Secrets of the City

thank god. st. paul is great because its “look” makes sense — grand has a look, so does downtown, etc. this fad-y stuff always looks ridiculous 10 years down the line. let minneapolis/developers do this crap, and create sections of its city that look totally schizophrenic (uptown) … let st. paul keep its charm.

St Paul: The town that doesn’t want you to move there.

St. Paul’s downtown sure does have a look, it’s called there are no people around! And this is comming from someone who lives in St. Paul. Minus the Wild and maybe the Science Museum downtown St. Paul is terrible!

Don’t get to excited yet. The city council still has the final decision on the matter. And they aren’t voting whether it can happen or not, just whether Trooien can skip the zoning rules that would prevent him from building the giant 30 story towers. Now if that gets shot down it’s not clear what the developer would do. But he might still move forward with a modified plan.

Joe Soucheray has an unsurprisingly offensive editorial on the subject. In, Small minds stand in Bridges’ way, Soucheray essentially calls people opposed the project stupid and talk about sick he is of all this community voice BS. Yeah don’t you hate it when our government works and the people’s voices on a subject are heard. Yeah big bummer.

Awesome things in downtown Saint Paul:
Tanpopo Noodles
Artist’s Quarter
Farmer’s Market

I’m not trying to say its a booming metropolis or anything but there are some cool things here.

phil, take a walk down to lowertown. head up to grand. go to the history center. there’s a bunch to do, minus the whole downtown club/bar scene. that’s what minneapolis is for. in a metro area this size, i’m surprised st. paul is as lively as it is…

Plus, you’d think Soucheray, et al., would have a teensy problem with the fact that Trooien’s asking for $100 million in public financing. Neat!

Sounds like a Bridges Too Far.

I met Mr. T., the deveoper in question. I was with my (then) CEO, who was meeting about building a new ALAMN headquarters on the West Side riverfront, perhaps in the Bridges. An interesting battle of wills in play that afternoon.

In the end, we decided to stay in our current building.

I’m really curious about this Mythica thing also. Wonder if it will be a real acredited museum with artifacts and such or a more museum-y center of mythtastic exhibits?? I’d be curious to know more about the team that might develop that space out.

I’m completely ambivalent on the subject, but whichever way St. Paul decides to go about it would make sense to me. It’s a well thought out plan, to be sure, but it’s just a question of whether or not it’s a “St. Paul” kind of project.

Ok, so I have a soft spot for downtown st paul because they actually preserved an urban character in a lot of it … but the one thing it really needs is people after 5pm. That’s something this project would probably bring to the city, and that’s a good thing. Plus the plan actually makes sure that the riverfront is a public space, and a pleasant one at that. Has anyone taken a look at where they want to build this project? It’s a bigass empty parking lot right now. Boy oh boy, I’d much rather have a ugly parking lot on the riverfront than an active mixed-use development! *cough*

Seriously, of course the project will need some tweaking and community input, but it’s absurd to shoot it down right away because you want to keep west st paul a dingy shithole.

link to google maps of site

The best thing I can say about St. Paul it is that, all things considered, I’d rather live in St. Paul than back in Detroit. And also the neighborhoods in St. Paul are quite nice, especially those that border Minneapolis.

There is a cliched idea that downtown St. Paul has somehow maintained its historic urban feel. Great. Except it’s really not very true. There are a couple of pockets that are great, like Rice Park (which I’ll admit is really great). The rest of the city, though, is quite bad… a hodge podge of bad late-century modernism, poor urban planning, nasty parking ramps and bleak surface lots.

St. Paul saved the Landmark Center, and Minneapolis knocked down the Metropolitan Building, so I’ll give them that. St. Paul, though, has torn down vast sections of its downtown and nobody seems to have noticed.

As for the Bridges:

1. It’s not in downtown St. Paul, so it’s not going to help it. It will dillute what little demand there is for entertainment, restaurants, and retail in downtown.

2. It’s not walking distance from anywhere, so everybody that goes there is going to have to drive and park in their giant underground garage.

3. It will be full of exciting chain stores and restaurants. It will be a glorified shopping mall.

4. Hello, flood plain?

Not in walking distance from anywhere? I guess you must be really lazy if you think it’s too far from downtown stp or harriet island to walk.

I’m not a walking pansy, I promise. I walk all over the place, but that’s not how normal people act.

A half mile is generally the maximum distance normal people will walk. A half mile from the middle of the Bridges project gets you to the intersection of Kellogg and Robert, so you’ll have to walk another half mile or so to get into the heart of downtown St. Paul.

And I’m going to walk a mile for what? An Applebees? In a Mediterranean themed, suburban-style lifestyle center?

No thanks.

A roughly comparable comparison might be this: how many people do you see walking across the Hennepin Avenue bridge to get to Riverplace?

Yeah, nobody goes to block E or anything.

And they don’t go to riverplace, they go to st anthony/main or the hennepin/university commercial strip. Plenty of people do it, too. The whole bridges project would essentially be like a nonhistoric verson of that area to st paul. Except st paul is a lot more historically grounded than minneapolis, so that part is kinda backwards. In any case, I think it could and will work. “Oh noes, chipotle and panera are so totally chains, so the st anthony/main neighbourhood is totaly lame I’m never going there!” Give me a break.

two corrections. . .
It’s $125 million in tax increment financing, not $100 million. That’s the TIF only, not the costs of any expanded infrastructure (raods, bridges, etc.) So the actual public costs could be higher.
It’s the West Side, not West St. Paul. Why would the St. Paul Planning Commission or City Council have jurisdiction in a Dakota County city? Unless someone smells a conspiracy here. . .

Constantly-running shuttles across the bridges, and lots of well-lit retail and restaurant activity right across the river on Kellogg, within unavoidable sight of the people milling throughout The Bridges, drawing people across into St. Paul proper, might be a very effective way to make it a win-win.

It’s Saturday night, the greeter at the Bridges restaurant tells you there’s a two-hour wait for a table, and you look up and see lots of lights and people walking around up on the cliff top across the river. The shuttle stop is right next to you. Do you wait for two hours, or jump on the shuttle?

I know, I know, the DT St. Paul people would have to buy light bulbs, something they’ve never needed before. Huge paradigm shift. But, it could be done . . .

.

They need to drop the public financing part, buy land, and build the project if it’s so neat. Hey, I’d like to open a pizza parlor. I’ve got experience in the business. Why doesn’t St. Paul give me $250,000 to do it? Because I don’t deserve public financing, and neither do these guys.

“constantly-running shuttles”??
“restaurant activity”??
“two hour wait for a table”??

… in st. paul? the city can’t change overnight, and certainly not because of some cheesy sculptures designed by the same guys who design legolands for a living.

the project too quickly builds something too big. that’s ignoring mythica, which belongs @ caesar’s palace, not the west side.

The smartest thing would be for the developers to do it in staggered phases and take community input on the design. But they also shouldn’t bend over and take it from NIMBYs who’d rather have the whole area be a parking lot, either.

As far as TIF, I agree they don’t really need or deserve it, but these days governments are handing it out like candy so they’d be stupid NOT to ask for it. If that’s the way things are done, you can’t fault them for going along with the tide. You should be complaining to the government officials who are too freely handing out TIF and other monies to private developers (cough cough twins stadium cough cough).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of big developers, but just saying the whole project needs to be canned is stupid. If anything I hope the TIF is tied to guarunteed creation of affordable housing in the project, because that’s one of the easiest ways for cities to add to affordable housing stock.

There is NO affordable housing in this project Quote JT “This is not the development for the single mother and her six kids.”