Development News

When a big city loses a homegrown Fortune 500 company, it hurts. It hurts less when the company moves its operations only as far away as a nearby suburb, since jobs stay close. But either way, the city can be left with land that once cradled a world-class business but now sits idle or underused.

Examples in Minneapolis include the former General Mills sites on the downtown riverfront and on the city's East Side. After General Mills decamped to the west to establish a new corporate campus in Golden Valley, both areas required years of redevelopment effort to get back to their current states of economic vitality.

On its own East Side, St. Paul has 45 acres that once were home to 3M, before the company originally known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing moved its world headquarters further east to Maplewood. The sprawling former 3M site along the Phalen Corridor--together with two smaller, adjacent sites--has been rechristened Beacon Bluff.

The sprawling former 3M site along the Phalen Corridor has been rechristened Beacon Bluff and is being marketed for industrial redevelopment by the St. Paul Port Authority and commercial real-estate firm Cassidy Turley. On 4.5 of those acres now stands a new HealthEast Medical Transportation facility. It opened for business this summer with 120 jobs and a $5.1 million investment in construction.

"It's really an important step to reclaim the jobs that were lost when businesses like 3M and Whirlpool went away," said Mayor Chris Coleman at a ribbon-cutting event last month to dedicate the building. "This marks the beginning of the reshaping of the whole East Side."

Source: Tom Collins, Saint Paul Port Authority
Writer: Chris Steller

Here's a measure of how serious Minneapolis is getting about bicycling: the city's draft Bicycle Master Plan, which is up for public comment this month, might tip you over if you tried to bike with it.

The plan, with accompanying design guidelines, runs to nearly 500 pages of text, tables, photos, and more. Its predecessor, from 2001, was a map.

The new document lays out Minneapolis' policies on bicycling and tells how city government intends to carry them out. If the city council adopts it, the master plan will be the first word--if not necessarily the last--on where biking will take Minneapolis and where Minneapolis will let biking go.

A series of five public meetings starts this week at which people can learn about the plan, express opinions and offer ideas for changes. A comment form, like the master plan itself, is available online.

Even before the meetings, members of the city's active bike community were sizing up the plan online at Minneapolis Bike Love and the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition. Resident Brendon Slotterback sees lots of city-planning documents in his job as Dakota County planner but says this seems like "a big deal." At his blog, Net Density, Slotterback made a new map to show which improvements actually have the maintenance funding needed to start construction.

Billy Binder, a member of the city's Bicycle Advisory Committee, a lifelong Northside resident, and longtime bicycling advocate, admires the master-plan effort but says the process is moving "way too fast." Guidelines showing 12-foot traffic lanes and 5-foot bike lanes are disappointing, he says, because narrower widths would let bike lanes proliferate even on skinny streets. Binder plans to comment but says he also will directly lobby council members to seek a plan worthy of what Bicycling magazine calls America's most bike-friendly city.

Sources: Billy Binder, Minneapolis Bicycle Advisory Committee; Brendon Slotterback, Net Density
Writer: Chris Steller

As his firm's design for the world's tallest building rises in Shanghai, architect William Pedersen has designed something much closer to the ground--and, perhaps, his heart--for his alma mater, the University of Minnesota. The $72.5 million Science Teaching and Student Services (ST+SS) building is Pedersen's third major Twin Cities project, after the Federal Courthouse in Minneapolis and the St. Paul (now Travelers) Companies headquarters in his hometown of St. Paul.

Speaking from Kohn Pedersen Fox's New York office, Pedersen was full of praise for local partners HGA Architects, McGough Construction, sculptor Alexander Tylevich, and especially his university client. He seemed freshly enamored of the U of M, where he graduated from the School of Architecture in 1961 after playing Gophers hockey with teammate Herb Brooks. He acknowledged parallels between ST+SS and his 1983 Chicago landmark, 333 Wacker Drive, another building at a bend in a river that has "a fluidity addressing the natural context." Here are a few edited excerpts from the interview:

Q. Why were you attracted to the SS+ST project?

A. My commitment to the university was probably the most powerful attraction. Also, the U had a very strong philosophical concept: [to create] the most advanced teaching building in the United States. President Bruininks was very focused. Finally, it's the most dramatic site on any university campus. It faces the Mississippi River and it faces back to the campus. It forms a gateway to the East Bank campus with the Weisman [Art Museum by Frank Gehry]. The two need to form a relationship.

Q. What other challenges did the site pose?

A. The big glass surface facing west presented solar challenges. The vertical piers of stainless steel are not spaced uniformly. They're closer together where the building faces west--spaced rhythmically, not like an office building. I wanted the building to feel cheerful in all kinds of weather, even on a dreary day.

