
Downtown St. Paul has been declared ‘dead’ before
Everyone seems to be worried about downtown St. Paul.
The sidewalks are empty, office buildings sit vacant and going-out-of-business signs are draped across storefront windows.
The year is 1975. Or is it 1990?
The past 50 years have seen waves of handwringing over the future of the Saintly City’s central business district, and the latest appears to be cresting right now.
The challenges facing downtown St. Paul in 2025 are new — and perhaps the most serious in decades.
The persistence of remote work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic deprived downtown restaurants and retailers of crucial foot traffic for years, forcing many to close or move elsewhere.
The recent collapse of Madison Equities, downtown St. Paul’s largest property owner, has saddled the central business district with a glut of empty and unloved commercial and residential towers.
Post-pandemic anxiety around public safety has continued to plague downtown, even as crime rates have declined.
What will it take to overcome these problems? If history is any guide, the answer is a little bit of everything.
“There is no secret formula,” said Joe Spencer, president of the St. Paul Downtown Alliance, a booster organization that brings together businesses, nonprofits and government entities. “It’s always a multivariable approach.”
That multivariable approach has already begun to bear fruit, but downtown St. Paul’s past brushes with disaster have proven that navigating such a crisis takes time — and a lot of work.
‘Downtown: Going out of business?’
Former St. Paul City Council member Dan Bostrom’s first job after graduating high school in 1958 was as a shoe salesman at the Emporium, downtown’s leading department store.
The Emporium shared the city’s central business district with more than 400 other retailers, making downtown the undisputed commercial heart of the east metro.
“All roads basically led to downtown St. Paul,” Bostrom said. “That was the hub of all activity. All the jobs were in downtown St. Paul. There were a few outliers, like 3M over on the East Side and some out in Midway.”
By the time he left the Emporium to join the city’s police force in 1964, that had begun to change. Growing suburbs were drawing St. Paulites and their money out of downtown.
Like many American cities facing this challenge in the ’60s, St. Paul tried to bulldoze its way back to the top. Deteriorating downtown buildings were leveled to make way for modern office towers in hopes of attracting corporate employers.
Passersby are seen through the windows of a vacant storefront at Seventh and Minnesota streets in downtown St. Paul on April 2, 1975, amid a decline in the fortunes of the city’s central business district. (Buzz Magnuson / Pioneer Press)
A Pioneer Press headline in August 1970 asked whether all this “urban renewal” had turned the city’s core into a “modern desert.”
“Area planners are paying attention to increasing complaints from the man on the street that downtown St. Paul may be swell for opening an office or parking a car, but it’s losing out as a place to shop, eat or have shoes repaired,” the article read.
Five years later, the country was in the midst of a recession and only 161 retailers remained in downtown. The Emporium, which closed in 1968, was not among them.
The wave of closures prompted another inquiring Pioneer Press headline: “Downtown: Is it going out of business?”
That question figured prominently in the 1976 mayoral election, which narrowly gave George Latimer the first of his six terms in City Hall’s top job.
Concerns about downtown St. Paul’s retail economy led the front page of the Focus section in the Pioneer Press on May 11, 1975.
In a Q&A with the Pioneer Press, candidate Latimer had lamented that although St. Paulites made good use of the city’s parks and other public spaces, “We have forgotten downtown St. Paul.”
His administration set out to change that. A series of high-profile additions to the city’s skyline followed — the Town Square Complex, Galtier Plaza and what is now Wells Fargo Place — creating a surge of optimism around downtown St. Paul.
“He came in at a good time, because the economy was changing,” local developer John Mannillo said of Latimer, who died last year. “But he also knew how to instill confidence in the city that he was doing something” about downtown’s problems.
The city council also chartered the Lowertown Redevelopment Corporation, which spent the 1980s luring developers to downtown’s decaying warehouse district, where a series of residential conversions turned the enclave into an “urban village” envisioned by city planners.
Latimer’s administration was credited with breathing new life into downtown St. Paul, but the momentum created by these splashy projects had already begun to fizzle by the time he left office in 1990.
“They were kind of like firecrackers,” Bostrom said. “They sparkled when the fuse was lit, then there was an explosion, but after that — crickets. They just didn’t have the legs. You can’t manufacture that.”
‘Deader than downtown Atlantis’
The late Pioneer Press columnist Nick Coleman declared in May 1990 that “downtown St. Paul is deader than downtown Atlantis.”
In a column decrying West Publishing’s planned exodus to Eagan with its 2,100 downtown employees, Coleman recounted a recent walk through a deserted office building in St. Paul’s central business district.
West Publishing’s long-telegraphed decision to abandon downtown St. Paul for Eagan, taking its 2,100 employees with it, dominated the front page of the Pioneer Press on July 4, 1990.
“I felt like a guy in a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode who wakes up to find himself alone in a vacant city: Where is everybody?” he wrote.
The loss of West Publishing (now a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters) was a body blow to the vitality of an already struggling downtown amid the economic headwinds of the early ’90s.
It was another Coleman who would take up the task of reviving downtown St. Paul this time around.
