Director

The Northern Pacific Railroad Office Building/Great Northern Lofts (300 Wall Street)<ul><li>This is one of three buildings constructed by James J. Hill to be featured on this tour. Hill immigrated here from Canada when he was eighteen (1856) and got his start in business by working as an office clerk in Lowertown. Over thirty years later he was on his way to becoming one of the wealthiest men in America and he decided to anchor his business, the Northern Pacific Railroad, in this Italian Renaissance Revival-style office building.</li></ul><ul><li>Its construction reflects the Hill's obsession with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He insisted that his architect eschew the more common usual iron or timber frame construction in favor of fireproof steel beams enclosed in solid brick exteriors and interior masonry walls—3 feet thick in some places—and supporting heavy arched brick and clay ceiling</li></ul><ul><li>As you can imagine, this fireproof structure makes the building incredibly heavy, which was nearly its undoing. Lowertown is located in a river valley undergirded by soft dirt rather than bedrock. The pilings driven into this unsupportive muck failed at one, causing the building's southeastern corner to settle by as much as two feet. If you look at that corner carefully you can make out repaired breaks that reveal where it sank and was jacked back up.</li></ul>

A Bird's-Eye View of Downtown St. Paul from the West Side (1910)

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This block of Wall Street offers a glimpse of Lowertown during its economic heyday between 1880 and 1930 when these buildings hummed with the sounds of commerce and industry.  The first one you'll take a look at is the Great Northern Lofts (300 Wall Street). Stand across from it on Broadway so you can see what the building's southeast corner reveals about its history.


To view these building, begin at the SW corner of Broadway and Kellogg and walk north to the end of the block. <ul><li>The Tilsner (300 Broadway) which was built in 1894 to house a hardware wholesaler and then carton manufacturing company.</li></ul> <ul><li>The Northern Warehouse (northeast corner of Broadway and Prince) constructed to serve as the warehouse for a local grocery wholesaler and subsidiary of the Northern Pacific Railroad (1908)</li></ul> <ul><li>Lowertown Commons (northwest corner of Broadway and Fourth) built in 1905 to house a rubber factory, a grocery wholesaler, and a printing works.</li></ul> From 1880 until 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression, businesses like these kept Lowertown humming as the neighborhood fueled the development of St. Paul.

Over the next 30 years other local manufacturers, warehouses, and wholesalers took advantage of rapid (and far lighter weight) improvements in fireproof construction and erected three other large buildings on this block so their operations would be conveniently located near Union Depot where St. Paul's manufactured goods were shipped. 




The Tilsner Building when it was the Farwell, Ozmun & Kirk Wholesale Hardware Company (1902)

300 Broadway Street, 300 East Fourth Street, 308 Prince Street

A Glimpse of Gilded Age Lowertown

Explore the historic Lowertown neighborhood in St. Paul with the Minnesota Historical Society

Lowertown History Walk

The Minnesota Historical Society affirms that every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to this moment. Some were brought here against their will, some were drawn to leave their distant homes in hope of a better life, and some have lived on this land for more generations than can be counted. Truth and acknowledgment are critical to building mutual respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference. The Minnesota Historical Society begins this effort to acknowledge what has been buried by honoring the truth. 

You are in the ancestral lands of the Dakota People which they ceded via the Treaty of 1837. We pay respects to their elders past and present and ask you to take a moment to consider the many historical legacies that bring people together in this place today.



Land Acknowledgement

You begin your walk in the Commercial Core, but you will spend most of your time in Lowertown, which is the oldest section of Downtown Saint Paul.  Lowertown was the engine of St. Paul's early growth as an American city, and its hippest neighborhood today. Lowertown contains many stories, all layered on top of each other: a river story; a boats-and-trains story; two tales of boom-and-bust, and another of neighborhood renaissance. 