Q. How did you feel about the building once it opened?

A. I was so proud of my university and the way they [approached the project]--enormously progressive and optimistic.

Source: William Pedersen, Kohn Pedersen Fox
Writer: Chris Steller

Steering a kayak through a whitewater rapids within a stone's throw of downtown Minneapolis has been a longtime dream of local paddling enthusiasts.

The idea has been to take advantage of some of the Mississippi River's approximately 50-foot drop at St. Anthony Falls along the river's east bank. A manmade course of restored rapids could be controlled, according to plans, so as to provide the right flow for a range of recreational users, from leisurely rafters to competitive racers.

The concept has received both state and federal support over the last decade or more. Now a redesign of the project by consultants for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is underway, with a draft report due this fall.

Designers are considering a continuous, looping course--using a conveyor to return paddlers back to the beginning --as an alternative to a linear course with start and finish far apart. They are also taking into account changed conditions on the ground like the new piers of the replaced I-35W bridge.

At a progress meeting last week, an expert on whitewater courses presented encouraging numbers: restored rapids in Minneapolis could attract 62,000 people annually. Even the least lucrative of four business models shows that most costs of operation could be recovered. (Construction costs are another matter.)

Project Manager Russel K. Snyder calls the course that the Mississippi River whitewater park concept is taking through the federal system "unusual." But like the whitewater rapids it would restore, the project keeps moving, stirring passions and possibilities.

Source: Russel K. Snyder, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Writer: Chris Steller

If you take a walk in St. Paul, it's becoming more and more likely that you'll step on a poem.

The city's sidewalk poetry program is in its third year of stamping poems into sidewalk squares as part of regular maintenance work. Residents compete in an annual contest in which 10 are chosen to have their work set in concrete. Now there are 30 poems in 300 locations across the city. Calls come in from as far away as New Zealand to inquire about the program.

It's one of the projects that got its start through another St. Paul innovation: the artist-in-residence, a nontraditional approach to public art. Many public-art programs operate on the percent-for-art model, explains Christine Podas-Larson of the nonprofit Public Art Saint Paul. A capital project has already been designed and an artist is called in-- "usually at the end," she says--to add some art.

The artist-in-residence program in St. Paul stands that on its head. The artist gets embedded in the inner workings of City Hall. Not only the politics and administration but the day-to-day duties of all sorts of public servants.

The deal Public Art Saint Paul offered City Hall, she says, was this: We will pay for the position of artist-in-residence. You make room for the artist "at the big kids' table." (A $50,000 grant from the McKnight Foundation helped Public Art Saint Paul keep its end of the deal.)

That's how the sidewalk poetry program was born. Artist-in-residence Marcus Young visited the Sidewalk Division of the Public Works Department and asked "What do you do?" It turns out the division spends a half-million dollars annually replacing the equivalent of 10 miles of broken sidewalk squares. Young already had a concept of the city as a book and the sidewalks as pages. Here was a readymade way to turn that into reality.

"We take a tiny corner of what they're doing anyway," says Podas-Larson says. "It makes maintenance artful," she says.

Source: Christine Podas-Larson, Public Art Saint Paul
Writer: Chris Steller

A downtown block that has sat largely vacant for almost two decades--despite its location at the confluence of three major streets--may soon get back its mojo.

In the 19th century, construction on what's known as the Nicollet Hotel block, where Washington Avenue meets Hennepin and Nicollet avenues, led the way to development of the downtown Minneapolis we know today. Now hopes are high that redevelopment on the same spot, next to the new Central Library, can again lead to a revival of neighboring blocks at the north end of downtown. Mayor R.T. Rybak pitched the idea of a public park at the city-owned site during his annual budget address last week. The city's planning director, Barb Sporlein, says city staff, regional officials, and downtown leaders are in talks about a renewed effort for possible three-pronged redevelopment there, including parkland, mixed-use and transit.

A federal grant helped the city buy the block as a site for a transit hub, but two rounds of requests for proposals in 2005 and 2009 did not produce a project that's taken hold. Now excitement over devoting at least some of the land for needed downtown park space is dovetailing with prospects that the block could host a new streetcar line running from Central Avenue across the river to the Nicollet Mall downtown. Where that streetcar line would run, who would pay for park upkeep, and what sort of mixed-development could share the block are questions Sporlein says studies or another RFP may answer.

The turnaround scenario is that adjacent areas would gain energy from a revived Nicollet Hotel site, just as Gold Medal Park sparked development in downtown's Mill District. "This could be a hard-working block," says Sporlein.

