There’s no magic bullet for revitalizing downtown St. Paul, but if there was it might look something like Detroit. At least, that’s the working theory from one local developer, Ari Parrish, mentioned a few months ago in Axios.
This spring, I was lucky to attend a conference in downtown Detroit where I gathered a list of observations. Because it’s an extreme and high-profile example, Detroit is a fascinating place to think about urban planning ideas, good and bad.
A St. Paul-Detroit city comparison
Before going further down this road, it’s important to compare Detroit and St. Paul side by side, because there are some fun economic and social similarities and differences between these two midwestern cities.
First, there’s the size. Detroit is (and was) huge geographically and was (and is no longer) huge in population. The geographic area of the city of Detroit is famously massive, like combining the land area of Minneapolis with St. Paul and then throwing in Bloomington. Detroit was once the fourth-largest U.S. city by population, peaking in 1950 at almost 2 million people.
Second, Detroit is curiously both older and newer than St. Paul. It’s older in the sense that it was “settled” by French explorers and fur trade folks in 1701, over a century before Fort Snelling arrived on the scene. It’s also newer in the sense that the city’s big growth years happened in the 20th century, decades later than St. Paul’s or Minneapolis’ economic boom.
That’s important for urban planning reasons, the first being that Detroit was well established when 19th century ideas like the “City Beautiful” movement were en vogue. Then it boomed during the single-family, early automobile era and became less dense than many parts of the 19th century Twin Cities.
The third thing, of course, is the industrial legacy and concentrated economy. While St. Paul had some urban industry like the 3M, Amhoist and Seeger sites, Detroit’s boundaries contained many times the industrial manufacturing. The legacy of post-industrial land is visible nearly everywhere.
The similarities are fun, too. Both downtowns have Churches of Scientology, empty office towers, seas of parking, sports stadia and delectable coney dogs. St. Paul almost built a people mover in the early 1980s, but Detroit actually did so and it’s still there, spinning one-way into its retro-future obsolescence. They both have 1980s-era failed urban skyscrapers, though Detroit’s Renaissance Center is larger and more alienating than anything St. Paul could ever afford.
One key contrast: downtown Detroit is booming right now, seeing a renaissance of street life, investment and vibes, in stark contrast to St. Paul. There are lots of reasons for this, many involving billionaires buying up land and making (often subsidized) investments. Still, there are some interesting contrasts between the two downtowns. Here’s my list:
Use of murals
Murals are an affordable way to improve vacant spaces without waiting for an angel investor to transform your property. One of the first things I saw when I arrived in downtown Detroit was a giant mural of Stevie Wonder overlooking a block-long expanse of surface parking. It is a great sight.
For some reason, downtown St. Paul doesn’t have many fresh murals, common elsewhere in the Twin Cities. (When I think downtown St. Paul murals, the fading 1991 Twin Cities Marathon painting on the back of the Athletic Club building is one that comes to mind.) This seems like an obvious oversight. Fun, beautiful murals in downtown St. Paul would go a long way to revitalize specific spots.
A healthy improvement district
Part and parcel with the “wealthy benefactor” theory, Detroit has a very present and active DID called the Downtown Detroit Partnership (DDP). DIDs are something of a mixed bag; they can be everything from a privately controlled quasi-police force to geographically targeted branding service to coordinated urbanist placemaking efforts. When done well, though, I generally find them to be a useful tool for downtowns.
Walking around Detroit’s downtown, the DDP’s presence is felt all over the place, from the public art to the signage and kiosks. (I didn’t see the ambassadors, which are so common in Minneapolis.) Not all of it is great placemaking, but there’s certainly a healthy budget for amenities like benches, signage, public art, trash cans, decorative lighting and the like.
St. Paul’s Downtown Alliance budget is much smaller, though at least it’s beginning to grow. The city could really use a larger presence for its DID program.
Smart use of alleys
Downtown Detroit has a lot of empty surface parking lots, open spaces between things, that come to at times dominate the built environment. In places, there’s so much empty space that the negative space becomes the positive space, a parking lot polarity switch. But it’s such a large area with so many historic buildings with alleys running through them, and downtown had a few notable examples of using them creatively.