About Lowertown

If you had been here in the 1840s, what would you have seen and heard from here? <ul><li>Dozens of small streams, one large enough to create a rapids just a half mile to the north, burbling through hardwood forest, pine stands and dense shortgrass prairie.</li></ul> <ul><li>The occasional deafening screech of the wooden-wheeled oxcarts driven by Dakota, Metis (see link), Ho Chunk, and European traders hauling furs from Canada to the river via the road (now Kellogg Boulevard) established over centuries by generations of Dakota people.</li></ul> And down below?<ul><li>A tiny community of Irish, French-Canadian, and African American colonists, and Metis families living near the river in a gathering of wooden shacks, log cabins, and tipis, and speaking with each other in their common language, French.</li></ul> <ul><li>A slow and intermittent parade of Dakota people traveling to trade with and visit relatives by canoe and American and European visitors arriving by raft or flatboat.</li></ul> Over the next decade, the trickle of American and European commerce and colonization would become a flood fueled by treaties, forcible removal of indigenous people, land speculation, and the natural boat dock known as the Lower Landing. That boat landing is where Lowertown’s story begins.

Look for the large granite marker in the park. It stands where a Catholic priest named Father Lucian Galtier built the log chapel of St. Paul for which he named the city in 1841. An American who visited two years later wrote, “[Saint Paul] had but three or four log houses, with a population not to exceed twelve white people and it was a mixture of forest, hills, running brooks, ravines, bog mires, lakes, whisky, mosquitoes, snakes and Indians.” His observations were not entirely incorrect, but his descriptions leaves out many of the finer, more telling deatls.

Welcome to Kellogg Mall Park

This is a Dakota place.Look for the words Imnizaska Otunwe carved into one of the granite markers embedded in the ground. Imnizaska Otunwe, "the place of the white cliffs," is the Dakota name, the first and oldest name, for this place. The name comes not from a foreign saint but from the high limestone bluffs that have marked this location on HaHa Wakpa/the Mississippi River for centuries. According to the Bdote Memory Map Project, the river below has served generations of Dakota people, past and present, as a source of food, medicine, "communication with the physical and spiritual worlds," and a point of contact with other nations in their Minnesota homelands. River as Metaphor:immigration and migration

Before you dive into the history of the boat landing, explore the St. Paul Culture Garden at the park's southeast corner. It is filled with art and poetry that reflect the interwoven and centuries-long stories of the many people who have converged around this bend in the Mississippi River known today as St. Paul. 

The Flow of Memory in the Culture Garden

This landing, called the Lower Landing, was located just past the Robert Street Bridge and ran along river’s edge for the length of 4-5 city blocks where the waters that drained from this plateau joined a large creek that flowed from north St. Paul down to the Mississippi.  Our capitol city might have remained a relatively minor fur trade post if it hadn't been for this landing, along with a second located just under a mile southeast of here near the Science Museum of Minnesota. These landings made St. Paul the head of navigation on the Mississippi River when it was the busiest transportation route in North America. <ul><li>The first steamboat arrived here in 1850 just as the international fur trade that had fueled the local economy was beginning to collapse.</li></ul> <ul><li>Between 1850 and 1863, US and Minnsota officials violently expelled thousands of Dakota and Ho Chunk people from the state and forced the removal of Ojibwe people to northern reservations altering St. Paul's earlier multiracial reality.</li></ul> <ul><li>At the same time, the people who had negotiated the treaties and expelled and removed Native Minnesotans from this land created a new economy based on land speculation and colonization that, aided by booming steamboat traffic, raised St. Paul's population by 900% in ten years.</li></ul> From about 1850 until the late 1880s when the railroads were established, the Lower Landing was one of the busiest steamboat landings in the United States and the primary point of entry for people, goods and information in St. Paul. This is where: <ul><li>Hundreds of American and Europea colonists arrived each day during the land speculation boom of the 1850s.</li></ul> <ul><li>Where enslaved African Americans escaping through the Underground Railroad landed in search of the Underground Railroad stop operated by Black barber William Taylor and his wife Adeline on Kellogg Boulevard.</li></ul> <ul><li>Where a group of self-emancipated African Americans arrived by raft in 1863 to make St. Paul their new home and to found the state's oldest Black church, Pilgrim Baptist.</li></ul> <ul><li>Where VIP’s, well-wishers, and bands greeted Minnesota soldiers returning from combat against the Confederacy during the Civil War. </li></ul> Despite the railroads having long overtaken riverboats as the primary mode of distance transportation in St. Paul, the federal Works Progress Administration renovated the landing during the Great Depression as part of a riverfront revival project. Most of the landing was removed in the 1950s for the construction of Warner Road, but tows and passenger steamboats still use what remains today and Lower Landing Park stands as a reminder of what was lost and gained as Saint Paul became an American city.