Mayor Norm Coleman — no relation to the columnist — took office in 1994, just as the economy bounced back and local government aid poured into city coffers from the state, said retired St. Paul Public Works Director Kathy Lantry, who served on the city council during Coleman’s tenure.
“He had a lot of things going for him at the time,” Lantry said. “The economy was really good and he took advantage of that.”
Coleman created a “development cabinet” that included representatives from the St. Paul Riverfront Corporation, the Port Authority and city departments, like Parks and Recreation and Planning and Economic Development.
“He started down this path of really bringing different parties together to create a vision for downtown St. Paul,” Lantry said. “Norm got everybody pulling in the same direction.”
St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, riding one of several Zamboni ice machines in a downtown St. Paul parade Wednesday, Feb. 10, 1999, celebrates the return of the National Hockey League to Minnesota. (Sal Skog / Pioneer Press)
One of the people who did a lot of pulling was Doug Leatherdale, CEO of the St. Paul Cos. (later Travelers), who helped Coleman recruit corporate sponsors for a new downtown booster organization called the Capital City Partnership in 1996. The group would be a supporting character in many of downtown’s success stories over the next few years.
Leatherdale also was instrumental in helping Coleman’s administration lure Lawson Software and its 400 employees to downtown St. Paul from Minneapolis. The company, which was later acquired by software developer Infor, built a new 13-story office tower on St. Peter Street.
It wouldn’t be the last Minneapolis employer downtown St. Paul would poach during Coleman’s two terms as mayor.
One of Coleman’s greatest coups was landing the NHL expansion team that became the Minnesota Wild, paving the way for the Xcel Energy Center to replace the aging Civic Center at Seven Corners. The 18,000-seat arena became the city’s premier entertainment venue.
His administration also orchestrated the Science Museum of Minnesota’s move into a brand-new riverfront facility at the site of the former West Publishing headquarters.
The next couple of decades saw downtown St. Paul death watches of their own as the economy waxed and waned, but the city’s central business district largely avoided the existential crises of earlier years. That changed in 2020.
A perfect storm
Downtowns across the country were devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as the rise of remote work sapped the commuters who supported their economies.
This problem was compounded in downtown St. Paul, where government agencies — the area’s largest employer bloc — were slow to bring workers back to the office.
Pandemic-era spikes in downtown crime also plagued American cities, and St. Paul was no different. And despite the capital’s declining crime rates in recent years, concerns about public safety have stubbornly persisted.
Then in early 2024, St. Paul real estate mogul Jim Crockarell, whose Madison Equities was downtown’s largest landlord, died at 79. The company put its entire portfolio of properties — many of them sparsely occupied — up for sale, injecting fresh uncertainty into downtown.
Tom Haas points out landmarks in downtown St. Paul, including Infor Commons on the left, the St. Paul Hotel at center and Landmark Towers on the right, to his wife, Nancy, as the St. Paul couple enjoys a tour of the Landmark Center’s North Tower on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. “It’s a lot of fun,” said Haas, “We’re thinking about bringing our grandchildren up here.” (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
Despite this series of ugly headlines, Spencer believes downtown St. Paul is already in the midst of a turnaround, pointing to rising foot traffic in Lowertown and the area around Rice Park.
“I think it’s accurate to say the core of downtown is really struggling,” he said. “The reality is we’re not trying to boil the ocean here.”
He has other reasons to be optimistic. After years of workers returning to downtown in a trickle, the state of Minnesota turned on the tap last week when it ordered its thousands of employees back to the office.
Greeting them will be several new restaurants and retailers that have moved into spaces vacated by pandemic-era casualties, as well as the many that survived.
The Metro Transit Police Department’s new Strong and Safe initiative aims to reduce crime along the Green Line light rail, which runs through the heart of downtown St. Paul.
Developers are also beginning to buy up vacant office buildings, turning some of them into housing. Landmark Towers, just off Rice Park, is now home to 187 luxury apartments, which opened to tenants in May.
Spencer’s organization believes downtown’s residential population has plenty of room to grow. It recently identified 10 office buildings that are prime for housing conversions.
But he acknowledged that adding more downtown tenants is only part of the solution. Bringing more jobs downtown will be essential to the mixed density needed to sustain the city’s central business district.
“That includes people who live in downtown, that includes people visiting downtown, and that has to include people working downtown,” Spencer said.
Mannillo, whose career spans the downtown crises of the ’70s and the ’90s, said the issues facing it now are the most serious he has seen since those dark decades. But he also sees silver linings.
“Downtowns have a cycle,” Mannillo said. “Good investors don’t buy when the market is up. Right now, we have opportunities downtown.”
Making the most of those opportunities will take a concerted effort by city officials and local business leaders — a lot of effort.
A thriving downtown doesn’t happen by accident, Lantry said. It must be tended to, like a garden or a marriage.
“You can’t put anything on autopilot and expect it to be good,” she said. “It takes work. It takes constantly checking in, doing new things, culling out old things. Of course that’s easy to say.”
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