Source: Barb Sporlein, City of Minneapolis
Writer: Chris Steller

Living on the water--really on the water--has been a way of life for David Nelson and his wife Renae since they moved into a houseboat on St. Paul's Mississippi riverfront almost 23 years ago. Over that time, they've shared the floating life with a few river neighbors, but now they've got plans to share its charms and challenges with many more.

Nelson, a building contractor and developer, has embarked on a renewed marketing push for a project he calls River Cities: housing 300 or more people in condos on a barge-sized boat that's specially built to ply the nation's extensive inland waterways system.

Nelson has been working on the concept for more than five years (full time for three), and figures the market for an adventurous way of living, especially for retirees, may be ripe now. "People are sick of this perpetual staycation that we're in," he says.

Plans are for two 300-by-54-foot boats, each five stories in height, that could travel together or separately. With sufficient commitments for condos ranging in price from $299,000�$499,000, Nelson could have his first condo-bearing boats built in as little as 18 months.

A big part of River Cities' appeal is the kind of proximity to nature that the Nelsons have enjoyed in St. Paul. They've also found a sense of community on St. Paul's houseboat docks (nine boats when they moved in, a city maximum of 25 now) that they hope to replicate on a bigger scale with River Cities. "Boaters look out for each other," Nelson says.

Source: David Nelson, River Cities, Inc.
Writer: Chris Steller

They say nothing succeeds like success, and that's the attitude Lund's is bringing to plans for a new grocery store in St. Paul's Lowertown.

The grocery chain has committed to leasing 30,000 square feet of ground-floor space in the Penfield, a mixed-use building for which the City of Saint Paul has taken over the role of lead developer.

Mayor Chris Coleman announced the grocery deal at a press conference last week for an initiative called Rebuild Saint Paul that encompasses $15 million in city funding for more than a dozen development projects around the city.

The Penfield project has had its ups and downs but the grocery chain remained certain it wanted to be a part of it, says spokesman Aaron Sorenson. One reason: a similar and  "extremely successful" Lund's store near downtown Minneapolis.

"This store is patterned in many ways on [the] Northeast Minneapolis [store]," Sorenson said, adding that St. Paul store will have more of an emphasis on prepared foods and "grab 'n' go" items. The Northeast Minneapolis store is slightly smaller at 26,000 square feet.

The Northeast store, the chain's only new location in the last decade, gives Lund's "extra confidence" in its downtown St. Paul prospects, says Sorenson, noting that both sites are on the "outskirts of downtown."

"We feel very confident about bringing that model" to St. Paul, where Lund's sees a rising downtown population that lacks a nearby full-service supermarket.

Sorenson emphasized that Lund's interest has held steady throughout shifts in Penfield plans. With or without city or federal money in the project, Lund's always intended to lease space at market-based, not publicly subsidized, rates.

Back in Minneapolis, plans are yet to gel for a store actually in downtown, where Lund's owns a two-story building. Those two floors, Sorenson says, raise a difficult question: "What items do you put on what level?"

Source: Aaron Sorenson, Lund's
Writer: Chris Steller

When Minneapolis lands at the top of national rankings, it's usually for things like literacy, per-capita theater attendance, or bicycle-friendliness. So it was a surprise this month when a real-estate website called Trulia.com declared Minneapolis the all-time, record-breaking, national leader in a seemingly less desirable category: percentage of houses for sale at reduced prices.

The figure, which covers homes for sale within the city of Minneapolis proper (not St. Paul or suburbs), is 42 percent. That is, 42 percent of Minneapolis homes on the market, as compiled in Trulia's considerable database, have asking prices that are lower than when the homes first hit the market.

"We've been surprised to see Minneapolis at the top of the list," says Trulia's Tara-Nicholle Nelson. Minneapolis had for three previous months held the top position at a steady 40 percent. The website has tracked cities' price reduction rates since April 2009.

Nelson doesn't take the numbers to mean the city's real estate market is "bizarrely overflooded" or "overly distressed." Things are bad all over, but Minneapolis can boast strengths such as an unemployment rate consistently lower than state and national figures. So what makes the city special in this particular category? One theory Nelson offers (reinforced, she says, by locals she's spoken with) is this: "Sellers are very realistic and aggressive [and] are seeing the need to sell or want very badly to sell."

A year ago, when Minneapolis ranked fourth on Trulia's list, local mortgage banker Alex Stenback proposed another possibility on his website, BehindtheMonrtgage.com: "Minneapolis home sellers are altogether too optimistic in the first place, but quick to recognize their mistake." Asked about this year's ranking, Trebak cautioned by email about reading too much into monthly data but said it suggests that "real estate has not yet bottomed-out."