Now move on to a view of the Lower Landing.  If you stand at the overlook (SE corner of the park) an look to the riverfront, you will see a long concrete dock marked by a blue railing. That is the Lower Landing, a locus of extraordinary change, opportunity, and loss.

A View of the Lower Landing

Between the late 1840s and 1857 a massive wave of land speculation washed across the continent. That wave hit Lowertown hard.A sixty-foot lot in Lowertown, purchased for $200 in 1847, was worth $6,000 eight years later. As one St. Paul historian said, "It was land for breakfast, land for dinner, and land for supper!" In the 1850s St. Paul’s population exploded from 1,000 to 10,000 as American, European, and Canadian colonists flooded into the city. During the summer of 1857 alone, close to 500 newcomers a day arrived at the Lowertown Landing. Local lumber mills couldn't keep up with demand so boosters placed advisories in newspapers downriver. Newcomers began arriving with tents and camping out wherever they could until building materials became available. During this period Lowertown also became a destination for "tourists, speculators, sporting men, and even worse characters.” Gangs like the Chicago Stars competed to add St. Paul to their criminal territory.  But in 1857 this boom went bust in a big way. The ship containing all of the gold that secured US currency sank to the bottom of the ocean during a storm, setting off a nationwide insurance and banking collapse that sent the American economy into a depression from which it did not fully recover until the 1880s. All of the frenetic activity that built the first Lowertown slowed waaaaaay down. The criminals and speculators cleared out, having no further use "for the town that was essentially if not actually broke." Lowertown's wooden homes and storefronts fell victim to fire, rot, and weathering. New residents began arriving at the landing in larger numbers again the 1870s. In the 1880s Lowertown transitioned from steamboat shipping to rail and business boomed again in the district. It was during this decade that local businesses and industries began erecting the large stone and brick structures that comprise much of the neighborhood today.

If you had arrived at the Lower Landing in the mid-1850s you would have walked into a growing town of just over 1,000 people, mud streets laid out in intersecting grids and wooden shacks, houses, stores, saloons (the easiest businesses to license) and churches rising around those streets overnight. 

In the1850s St. Paul was a boomtown and Lowertown was at its epicenter.



Lowertown Goes Boom and Bust

The Northern Pacific Railroad Office Building/Great Northern Lofts (300 Wall Street) <ul><li>This is one of three buildings constructed by James J. Hill to be featured on this tour. Hill immigrated here from Canada when he was eighteen (1856) and got his start in business by working as an office clerk in Lowertown. Over thirty years later he was on his way to becoming one of the wealthiest men in America and he decided to anchor his business, the Northern Pacific Railroad, in this Italian Renaissance Revival-style office building.</li></ul> <ul><li>Its construction reflects the Hill's obsession with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He insisted that his architect eschew the more common usual iron or timber frame construction in favor of fireproof steel beams enclosed in solid brick exteriors and interior masonry walls—3 feet thick in some places—and supporting heavy arched brick and clay ceiling</li></ul> <ul><li>As you can imagine, this fireproof structure makes the building incredibly heavy, which was nearly its undoing. Lowertown is located in a river valley undergirded by soft dirt rather than bedrock. The pilings driven into this unsupportive muck failed at one, causing the building's southeastern corner to settle by as much as two feet. If you look at that corner carefully you can make out repaired breaks that reveal where it sank and was jacked back up.</li></ul>

