My how times have changed. Thirty years ago, the city shoreline of the Mississippi River, dirty and degraded from more than a century of industrial duty, was anything but sought after real estate. In fact, St. Paul’s highest-profile riverfront developer at the time was Ramsey County, which planted its new jail on the downtown-side bluff overlooking the river. “We used to joke that the best view of the river in St. Paul was from the county jail,” says Patrick Seeb, executive director of the Saint Paul Riverfront Corporation, a nonprofit organization that helps to implement the city’s plan for redevelopment on the St. Paul riverfront.
That was then. By June of this year, Ramsey county officials, who built a new jail in 2003 away from the river, had received eight acquisition bids from an array of companies eager to latch on to an exceedingly desirable riverfront property. Seeb suspects that the vacant jail, along with part of the adjacent office complex West Publishing evacuated when it moved to Eagan, will be transformed into a tax-base enhancing blend of housing, office, and retail.
“There is a lot of interest in that site,” adds Cecile Bedor, director of the St. Paul Department of Planning and Economic Development, “which is a reflection of the fact that St. Paul is a great place to develop and the river is a significant asset.”
In fact, more than a half dozen high-profile projects are in the pipeline or have been proposed for sites ranging from the West Side Flats, across the river from downtown St. Paul, west to the 125-acre Ford Motor Company site, which the automaker is slated to close in September 2008. Clearly, the St. Paul riverfront, once something of a development repellent, has reemerged as an essential component to the city’s economic-development efforts.
While riverfront revitalization continues to heat up in St. Paul, shoreline development in Minneapolis—especially in the so-called Mill District—has been red hot since 1999. That’s when Minneapolis-based Brighton Development Corporation opened the first of four housing developments in the Washburn A Mill complex, a national historic landmark situated on West River Parkway between Portland and Chicago avenues. Combined, the North Star, Stone Arch, Humboldt, and Washburn lofts totaled roughly $78.2 million in development costs and added nearly 132 residential lofts and condo units to the downtown side of the river.
In 2003, the Mill City Museum opened on the same block. The $31-million project was built within the ruins of the Washburn A Mill, which was built in 1880 and almost completely destroyed by fire in 1991. Three years later, the Guthrie Theatre made a dramatic entrance when it opened its striking new $125-million facility across the street from the museum.
“One of the things we’ve been working to do is transform the riverfront from a utility to an amenity,” says Ann Calvert, a project coordinator for Minneapolis’ Community Planning and Economic Development Department. Calvert, who’s been involved in the riverfront revitalization for the better part of three decades, reports that from the early 1970s through 2005, $1.4 billion in riverfront revitalization and development projects had broken ground or been completed. “And a bunch more projects have started since then,” she adds. “This has all been a part of a long, intentional, and very thoughtful redevelopment project.”
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