Director

<ul><li>CHS Field (360 N. Broadway Street) CHS Field, named for the Minnesota-based international farm cooperative Cenex, can seat over 7,000 people and has been the home of the St. Paul Saints, the city's AAA baseball team, the Hamline University Pipers baseball, youth baseball camps and non-baseball events like the Summer Beer Dabler and the Cat Video Festival since 2015. It was formerly the location of the massive Gillette/Diamond Factory where over 1,000 Minnesota workers produced and shiped classic old-school beauty products like Dippity-Do Setting Gel and Toni Home Perms. The complex closed down in 2005 and the buildings were demolished in 2013 to make way for the stadium.</li></ul> <ul><li>The Crane-Ordway Building (281 E. 5th Street, NE corner of 5th and Wall) This modest structure was originally headquarters of the Crane-Ordway Company (1904), a steam engine manufacturing company. Vacant for almost a third of the last century, the building was purchased by a non-profit development company and rehabilitated as apartments (2006). The Crane-Ordway offers affordable housing for people learning 30 to 50% of the area median income (AMI) and features 14 units reserved for adults experiencing long-term homelessness.</li></ul> <ul><li>The Rayette (261 5th E. Street, NW corner of 5th and Wall) Today the Rayette is home to the Saint Dinette restaurant and loft apartments, but it was originally a hat and clothing company whose fate was changed by a curious young employee in the midst of the Depression. Raymond Lee, a former University of Minnesota chemistry student, cooked up a new kind of home perm kit in his free time (as one does). Lee's employers bought his formula for the "Raymond Wave" and reimagined itself the Rayette Company. Rayette's best-selling item wasn't the Raymond Wave, but the inexpensive but EXTREMELY POWERFUL Aquanet Hairspray, whose legendary holding ability made it the number one hairspray in the world in the 1960s. </li></ul>

Lowertown's transformation since the early 1980s has included creating places for people to gather, enjoy a good meal, and live with dignity irrespective of income.  The next three locations showcase the conversion of this former industrial center into a neighborhood where people live, eat, and play. NOTE: all three can be viewed from the platform in front of CHS Field.

Stand across from the Northern Warehouse building and look east toward the broad, low-lying plain beneath the Hwy 35E overpass. That was once a valley where two tributaries of the Mississippi River--Trout Brook and Phalen--converged and it was the reason Lowertown could become a hub of steamboat and rail transportation. <ul><li>Trout Brook attracted generations of human settlement before the 1850s streamboat era including Dakota leader Little Crow's first village of Kaposia, which was located here until the Treaty of 1837 forced him and his band to relocate across the river.</li></ul> <ul><li>Trout Brook was also where early American colonists fished, got drinking water and milled lumber and flour.</li></ul> The brook, which merged in this valley with Phalen Creek, helped shape the Lower Landing and created a flat plain onto which railroads easily constructed the tracks that brought trains in and out of Saint Paul. So what happened to Trout Brook? <ul><li>Late-19th century development and industrialization in Lowertown transformed the brook into a fetid sludge of raw sewage and dangerous factory waste, so the city decided to raise the valley floor with ten feet of fill and reroute the brook underground, making way for the massive Union Depot rail yard.</li></ul> <ul><li>After railroads began removing tracks and sheds from the valley in the 1970s, area residents used it as an illegal dump for nearly 30 years. In the early 2000s the valley was clean up, restored to its natural habitat and reopened to the public as the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary.</li></ul>

Lowertown's first success was built on steamboat traffic. Its second act was fueled by the railroads.  From here you can get a small glimpse of the original topography that made both possible. 

Understanding the Land: Trout Brook Valley

From the late 19th century until the 1950s, St. Paul was the third largest rail hub in the United States after New York and Chicago. All of that traffic moved in and out of Union Depot. The First Union Depot: A consortium of nine railroads funded the construction of the first Union Depot (1881), connecting St. Paul to Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Canada, the northern plains and the West Coast. It also made St. Paul a destination for thousands of European immigrants seeking homes and work in Minnesota in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. It burned to the ground in 1913 and the railroads undertook the construction of a larger, more modern replacement. The Second Union Depot: This Union Depot opened in the 1920s. To make way for the construction of the new 33-acre site, which included the Depot itself, a roundhouse,10 platforms, and 21 tracks, builders demolished several existing city blocks. In order to move the building and tracks farther inland, they also had to raise the platform and tracks 17 feet above the existing grade of the streets. The new Depot was where St. Paulites dined out, raised a glass, shipped out for military service, and welcomed visiting dignitaries. From Hub to Periphery: After World War II, automobile travel began to replace rail travel in popularity and long-haul highway trucking and air freight companies both garnered shares of the shipping economy the railroads had previously dominated. Union Depot ceased rail service in 1971 when the last passenger train left the station.  1971 to 2010: In the 1970s local preservationists got the front half of the building on the National Register of Historic Places while the US Postal Service purchased the back half of the building, razed the roundhouse, and removed the tracks and platforms. Numerous businesses opened and closed in the Head House and many redevelopment schemes for the building abounded, but none came to fruition until 2010 when the Ramsey Countil Regional Railroad Authority renovated the 33-acre property. Since 2012, Lowertown residents have lived, worked and dined here again and people from around the state, the country, and the world have arrived in and departed from St. Paul at Union Depot.

