Standing on Market Street downtown, looking up at the vaulted corners and turrets atop the Landmark Center, you might wonder what’s tucked into all those nooks and crannies in the rafters.

The answer: old St. Paul Winter Carnival memorabilia. And now, as a fundraiser for the festival, it can be yours.

St. Paul Winter Carnival memorabilia, including portraits of past Royal Families and a signed photo of TV host Steve Allen, sit in a storage room at the Landmark Center on Dec. 15, 2023. Through an online fundraising auction, Carnival staff are hoping some of this vintage memorabilia makes its way back to St. Paul homes. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)

The St. Paul Festival and Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit that puts on the Winter Carnival every year, is facing funding gaps to fill before the festival kicks off next month, foundation CEO Lisa Jacobson said.

So in a short online “clean out the attic” auction, you can bid on a vintage Vulcans coat, knighting certificates signed by King Boreases dating back to 1917, carnival posters and banners from the ’40s through ’60s, and a variety of pewter plates and patches. Several items in the sale, notably an etched lithography stone, are said to date to the 1880s.

The online auction closes at noon Wednesday, Dec. 20.

From the carnival’s perspective, it’s a win across the board, Jacobson said. They can get carnival memorabilia that’s collecting dust into the hands of community members who’ll appreciate it, and make some money in the process. Plus, with less stuff on its hands, the festival foundation can reduce its bill for leasing storage space in Landmark Center.

Assuming this inaugural sale goes smoothly, the foundation hopes to auction off a new batch of items as frequently as monthly, said Tom Barrett, the Winter Carnival history guru and former Vulcanus Rex who’s helping festival foundation staff sort through the organization’s storage rooms.

“There’s some really cool stuff we’re trying to make available,” he said.

If you happen to have carnival items in your own attic, you can support the Winter Carnival by giving them to the St. Paul Festival and Heritage Foundation, Barrett said. And while the foundation isn’t exactly in a position to purchase such items, he said, donations are tax-deductible.

Upstairs, in one of several Winter Carnival storage rooms in the attic of Landmark Center, Barrett pointed out dresses and wool marching jackets, likely from the early 1900s. Leaning against a wall were several frames, including a poster from 1938 and a signed photo from when TV host Steve Allen visited the carnival in the 1960s.

“The whole back end of this room was full of boxes,” Barrett said, chuckling. “You couldn’t move. It was like, how do we get through this?”

Other rooms contain shelves of photo albums and scrapbooks, dozens of VHS tapes, hundreds of photo slides in carousels and binders, and towers of cardboard boxes with decades’ worth of carnival financial records. Much of a fourth room is dedicated to paper ephemera, mostly newspaper clippings and front pages.

Several complete editions of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and St. Paul Dispatch from the 1930s, shown on Dec. 15, are among the many newspaper clippings in the Winter Carnival’s collection. Volunteers are currently working to organize several storage rooms full of papers, photos and other media to eventually digitize them. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)

For example: On Saturday, Jan. 28, 1939, the St. Paul Dispatch published an extra edition — the kind of special issue the newspaper might rush-print for breaking news events like wars or assassinations — to announce the new Boreas Rex had officially taken over. (Price: 3 cents.)

“We’re trying to protect these, and it’s just endless,” he said. “Our goal is to digitize, but then we need to figure out what to do with them. … This is part of the task that’s upon us.”

So what’s the long-term plan for all this stuff?

Some items are already in the hands of the Minnesota Historical Society, Barrett said, and there’s plenty that the St. Paul Festival and Heritage Foundation does not intend to let go of.

Other things, like leftover carnival buttons from years past that probably number in the thousands, are simply taking up space. Foundation staff are saving a few dozen from each year, and Barrett is working to send the remainder back to button-manufacturing companies so they can at least reuse the backings.

But Barrett is hoping that, through the memorabilia auction, many vintage items will bring back good Winter Carnival memories for people in St. Paul and around the state.

“It’s rooms full of history,” he said. “We’re just trying to find the right homes for it.”

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