St. Paul also has a handful of alleys that could be spruced up as interesting destinations, already beloved by wedding photographers. They could be little nooks for people to discover, preferably not to do drugs but to shop and hang out. There have been one or two such attempts in Lowertown to revitalize alleys — the former Golden’s Deli and the former 12 Eyes Brewing — but both were hampered by restrictions on historic buildings.
Pedestrian streets
While I visited, I watched a construction project on Monroe Street in the heart of Greektown, a few blocks of wonderful old buildings full of bars, restaurants and shops. I watched a crew working to turn it into a pedestrian street. I wish I could say St. Paul has an opportunity do something similar, but there’s just no retail density that might allow that to work well. (The one-block-long Seventh Place is a great case study of the benefits.)
Years ago there were plans to change Fourth Street, along the light rail line, into something called a “Market District” by removing cars. I still think that’s a decent idea, if done tactically and thoughtfully. That street remains the best candidate for a quality pedestrian experience.
Riverfront connections
Both cities have rivers and use them underwhelmingly. Detroit isn’t great in this regard, but still better than St. Paul. You can at least walk from downtown over to the river without crossing a freeway, and there’s a “riverwalk” waiting for you when you arrive.
(Granted, you have to cross freeway — or two! — in nearly every other direction when leaving downtown Detroit.)
Perhaps St. Paul can try harder to activate the Kellogg Mall Park, but the real idea here is the combination of the River Balcony project and Ramsey County’s massive River’s Edge development. (Both are still struggling for funding.)
My favorite idea is to reduce the size of Shepard Road. Done in coordination with converting Sibley and Wacouta streets back into two-way streets, the city could turn one of its river access points into a biking and walking connection.
Use of pavers
Somehow, downtown Detroit has a few paver streets that seem well maintained. It adds a ton of sense of place, slowing traffic, adding visual and acoustic texture, and emphasizing the historic nature of much of the century-old downtown. Meanwhile, St. Paul has crappy pavers that looked nice when they were installed but are nearly impossible to maintain.
Pavers are a luxury, to be sure, but they really do create a sense of place. I would love it if this could be something the city could find money to maintain. One engineer friend swears that they are cost effective over the long run — actual brick pavers, that is, not the concrete facsimiles installed by the Norm Coleman administration — only if city workers could develop institutional knowledge around installing and maintaining them.
Public art and plazas
Curiously to me, given what happened in the rest of the 20th century, Detroit’s downtown had a classic “city beautiful” plan that it implemented early in the 19th century. The plan created public vistas, axial avenues and a street pattern full of public space. For example: Campus Martius, a wonderful public plaza at the heart of downtown; Hart Plaza, a wide-open space full of art; Grand Circus Park, a pair of statue’d spaces at the north end of downtown; or the green median spaces along Washington Boulevard or Cadillac Square. Almost all of these spaces are edged with dense buildings.
Downtown St. Paul has three or four nice small parks around the downtown, but its “city beautiful” spaces like Kellogg Mall Park or Cleveland Circle are underwhelming to say the least. Our most concerted effort at city beautiful planning resulted in the desolate and (to me) anti-urban Capital Approach plan, which detracts from the downtown rather than adds to it. The green space is too large, and surrounded by often empty government offices and zero commercial space.
Detroit’s lessons for St. Paul
Detroit boomed higher and bottomed out much lower than St. Paul (or even Minneapolis). For the most part, that’s a good thing. You don’t want to have cities cresting and crashing every 75 years, producing vast amounts of waste and loss.
That’s maybe one reason why enticing billionaires to build new buildings and rehab old ones while funding stadia and vanity streetcars seems like a tall order for St. Paul. Detroit’s highs were higher and its lows were lower, and if you think the recent few years of bad headlines in downtown St. Paul are a lot to tolerate, imagine decades of that experience combined with the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy.
It’s worth pointing out that, post-COVID, St. Paul might have a few advantages. While both cities need a lot more downtown housing, Detroit’s existing residential population is even less than St. Paul, which makes a balanced post-COVID future difficult. That said, Detroit offers some urban lessons around care and creativity, and Detroit’s placemaking playbook could help St. Paul as it works to attract investment.