Jim Crockarell, the sometimes cantankerous real estate developer thought to be downtown St. Paul’s largest private building owner, died Thursday at age 79.

Family members in November said Crockarell was battling an infection they didn’t think would be fatal.

“We are grieving the loss of my father, Jim,” said his daughter, Carol March, a real estate broker and principal asset manager with his company, Madison Equities, in a brief written statement. She said the family requested privacy while funeral arrangements were made.

Raised in Clarksville, Tenn., Crockarell made St. Paul his adopted home, serving as both a proprietor of the city’s architectural history and a sometimes foil to City Hall.

He was 28 when he arrived in Minnesota in the 1970s, working in planning and research at the architectural firm Ellerbe Becket. By the early 1980s, he’d begun dabbling in real estate, buying homes in St. Paul’s Ramsey Hill neighborhood.

Crockarell bought his first downtown property, the Degree of Honor Building, in 1999, then kept on buying.

Through Madison Equities, the developer held stakes in at least 32 buildings, many of them storied old downtown office buildings and former office buildings that underwent residential conversions under Crockarell’s direction. The firm owns St. Paul’s 1930s-era landmark First National Bank high-rise and its iconic, illuminated No. 1 sign, as well as the Alliance Bank and U.S. Bank buildings, and shopping centers in Roseville, St. Anthony, White Bear Lake, Oakdale and St. Cloud.

His many real estate holdings also positioned him as landlord or part owner of some of the city’s newest and most stylish restaurants, recently including Noyes & Cutler, the Handsome Hog, Ox Cart Ale House and Gray Duck Tavern.

Madison Equities maintains all of the Lowertown Mears Park buildings between Sibley and Wacouta streets, home of the Barrio and Bulldog restaurants, as well as the adjoining Park Square Court building. A year ago, when Crockarell bought the 7th Place Apartments on Wabasha Street — which had entered the world as the St. Francis Hotel in the 1920s — he excitedly predicted that the home of Afro Deli and Candyland soon would be joined by a 9,000-square-foot restaurant in the vacant space previously occupied by the Wild Tymes Sports Bar. The Wrestaurant at the Palace, a full-service restaurant and bar serving Wrecktangle Pizza, opened in August.

City Hall antagonist, downtown advocate

Crockarell’s battles with St. Paul City Hall, labor advocates, state regulators and even fellow business partners were about as numerous as his downtown investments.

When officials with the St. Paul Downtown Alliance — a partnership between City Hall and downtown business owners — launched a dues-based Downtown Improvement District in 2020, they took care to effectively gerrymander its borders to avoid Crockarell’s many properties, avoiding a legal fight over the fees charged to building owners for the district’s street greeters, graffiti removal and other services.

“There’s nobody officing downtown, and as a result crime has proliferated,” Crockarell said in March 2022, bemoaning the rise of remote work following the coronavirus pandemic. “What we need is a critical mass of people. It’s very important to get the workers back. … I don’t think the Downtown Alliance will have any significance. There’s only so many little old ladies you can escort across the street.”

It wasn’t the first time Crockarell failed to see eye-to-eye with downtown advocates, even as he played an advocacy role himself in promoting his properties as the best places to live, work and play. “Apparently, Jim Crockarell can’t get enough of St. Paul,” wrote a reporter for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal in 2013 when Crockarell acquired the 26-story U.S. Bank Center on Fifth Street.

Nearly a decade later, when 3M Co. announced it would spin off its massive health care division into what could be its own Fortune 500 company, Crockarell made a public pitch to have the new company locate downtown. He told a reporter that the vacant land surrounding the Central Station light-rail stop off Cedar Street could easily accommodate a 40-story office tower, which would have been St. Paul’s first new office building in decades to be erected from the ground up.

“It’s a big hole in the middle of St. Paul, and it deserves a high-rise tower,” said Crockarell, in September 2022. “3M could locate there along with a convention hotel, condominiums, apartments. We would be interested in making a proposal to the city. … It would tie the entire downtown together.”

Crockarell had a knack for obtaining downtown properties at bargain prices by acquiring them out of foreclosure or in financial distress. In May 2022, a limited liability corporation owned by Crockarell and family purchased the Capital City Plaza parking ramp at 50 E. Fourth St. in a foreclosure sale.

In 2015, Crockarell galvanized business owners along Wabasha Street to fight against the city’s proposed Capital City Bikeway, a sidewalk-level bicycle loop, given the number of on-street parking spots that would be eliminated.

“I own 16 buildings in downtown St. Paul, and at least five of them are on the proposed bike loop,” Crockarell told a reporter at the time. “I like bicycling. It’s like, do I like apple pie? Yes, I do. But Wabasha needs on-street parking.”

His opposition toward the bikeway may have delayed construction, but it didn’t stop it. The loop’s west segment along Wabasha Street was installed in 2022.

Last June, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office sued Madison Equities after security guards alleged they were told to punch out of work and clock back in as if working for a separate company as they walked from building to building, allowing various limited liability corporations associated with the building owner to work them long hours without overtime.

The attorney general began investigating Madison Equities’ labor practices in fall 2019, but it took four years to get to court as Crockarell refused to turn over payroll data and other potential evidence, arguing the statute of limitations had run out.

Concerns about the future

Asked in October about the future of U.S. Bank at U.S. Bank Center on Fifth Street, Crockarell acknowledged the company had been consolidating offices in the remote-work era and he was unsure if they would renew their multi-story lease. He blamed the government sector, as much as the private sector, for failing to revive downtowns in the aftermath of a pandemic that sent office workers home by the thousands.

U.S. Bank’s departure “would decimate the building in terms of occupancy, and it would hurt the city in terms of real estate taxes,” said Crockarell at the time. “The value of the building would go down dramatically. That’s true of many buildings across St. Paul. They’re all facing lower tax payments and lower valuations because their tenants are leaving when leases are coming up for renewal.”

“I can’t tell you what they’re going to do with the office facility,” he added. “Downtown St. Paul needs all the help it can get bringing employees back.”

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