Saint Paul buildings, and the record behind them

Downtown Saint Paul is an office market of roughly eighteen million square feet that has spent a decade absorbing tenants who need less space than they used to. The visible result is repositioning: buildings taken back to the frame and relaunched, Osborn370 among the most prominent, and floors that were single tenant now carrying a roster. A five mile enclosed skyway across forty seven blocks connects much of it, so the same shared second level condition that governs Minneapolis applies here on a smaller and quieter footprint, which is its own kind of exposure.

Lowertown is the part of downtown that changed use most completely. The historic district covers sixteen blocks of warehouse and wholesaling buildings put up between the eighteen seventies and the nineteen twenties, thirty seven of them contributing structures, and most now hold apartments, studios, and offices above street level tenants. CHS Field and Mears Park sit inside it. A single Lowertown address can carry residential leases, commercial leases, and a ground floor that fills on a ballgame evening, all reached through one lobby and one century old stair.

West of downtown, Highland Bridge is converting the hundred and thirty five acre former Ford assembly site into a neighborhood: thousands of housing units, around two hundred and sixty five thousand square feet of office, a hundred and fifty thousand square feet of retail, and more than fifty five acres of public space. It is being built in phases, which means occupied buildings and active construction have been neighbors there for years and will be for years more.