The Lowertown Depot Building

Although St. Paul’s Lowertown neighborhood is rapidly developing, there is one building left behind.

It’s the Lowertown Depot and located at the foot of the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary.

According to Dan Turner’s SubStreet blog, the building was renamed Lowertown Depot to as part of a failed residential development project.

Apparently the Lowertown Depot wasn’t a depot at all, but the old Standard Oil Branch Warehouse. The name was just a marketing gimmick for condo developers.

I’m surprised that they haven’t attempted to redevelop the area – it’s a massive undeveloped chunk of land right by downtown.

The Lowertown Depot reminds me a lot of Miami’s Midtown neighborhood. Midtown was just a huge chunk of undeveloped railroad tracks when I was in high school. Developers decided to play Sim City and turned it into a huge residential and commercial complex.

It will be interesting to see how much the Lowertown area will change in the next few years. We just got the Amtrak and light rail service, and apparently a stadium is coming soon.

This neighborhood has become increasingly trendy (and expensive) which will likely force many of us to make a buying vs. moving decision next summer.
Rising rents almost drove us back to Minneapolis this summer.
In fact, we had a deposit down on an apartment, but we were rejected because my prior landlord didn’t respond to their reference requests. The guy who took my unit is a little freaked out because he’ll likely run into the same problem.

Exhaustion from the apartment search caused us to sign on for another year in Lowertown, but I suspect future rent hikes will soon turn this area into another Uptown or Warehouse District.

We’ll see.