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

The third life of Lowertown began in 1978 when a visionary urban planner named Weiming Lu and an organization known as the Lowertown Redevelopment Corporation (LDC) decided to remake it as an "a highly livable urban village in the midst of the city, which will bring new jobs, housing, commercial development, and year-round activities to Lowertown and infuse the city with renewed vitality.” Weiming brought urban planners, architects, for-profit and non-profit developers into the project kickstarting Lowertown's revitalization. For-profit developers transformed former industrial and office buildings into condos.<ul><li>Not quite 100 years after it was built, what the former Northern Pacific Railroad offices became the Great Northern Lofts.</li></ul> <ul><li>The former rubber factory and printing compay became Lowertown Commons Lofts, although not before the developer rebuilt entire foundation, which had rotted and collapsed under the building. </li></ul> The Twin Cities-based non-profit development company Artspace, a leading national developer of art-related rehab: <ul><li>Converted the Northern Pacific Railroad Warehouse into the 52 "live-work" apartments for the Northern Warehouse Artists' Cooperative (1990), the first development in the country to use federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit for artists' housing.</li></ul> <ul><li>Transformed the former Tilsner carton factory, which had no remaining windows or roof, into 66 "live-work" apartments for the Tilsner Artists’ Cooperative (1993)</li></ul> <ul><li>Units in both buildings are occupied by working artists who must submit their portfolios and undergo a rigorous application process before being permitted to move in.</li></ul> These new living spaces were only one part the decades-long transformation of Lowertown from industrial district to urban village.

Modern Lowertown's economy of manufacturing, wholesaling and warehousing relied on robust transportation. When railroads overtook steamboats as the primary mode of distance travel and shipping, Lowertown grew. But when cars and planes overtook railroads, the neighborhood suffered.

After World War II highway travel and air freight displaced railroads. Corporations moved their offices, factories, and warehouses out of Lowertown into the suburbs or other parts of the country. 
 
These buildings and the neighborhood struggled to survive. By the 1970s, Lowertown was a largely abandoned collection of badly decayed industrial hulks. What turned it around this time?



Lowertown's Third Life

The St. Paul Growers' Association operates the St. Paul Farmers' Market today.  <ul><li>They allow only fresh produce from local growers who sell directly to consumers. </li></ul> <ul><li>They also bring in local makers of bakery goods, cheese, poultry and meats, maple syrup, eggs, honey, flowers and plants.</li></ul> <ul><li>They operate 19 other locations throughout St. Paul and surrounding suburbs. The downtown market operates April-October on Saturdays and Sundays. They also operate a winter market here.</li></ul> About half of the produce vendors here are Hmong or Hmong Minnesotans. How did people from the mountains of Laos come to be farmers in Minnesota? <ul><li>In the 1970s the CIA recruited Hmong men to assist the US in its Secret War against Vietnamese Communists. The United States' 1975 withdrawal from Southeast Asia left our Hmong allies in grave danger and thousands began fleeing their mountain homelands in Laos for Thai refugee camps.</li></ul> <ul><li>Unable to safely return home, Hmong refugees resettled in places like Minnesota beginning in 1976. One way the community forged a path in their new home was by adapting their agricultural traditions to Minnesota's markedly different climate and growing season and bringing that produce to the St. Paul Farmers Market in the 1980s.</li></ul> <ul><li>Today, many belong to the Hmong American Farmers Association (HAFA), which manages a 155-acre farm in Dakota County where member families can lease land, learn everything from business planning to sustainable agricultural process, and use HAFA’s to sell produce to farmers markets, schools and CSA’s (community-supported agriculture) shares.</li></ul> <ul><li>During an ordinary, non-pandemic year not only do Hmong American farmers comprise over ½ the producers at metropolitan farmers markets, they generate over $250 million in annual sales and are major contributors to the Twin Cities' agricultural economy.</li></ul>

Lowertown was a food desert in the 1980s. In order to make the neighborhood a place residents would want to live, developers had to address that problem. 

