspirations along with it – was partially driven by the U.S. Postal Service and its airmail service, which at one point used a system of bonfires to guide pilots after dark. Airmail cut delivery time to 35 hours coast-to-coast, beating the fastest transcontinental trains by three days. Stories of early flight navigation are fascinating and plentiful. I read of one pre-night flight method in which the mail was carried by day in a plane, which landed at dusk near a railway station. The train carried the mail overnight to another station, where another pilot picked it up and flew onward.
Other technologies soon superseded the usefulness of the airway beacons. Ironically, radio navigation was coming in as some were being built. Local historian Steve Trimble has written, “Air travel was starting to become important in the Twenties…people were fascinated by the development of flight…according to a newspaper article, ‘during the summer months large crowds of onlookers throng the bluffs overlooking the airport.’”
The St. Paul beacon is among the last of its kind. Trimble reports that the Smithsonian wanted it, but the community said no. Our airway beacon has become a neighborhood landmark, deemed worthy of renovation and repainting in 1994, and noted by a mayoral candidate who vowed to climb it if elected. For years, the beacon was at the center of an annual April Fool’s Day tradition in a neighborhood newspaper, being variously reported to be replaced by the old 3M water tower or to be topped by a Weatherball found in a scrapyard. One report included a sketch of enormous banners to be hung from the tower asking pilots to be quiet after 10 p.m. In 2008, the Dayton’s Bluff District Forum straight-face-reported that the beacon had been accidentally sold on Ebay and its new owners would be using it to project huge digital advertisements on the bluffs and on downtown buildings.
The biggest factual news story about the intersection of aviation and the neighborhood concerned the 1929 crash of a Northwest Airlines tri-motor passenger and mail plane. After taking off from Holman Field, the plane lost power and crashed on the bluff. The veteran pilot died but all seven passengers survived with injuries. Neighbors ran to help, and a newspaper photo shows several hundred people viewing the wreckage.
I can testify that it is a long uphill bike ride from downtown to the beacon, and that the shade of the park is welcome. The burial mounds still rise solemnly over the river valley. Signage reminds visitors that they are in a cemetery. There’s an eagle cam up there, too, whose subject can sometimes be seen from the bluff, floating. Below the bluff are the runways of Holman Field, where pilots from Chicago once landed with the mail, using arrows and beacon towers and the winding Mississippi River to find their way.
Today, Holman Field has more than 41,000 landings and takeoffs annually, and many seem to float exactly along a 28th-floor altitude across my east-facing window. The field’s 1939 terminal building still stands, housing a fine dining restaurant with deck tables near the runway. I have been there when a small plane pulled up for dinner.
When you leave the restaurant, the Mounds Park Airway Beacon is visible above and flashing. Imagine the throng of people up there a hundred years ago, watching the miracle of flight at the downtown airport. Measure the height of the bluff and give thought to the night-flight pilots who followed beacons from city to city, wayfinding through the 20th century sky. Above all, consider the burial mounds, a sacred site for thousands of years, and still.
Peg Guilfoyle lives in downtown St Paul. Read more of her short essays, Motley Peg, at www.pegguilfoyle.com.

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