Preservation Journal: Spring 2008
by Michael Koop
In 2006, St. Paul-based Old Home Foods closed its production plant located on the southeast corner of University and Western Avenues. The 46,000 square foot building is currently for sale.
Preservation Journal: Fall 2007
by Paul Singh
The number of vacant residential properties in Saint Paul has more than doubled over the past year. There are currently more than 1,200 vacant single-family homes and duplexes in the city. This trend is fueled by foreclosures and the recent decline in the housing market. These vacant homes are overwhelmingly concentrated in Saint Paul’s core neighborhoods: West Seventh, Summit-University, Frogtown, the North End, Payne-Phalen and Dayton’s Bluff.
Preservation Development Initiative Report
In May, 2002 Saint Paul was named as a demonstration site in the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Development Initiatives (PDI) program. The PDI program, made possible by funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is designed to incorporate historic preservation into community and economic development strategies.
Mapping Historic Preservation Potential
Restore Saint Paul: Mapping Historic Preservation Potential employs a geographical information system (GIS) analysis of property information, demographics and local data to identify neighborhoods that are challenged by disinvestment, yet are endowed with historic resources.
Preservation Journal: Spring 2007
by Carol Swenson
By the year 2014, the Twin Cities will have undergone a major transformation—the construction of a light rail line linking downtown Saint Paul and downtown Minneapolis. Following a historic alignment, the $1 billion “Central Corridor LRT Line” represents both a challenge and an opportunity for historic preservation.
Preservation Journal: Fall 2006
by Bob Roscoe
Perhaps no other commercial street in Saint Paul contributed to the city’s immigrant history as much as Payne Avenue. The Payne Avenue State Bank Building (historically known as the Swedish Bank Building), at the corner of Payne and Case Avenues, was critical in that role. The bank was the financial backbone of the early Scandinavians, Germans, Italians, and other European settlers who established work, home, and cultural life in close-by neighborhoods. Today, Payne Avenue and the Swedish Bank are renewing those collaborative roles.
Located in the North End neighborhood, Rice Street began as a commercial corridor that served Saint Paul’s working class. Rice Street is unassuming; when it was rushed into being more than a century ago, there was no time for ornamentation or ostentation. Despite its utilitarian appearance, Rice Street has a character that is unique to the street and the North End.
Since 1840, Saint Paul has taken on different identities: frontier hamlet, steamboat burg, provincial capital, railroad boomtown, city in stagnation, city in decline, city in revival. These transformations have left their marks all over town. Nowhere can one see them better than on Selby Avenue.
The contours of the earth define and set apart Saint Paul’s West Side. On the north, the great swoop of the Mississippi forms the point and two sides of a rounded triangle; a line of limestone cliffs – the shore long ago of the glacial River Warren – forms the base. The low plains inside the triangle, the flats, has invited immigrants, industry, and floods for more than a century and a half.
Saint Paul is known for its “Main Street” commercial districts that grew to serve the immigrants who settled the city’s neighborhoods a century ago. One of the liveliest of these districts is the East Side’s Payne Avenue, known in the 1930s as the “downtown of northeastern Ramsey County.”