There has been a public market in downtown St. Paul locations since 1854. The Lowertown Redevelopment Corporation convinced the St. Paul Farmers' Market to relocate here in 1982 and it has been instrumental to the neighborhood's ability to grow and thrive. 

Feeding the Urban Village

<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.

Playing, Living and Dining in the Urban Village

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.

Inside the Depot

<ul><li>This park, donated to the city in 1849 by a man named Smith, was once rose 50-foot above the surrounding block. Named Baptist Hill after the church built atop it, this was where residents looked out for arriving steamboats and fired cannons to celebrate Union victories in the Civil War.</li></ul> <ul><li>When the railroads fueled a massive period of growth in St. Paul, local developers began cutting into the hill to make space for larger buildings and wider streets. The church relocated and the city flattened the hill, used the dirt as fill under the expanding Union Depot railyard, and transformed it into Smith Park (1888) in the midst of what had become a bustling warehouse district.</li></ul> <ul><li>The park's original design featured paths shaded by elm trees and radiating out from large central fountain which remained in place for much of the 20th century. In the 1970s the city undertook a redesign that paved the space so extensively residents nicknamed it the "Brickyard."</li></ul> <ul><li>The 1980s redevelopment spurred by the construction of Galtier Plaza inspired St. Paul to commission the current design (1992) and renamed it after St. Paul inventor and Lowertown booster, Norman Mears. Today Mears Park hosts numerous concerts and festivals.</li></ul>

At the heart of Lowertown is Mears park. Formerly a hill from which St. Paulites could view the river, it is one of the city’s oldest green spaces.


Mears Park

<ul><li>Cray Plaza, formerly Galtier Plaza (SE corner of Sibley and 5th) When it opened in 1986, the Plaza contained a movie theater, a YMCA, an atrium of shops and offices, restaurants and apartments. The overall design style is post-modern, but the Sibley Street side of the building incorporates parts of the brick facade of the 19th century buildings it replaced. Unfortunately, the project struggled to secure commercial and retail tenants and to attract consumers to the movie theater, shops, and restaurants. Critics quickly labeled it a boondoggle, a reputation that dogged it through subsequent reimaginings. Nonetheless, the Plaza has been successful mixed rental apartment/luxury condo/townhome residential complex and it spurred interest in in renovating Mears Park and the surrounding historic guildings in the 1980s and 1990s.</li></ul> The rest of the buildings around Mears Park were erected between 1886 and 1915 but have been renovated for their current purposes in the past 25-30 years. Walking clockwise around the park from Cray Plaza: <ul><li>400 N. Sibley:  The Renaissance Revival-style Park Square Court event center and office building (1886) with its massive arched windows was originally the largest wholesale drug company between Minnesota and the Pacific Northwest. Here pharmacists once mixed medicines in labs upstairs and clerks filled orders below. </li></ul> <ul><li>235 N. Sibley: The home of Barrio restaurant was a manufacturer of harnesses and saddles and a printing company that produced tickets and menus for railroads (1893). </li></ul> <ul><li>237 N. Sibley: A wholesaler once stocked "high class bar outfits and fancy groceries” in the commercial building (1891) now occupied by the Bulldog Bar and Grill.</li></ul>

Like the block around the St. Paul Farmers' Market, the reimagination of the Mears Park block was inspired by Weiming Lu’s vision of Lowertown as a thriving mixed-use, job-creating urban village. Most of the surrounding buildings were constructed in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. One was built new in the mid-1980s. Your trip around the park starts there. 

Lowertown History Walk

A Glimpse of Gilded Age Lowertown

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Additional Information