There has been a Union Depot in St. Paul for nearly 14 decades. Both this one and its predecessor served the railroads that fueled the largest and longest economic boom in St. Paul's history. This Union Depot weathered the nation's transition from rail to air and highway travel and shipping and today serves Lowertown and the Twin Cities as a revitalized transit/bus/rail depot and a center of community life and activity.

Union Depot

The building has three sections: the head house, the waiting room, and the concourse. The head house, the front half of the building, is organized around this sky-lit marble and limestone lobby.  The concourse is the long section at the back of the building that connects travelers to the rail platform. The waiting room is the small area between the two. Completed in the mid-1920s, all three areas of the Depot were at their busiest during World War II. If you have come here in 1942, what would you have seen and heard? <ul><li>In the head house: The head house would have been a cacophony of people buying tickets and checking bags, sending messages from the telegraph office and using the telephone room. Gentlemen having a haircut at the barber shop and buying newspapers at the newsstand. Travelers picking up necessities at the drug store, a caffeinate pick-me-up at the coffee shop, or lining up for a table in the dining room, and a newsstand. Woozy visitors upstairs to the small emergency hospital above the lobby. </li></ul> <ul><li class="ql-indent-1">The Head House Now: Workers restored the ticket windows, plaster and paint to their original 1922 appearance. The paint color, which surprises many visitors, is the result of painstaking process of peeling back and dating numerous layers of paint and identifying the original shade from the 1920s. Today the head house features 33 loft apartments, several office suites, the Bee Line Honey Company, which operates five bee hives on the roof, and Station 81, a restaurant operated by the food justice non-profit Appetite for Change. Station 81 is currently open for takeout.</li></ul> <ul><li>The Waiting Room: This was a pass-through space since passengers waited in the concourse in 1942. Notice the restored vaulted tile ceiling cleverly crafted in a herringbone pattern that can withstand the heavy vibrations of steam and diesel engines that once lumbered past the Depot.</li></ul> <ul><li class="ql-indent-1">Now: It's a small waiting area illuminated by the "Forever St. Paul" Lite-Brite Mural created by St. Paul artist Ta-Coumba Aiken and built by hundreds of volunteers. Composed of 600,000 lite-brite bulbs, it has been certified the largest lite-brite in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records!</li></ul> <ul><li>In The Concourse: If you thought the Concourse was busy, emerging into the concourse on a busy day in 1942 was the next level of hustle and bustle. Throughout the day as many as 20,000 travelers bustled through the concourse. Dozens of Red Caps, unionized African American railway porters, called out greetings and directions, and offered passengers help with luggage. Soldiers shipping out or passing through for military service hiked upstairs to grab a nap in the temporary dormitory or relax in the 12-lane bowling alley in the second floor recreation center. Below, upwards of 250 trains arrived and departed on the 21 tracks and workers unloaded over 40,000 bags of letters and packages from mail cars.</li></ul> <ul><li class="ql-indent-1">The Concourse Now: Today the concourse is once again where travelers check track information and arrival and departure times on the restored wooden information cabinets and access the reconstructed train deck and tracks. It also serves as an event space that features the original tile frieze representing a history of American transportation and more recent art installations.</li></ul>

If you have a mask* and feel comfortable doing so, we encourage you to venture inside Union Depot to explore the head house, waiting room, and concourse, which have been restored to their 1920s appearance, and the public art pieces commissioned as part of the 2012 revitalization. 


*If you do go inside, please remember to maintain social distancing and wear a mask in compliance with  Governor Walz's Executive Order 20-81.

Passengers buying tickets at Union Depot (1949)

Entries on This Tour

Playing, Living and Dining in the Urban Village

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