When your city’s national image is best summed up as “the American answer to Siberia,” how exactly do you go about drawing a crowd of out-of-towners to take notice of your thriving community and impressive cultural scene? Well, if you’re St. Paul, Minnesota, you first arrange to host the National Hockey League’s All-Star Game during the dead of winter. Then, just before the cameras roll, you build an enormous palace out of 27,000 bathtub-sized blocks of ice, right smack in the middle of downtown, and just across the street from the hockey arena. The 2004 Ice Palace is a marvel of art and engineering, and it opens to the public tonight. Oh, and just for the record: the temperature in the Twin Cities this morning was a crisp 13 below zero.