Source: Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Trulia.com; Alex Stenback, BehindTheMortgage.com
Writer: Chris Steller

St. Paul's vision for its riverfront can be boiled down to six words: "More natural. More urban. More connected."

Now the city is taking the next 12 months to solidify that vision into a master plan for parks and open spaces for 17 miles along the Mississippi River--with an eye toward economic development as well.

But St. Paul has been studying its riverfront for years. Will a new master plan make anything happen?

Craig Coronato of Denver-based Wenk Associates says "quick successes" are possible.

"They have had a long process and identified a vision," says Coronato. "The people of St. Paul want to see that transformed into real things."

Coronato, an esteemed landscape architect who has worked for 28 years on rivers and cities (including some in China), says tapping new sources of funds could also help spur action.

Exactly what kinds of things St. Paulites want to see is a key question that Coronato's firm--as well as a local firm, Hoisington Koegler Group, and the City of St. Paul Parks and Recreation department--is seeking to discover. They kicked off a yearlong process of citizen engagement Tuesday with a citywide meeting at Harriet Island, with more workshops, neighborhood gatherings, and another citywide meeting to come.

Is there an inherent contradiction in trying to be both more natural and more urban? Coronato acknowledges "some tension" but says the key lies in the last aim: "More connected."

"How do you look at the interface between the natural and the urban, and make it better?" he asks, rhetorically. "They're not mutually exclusive."

Source: Craig Coronato, Wenk Associates
Writer: Chris Steller

In the midst of last week's wave of heat and humidity, all 58,000 square feet of space inside the City of Minneapolis' new Hiawatha Public Works Facility were comfortably chilled--but not with conventional air conditioning. Instead it was thanks to a geothermal system that brings the Earth's coolness (or warmth, in winter) up from underground.

That's only one of the features making the $9.5 million facility the city's greenest yet--and likely the fifth building in Minnesota to achieve LEED platinum status for environmental sustainability. (With LEED gold status already in hand, the city has an application for platinum status pending for the facility.)

The Hiawatha site in south Minneapolis has been home to the city's Public Works Department for more than a century. The 18 buildings once scattered across almost 10 acres are now consolidated into a single facility that houses department offices and the city's construction-vehicle maintenance shop. Indeed, the new building incorporates a brick structure that originally served as an infirmary for horses that pulled fire trucks and construction equipment, according to Senior Project Manager Paul Miller.

Miller takes most pride in the fact that even the 17 buildings that the city demolished got re-used, to the extent that the project actually gained LEED points during construction. Most projects lose points as waste material is hauled off, but "virtually 100 percent of what was there never left the site," he says. "That's the coolest thing."

The re-use wasn't limited to crushed gravel made from demolished structures. Miller says Knutson Construction and RSP Architects kept finding new uses for old building materials from the site--or even from off-site. The facilty's perimeter fencing served, in its past life, as the the steel-grid decking on the Lowry Avenue Bridge over the Mississippi River, which is now being rebuilt.

Source: Paul Miller, City of Minneapolis
Writer: Chris Steller

After nearly 30 years below ground, Walker Library in Minneapolis' Uptown neighborhood is getting ready to surface with a new $7 million building.

"A library that is highly visible" is the stated desire of a citizens advisory committee that issued a vision statement for a replacement structure earlier this year.

That will be a big change from the current, almost entirely subterranean library building at Hennepin and Lagoon avenues, where in lieu of a visible library at street level, person-sized steel letters spell out L-I-B-R-A-R-Y.

Envisioned is an above-ground building that announces itself as "Uptown's library, with a strong daytime and nighttime street presence." Designers don't have to look far to find an example of such a structure: the original Walker Library is still standing, just across the street.

Hennepin County's Designer Selection Committee has recommended an architect from among the 21 firms that responded to a request for proposals issued last spring, says Lois Lenroot-Ernt, capital projects manager for Hennepin County Library. The firm's name remains under wraps, however, until county commissioners act on the recommendation, perhaps this month or next.

Designer selection doesn't immediately lead to library construction in every case. A new building in north Minneapolis to replace Webber Park Library is on hold until the county acquires a site.

The county allocated more than $1 million in its 2010 budget to acquire land at a new Uptown site for the Walker library as well, but the RFP is for a $7 million structure to be built on the current site.

