Live Where You Eat: Building Above Farmers; Markets in St. Paul

ON THE WAY HOME FROM WORK, YOU stop at what is usually a covered parking lot, peruse for a while, and buy a fresh organic chicken. Thinking, “How should I cook this chicken?” you ask for a recipe from the farmer who’s selling it. After talking with some other farmers and shoppers, you pick up a few more items–enough for apple-braised chicken and a salad of mixed greens with honey herb dressing. You walk across the street, up the stairs, and into your condominium where you open a bottle of wine, cook dinner, and dine watching the sunset over the Mississippi River.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, future residents of the Market Lofts will be able to look forward to similar evenings. The condominiums are due to open in 2006 adjacent to the Farmers’ Market in the Lowertown district, the latest phase of ongoing redevelopment efforts using the Farmers’ Market as an attraction to anchor new construction.

In the mid-1800s, the district was one of the major storage and distribution centers of the Upper Midwest U.S. Its ornate yet sturdy Romanesque warehouses were designed by well-known architects of that era. In the latter half of the 20th century, changing freight distribution patterns rendered these warehouses obsolete, and Lowertown fell into disrepair. In 1978, the Lowertown Development Corporation, a non-profit partnership which markets the area and provides small amounts of gap financing assistance, stepped in to spur new investment. Preservationists got the entire district placed on the National Register of Historic Places by 1983, and the following year, the City of St. Paul created the eighteen-block Lowertown Heritage Preservation District to support the private preservation efforts.

Establishing the Heritage Preservation District did not instantaneously lead to the redevelopment of Lowertown. As with many redevelopment efforts, artists and non-profits were the first to return to the area. The Northern Warehouse Artists’ Cooperative, a 54-unit, affordable live/work building, opened in 1990, and the Tilsner Artist Cooperative building, a $6.5 million renovation that created 66 live/work units, opened in 1993. For ten years, the artists were largely alone in Lowertown. They marketed the area with cultural events like art crawls, and with the ongoing operation of the Farmers’ Market.

The real turning point for Lowertown came in 2003 when the City of St. Paul poured $2 million into renovating the Market, replacing old market stalls with new pavilions with skylighted roofs, electrical outlets, and more handicapped parking. At 150 years old, the St. Paul market has drawn national attention from magazines and shows like the Splendid Table on NPR. The market requires that all goods sold, from buffalo to bread to bracelets, originate within 50 miles of the market. The commitment to local goods and history strengthens the farmer-shopper bond and makes the difference for many shoppers who come to St. Paul even though other regional markets, such as the Minneapolis market, are closer to home.

The market’s renovation brought increased weekend activity to the downtown area of a state capital, whose large concentration of government workers in the labor pool means the sidewalks would otherwise be vacant. The market has spawned a number of restaurants, galleries, and music venues in Lowertown that are making the neighborhood a 24-hour “place.” The influx of new businesses, the beauty of the old warehouses, and a downtown construction boom brought on by Mayor Randy Kelly’s goal of adding 5,000 new housing units to the city, all combine to make the area attractive to more mainstream buyers than the original artist population. About two-thirds of this second wave are young professionals without children, and one-third are empty nesters moving back to the city for a change in lifestyle.

The Market Lofts, in development by the Lander Group, are the first attempt to capture this second-generation housing market using the Farmers’ Market as both an attraction and design-focus. The idea for the Market Lofts grew out of a conversation between George Sherman, a local developer, and the St. Paul Growers’ Association. The growers wanted to extend the market’s season throughout the winter, but because St. Paul gets so cold, they needed an indoor location. To build a one-story market was not economically feasible, nor did it satisfy the district’s design goal of increasing density. Sherman and the growers decided upon a mixed-use project with a ground-floor indoor market and upper-story housing units.

The Lander Group intends to break ground on the project in 2006. Once complete, the Market Lofts will have an indoor market on the first floor and 44 market-rate condos on the 2nd to 5th floors. The five-story building, an infill development, will knit together the surrounding buildings and create interest at the street level with a transparent storefront. Contributing to the project are a number of public sources, including the Metropolitan Council (the regional planning council) and the St. Paul Department of Planning and Economic Development. After the Lander Group completes construction, it will sell the first-floor market back to the city and the Growers’ Association.

Michael Lander, the company’s founder and president, says that, unlike other businesses occupying ground floor retail, “Growers are not conventional tenants.” He prepares his prospective condo-buyers for the noise farmers will make when setting up as early as 4 am. Some future residents don’t seem to care: they have been on the reservation list for twelve to eighteen months, patiently waiting for the project to break ground. Perhaps this new, unusual mix of uses will spread to other cities where getting fresh produce at your doorstep could provide a unique selling point for urban living.