Garrison Keillor’s real life happens in St. Paul.
The Saintly City is where he built his livelihood, his persona, his celebrity and his celebrated radio show. St. Paul is where his daughter, Maia, goes to school. It’s where he founded his quaint bookstore, Common Good Books, and where, in 2006, he led a denizen of Hollywood celebrities down Wabasha Street — Woody Harrelson, Meryl Streep and Lindsay Lohan among them — in support of the Robert Altman-directed film A Prairie Home Companion.
St. Paul is home, but it’s also work.
“St. Paul is where I have a schedule, it’s where I’m jumping in a car tearing off someplace and I’m 15 minutes late,” says Keillor. “St. Paul is getting up by 6:30 in the morning and being out the door no later than a quarter after 7.”
St. Paul is also the place where he is universally recognized, with his tall frame, wispy mane and rumbling baritone that seems to be on the cusp always of saying “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon…”
And so when Garrison Keillor and his wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, want to sneak off into blessed anonymity, they go to their co-op condo in New York City, in the historic Eldorado building on Central Park West. Keillor calls it his “Minnesota lake place,” though the closest thing it has to a lake view is a slice of green trees peeking out from Central Park.
Photography by Tria Giovan
“Some Minnesotans drive two hours to their cabin. We just happen to take an airplane,” says Keillor.
He first bought the Eldorado condo back in 1988, when he was married to his second wife, a Danish woman named Ulla Skaerved, who was giddy about the idea of a New York apartment with a decadent terrace. “The real-estate person was a little surprised because that’s not an easy thing necessarily to find,” recalls Keillor. But they found exactly what they were looking for: an art-deco building with tall, pre-war ceilings, original tile, a stately lobby and, yes, a truly outstanding terrace overlooking Central Park West.
It was a fine apartment, but the marriage did not last. And for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that Keillor was soon to be married to his new love, the pre-war apartment with the big terrace was sold in 1994.
For more than a decade, Garrison Keillor lived away from the Eldorado, taking up residence with Nilsson at 90th Street and West End Avenue, and then later, at 90th Street and Riverside. But he thought of the old place, with the muraled lobby, the architecture, that terrace. “We were spending more time in New York, we wanted more space and we thought, ‘Why not?’ ” When he went back to visit after more than 10 years, the doorman said, without batting an eye, “Good to see you again, Mr. Keillor.”
The apartment was virtually untouched, as if it had been padded with mothballs the entire decade. But that was itself a kind of design challenge. This was, after all, the place where Keillor had lived with his previous wife.
Keillor and Nilsson, a professional violinist, put the delicate task to interior designers Tom Gunkelman and Karen McKay, whom they had previously entrusted with not one but two St. Paul homes, as well as the Riverside apartment in New York. Gunkelman, who passed away in May, took to the project with gusto, first having the blonde wood floors stained mocha brown.
“That was an amazing psychological change,” says Keillor. “The memories of having lived here before were suddenly not so vivid.”
To that slate, McKay and Gunkelman added a program of formal, sophisticated furniture, including a linen-upholstered Saladino day bed with a cowboy roll of ivory boucle and an Andre Arbus armchair covered in plush, heathered boucle from Knoll. Textures, rather than color, create the interest here, with cotton, silk, wool, limousine cloth, marble, glass, linen, raw wood, lacquer and bronze all playing together in the same room.
“Garrison and Jenny like a casual, collected look in St. Paul,” says McKay. “For the New York place, we went for something a little more refined.”
The most St. Paul-ish space is the adjacent family room, where a 100-year-old Navajo blanket the couple picked up on a road trip holds center stage. This, says Keillor, is where the wallflowers congregate during parties and where 13-year-old Maia likes to play around on her mom’s laptop.
Life in New York has a markedly different rhythm. Keillor spends a lot of time writing and reading, taking strolls through Central Park and hanging out in the main reading room of the public library, where he is almost never recognized. Mother and daughter go to MOMA and the Met, and then order takeout from Citarella and Zabar’s. “When I cook, we sort of become circumstantial vegetarians,” says Nilsson sheepishly. “I have a destructive way with meat.” Nilsson and Keillor can easily entertain themselves for hours with New York people-watching. “There’s a guy who likes to cook in his underwear,” Nilsson says. “I’ve taken to calling him Russ.”
It’s not exactly rustic, with more than 30 Starbucks coffee shops within walking distance of the building. But for this Minnesota family, it’s exactly the cabin they need.
Garrison Keillor’s Favorite Details
The Mural at the Eldorado
“In the lobby of our building is a mural of the Golden City of El Dorado, like what Edgar Allen Poe wrote about in his poem. The mural shows people crossing a great arched bridge into a gold-dusted city of fabulous wealth, and was completed in 1931, when it must have seemed a great irony to the building’s investors. The apartments in the building are nice, but they are hardly opulent. I suppose the mural was painted to give the tenants a sense of opulence, and it does work for me.”
The Lake Painting
“In reality, this is an 1893 painting of a sea inlet at the Danish island Fyn, done by Peder Monsted, one of the painters of the Danish Golden Age. But in my mind, it’s really a painting of a Minnesota lake, surrounded by balsam and spruce. And it hangs in our lake place up in the air.”
Industrial Cupboards
“The cupboards were original to the apartment, but they were painted. And so we had all the paint chipped off and the stainless steel surface cleaned. It’s a small kitchen, a little, smart galley, and cupboards make it feel like the dining car on a train.”
Our Navajo Blanket
“Soon after we met, Jenny and I took a car trip and bought together this Navajo blanket that was made in about 1900, when the tribe was first starting to make things for the tourist trade. The colors are very fine — golds, oranges, reds and yellows.”