Source: Lois Lenroot-Ernt, Hennepin County Library
Writer: Chris Steller

Members of the Prospect Park-East River Road Improvement Association (PPERRIA) were in favor of historic status for their Minneapolis neighborhood--until they were against it.

It was in 2008 that Council Member Cam Gordon got city approval for the neighborhood's nomination for local historic designation. But over the two years that the nomination was pending, Prospect Park residents had a change of heart as they experienced tougher-than-expected provisional enforcement of historic-district rules.

And so this month, at PPERRIA's urging, the city council rejected historic designation for Prospect Park.

"It sounds strange," admits Joe Ring, leader of the effort to get historic status. "Like most things in life, it isn't simple."

Residents supported rules on owners making changes to building facades, Ring says, but they weren't expecting restrictions on rear additions, temporary wheelchair ramps or lead-paint abatement work.

Did the neighborhood waste $55,000 on a report by historical-research firm Hess Roise that determined it deserved national historic status? No, says Ring, because the city accepted the report, giving the neighborhood standing to object to demolitions like those that inspired the designation effort 15 years ago.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation suggested PPERRIA might instead pursue designation as a conservation district, a status enjoyed by neighborhoods in cities such as Nashville, Tenn., Cambridge, Mass., and Boise, Idaho. A University of Minnesota study due this fall is surveying conservation districts across the country and may recommend language for lawmakers here to consider.

Ring says administration of conservation districts, compared to historic districts, can be more neighborhood-based or bottom-up. And it might give PPERRIA greater say over things like the scale of new student-housing projects or Xcel Energy's tree-trimming practices.

Source: Joe Ring, Prospect Park-East River Road Improvement Association
Writer: Chris Steller

When Christopher and Rushika Hage moved back to Minnesota in 2007, they saw that on the sizable shelf of local-history books devoted to individual Twin Cities neighborhoods, one notable neighborhood was missing: Minneapolis' Nicollet Island.

The Hages have since filled that gap, twice over. Their "Nicollet Island" installment in Arcadia Publishing's "Images of America" photo-book series appeared earlier this year. And in July local publisher Nodin Press released their second book on the subject, "Nicollet Island: History and Architecture."

It's an in-depth survey that takes readers from the time when Dakota people made the island a birthing place, through its Gilded Age heyday as home to the city's early elites, to its current status as a showcase park on Minneapolis' downtown riverfront.

Rushika Hage calls the tale "a history of Minneapolis in miniature." Nicollet Island lies upstream of St. Anthony Falls--the only true waterfall on the Mississippi River and the reason Minneapolis came into being as a city.

After voters in the 1860s rejected a chance to buy the island as a central park, its 40 acres developed along the same pattern as the city as a whole: water power-based factories nearest the falls, then tiny zones of commerce, high-end townhouses, mansions, and residences for the middle and working classes.

The Hages devote a chapter to the island's residential and industrial architecture--a 19th-century time capsule, preserved thanks to countercultural residents who fought off bulldozers in the 1970s.

A special find is a boyhood photo of Franklin Griswold, an inventor of railroad and traffic signals used the world over who grew up on the island, riding a homemade four-wheeled cycle.

Sources: Christopher and Rushika Hage
Writer: Chris Steller (who lives on the island and gave some information to the Hages for their books)

City maps usually use colors, shapes, and other marks to denote things like bus routes, school locations, and major thoroughfares. Now a University of Minnesota professor is asking locals to mark places of pain and joy on her handmade wooden map of the Twin Cities.

"Unseen/Seen: The Mapping of Joy and Pain" is the latest project by Rebecca Krinke, an artist who teaches landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota. She is taking her large-scale tabletop map of Minneapolis and St. Paul to parks and other locations, where she invites people to draw in gray where they've felt pain and gold where they've felt joy.

The result, still evolving, is more than a composite mental map. It's a communal emotional map that Krinke hopes will be enlightening and even therapeutic.

"It really seems to be working," says Krinke, who calls the responses so far "beautiful, interesting and strange." Some people happen by; others who have heard about the project come as if by appointment. Most who participate end up staying half an hour or so, often interacting with others as they mark the map.

To her surprise, many of the markings are linear rather than mere points. River banks are lined with more gold than even Minneapolis' popular city lakes.

Word of the project has traveled quickly, and Krinke says she'll be packaging it for display in Blacksburg, Va. (site of a horrific campus shooting), and Sacramento, Calif.

A map of wood, while a thing of beauty, is also anachronistic in the age of Google Maps. Krinke says she's interested in suggestions she has received for online, possibly worldwide, versions.

Source: Rebecca Krinke, University of Minnesota
Writer: Chris Steller