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February 27, 2004

Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back

I spent a good chunk of the day in downtown Saint Paul the other day.

Yaaagh. See what happens when I don't come downtown for a couple of years? Everything goes straight to hell.

Now, Saint Paul has always - and by "always", I mean "since the forties" - been a city where downtown was just another neighborhood, rather than the center of the city. Saint Paul has been called "Fifteen small towns with one mayor", and it sorta works. Each neighborhood has more than just a look, feel and identity - and a history, and at the moment, some sort of outlook.

Some of them are always carved in stone. Highland is prim, proper, the home of DFLers who have liberalism the way some people have halitosis. The East Side is like an assembly line; immigrants and the dirt-poor come in at the bottom, in Swede Hollow and the ramshackle old railroad tenements on and below Dayton's Bluff, and as their prosperity and language skills evolve, they move up Payne Avenue, becoming blue-collar, working class Americans about the time they get north of Maryland, before sending their kids off to the U and moving to Battle Creek or Maplewood. The Midway echoes from the footsteps of generations of little kids, raised by sensible, frugal parents looking for good houses at bargain prices. Como has the same sedate gentility it had a hundred years ago.

But downtown?

I love downtown Saint Paul's quirky charms; little shops tucked into odd corners, the feeling that little or nothing had changed since the Depression when you walked into the Endicott or Pioneer or Hamm buildings. I always preferred the look and feel of downtown Saint Paul - at least the old downtown Saint Paul, with its limestone and pre-depression landmarks and shards of art-deco - to Minneapolis. Downtown Minneapolis is a too-blond, perfectly-primped, cold, distant, thirty-something marketing exec from Edina who drives a Lexus and knows all the waiters at Chino; Saint Paul is an Irish-Italian redhead from the East Side who takes the bus to her gig at the courthouse and can (and after three drinks, will) sing "It's Raining Men" at karaoke night without looking at the monitor.

But downtown hasn't fared well lately - and by "lately", I mean "for the last couple decades". A lot of the decay predated me by several decades; architectural history buffs tell me that once, before Urban Renewal, Cedar Street was a bustling, thriving avenue with lots of storefronts, the kind of thing that makes wandering around downtown a pleasure. Today, of course, it's a cold, windswept series of backsides of buildings, and downright unpleasant.

Even during the time I've been here - 18 years and change - the changes have been marked, and mostly depressing. Galtier Plaza - born and reborn and reborn again since it first opened right about the time I came to the Twin Cities - used to be the center of a thriving little destination; you could take the kids, grab a bite, go to the Farmers Market, see a movie, check out Mears Park, and on and on. The area had stores, bars, viable businesses...

...and today, all that's missing seems to be the tumbleweeds. The streets feel desiccated, drab, lonely.

Except for a few little slivers around the X, the Ordway and City Hall/Lawson, most of downtown reminds me of downtown Fargo in the seventies; in transition, but into what, we don't yet know.

The place is a monument to the folly of too much government intervention, of course; during the seventies and eighties, the St. Paul Port Authority built huge office buildings like the World Trade Center, just in time to serve a market that was vanishing. They built or financed or promoted a couple of "Festival Malls" - Galtier and Carriage Hill - that did about as well as any other festival mall (remember Riverplace, Saint Anthony Main, the Conservatory...). During the Latimer and Scheibel years, the Port Authority rang up immense debts and ran through development plans faster than Kos runs through polls. The Norm Coleman years were focused on big developments, like the Xcel, Rivecenter, the Science Museum and Lawson Commons, which did wonders for the little knot running from West Seventh up to about the Hamm Building - and not much more. The fundamental problems - that icky, cold, Stalinistic corridor on Cedar Street, the huge, uninviting, empty shell of the WTC, the misbegotten, unfriendly Town Square - still remain.

This last three months, I've been working in downtown Minneaopolis; despite the cold, artificial frenetics of the place, it's got throb and hustle and bustle to it that I love - and after ten years of working in the 'burbs, needed.

I wandered around downtown for a few hours, looking for any of the old landmarks, the ones that used to be part of my personal geography. When I first moved to the Cities, there were places to go: Shannon Kelly's for a good beer and some fun company; the Oz for sleaze; the Park Tavern for a classy night out. Now, after dark, there's nothing going on east of Saint Peter.

Later - when my son was three and my daughter was almost five, and my then-wife went back to work, I used to stay home with them in the morning (my work schedule was that flexible, for a long time). We had a season ticket at the children's museum; the ritual was to get down to the Childrens' Museum, play for an hour or two, walk through the skyway to St. Paul Center for lunch as we watched the super-cool fountain in the three-story atrium, then meander through Daytons or wander about Mears Park on the way to their daycare, by their mom's office.

Most of it's gone; the Children's Museum is there, but the food court, the dazzling fountain and the daycare are long vanished, replaced by empty offices. Town Square is a shell of its old self. There used to be signs of commerce, of a private sector...of life down there.

I had a bagel at Brueggers and watched who went by; a couple of vagrants, a few knots of government workers (you can usually tell them from private sector workers; the tight, strained gait, the institutional casual dress, the discomfort around the rabble), a bunch of people waiting on connecting buses. Not the signs of a place that's thriving. A few blocks away from Rivercenter, the place reminded me of sitting on the wrong side of the tracks in a South Dakota tourist town, during the offseason; too much depends on the tourists who come for the Reptile Garden Wild games for things to really feel secure.

There's going to be a revival in downtown Saint Paul, someday. There's too much great, quirky, retro, solid, lovely real estate to not attract some activity, someday. Someday, when the last cool, funky, prewar building in Northeast Minneapolis is converted to a Panera and the rents finally zoom out of reach, perhaps it'll be the new, New Uptown. Maybe it'll be the cheap incubator space for the next technological boom to come from the Twin Cities, whatever it is.

For now, it's just sad.

Posted by Mitch at February 27, 2004 04:42 AM
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