A River Runs Through Them
Architecture Minnesota, Nov/Dec 07
Minneapolis' and St. Paul's downtown riverfronts lie less than 10 miles apart. So why is the urban design of the two places so remarkably different?
On July 4, I was on a riverboat on the Mississippi River watching fireworks explode over St. Paul. A few weeks later, during Minneapolis’ Aquatennial, I was again watching fireworks, this time sitting on a crowded street, towered over by condos and grain elevators. The experiences were distinctly different, even though the events themselves -- the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air -- were nearly identical. The reason was urban design.
It has been often said that the Twin Cities are more likely fraternal than identical, but never was this idea so apparent to me as at these two fireworks displays. There is an urbanity, a tightness, in Minneapolis that gives way to relaxing parklands in St. Paul. The capital city has a grand simplicity that Minneapolis counters with a busy and varied aesthetic. Despite both burgs being on the same river and being home to roughly the same number of potential fireworks watchers, their downtown riverfronts are so, well, different. Why is that?
One Plan, Several Plans
In simple terms, there are three reasons: history, planning, and geography. On the first count, Minneapolis has a distinct advantage. “You’re seeing a riverfront in Minneapolis,” says Tim Griffin, AIA, “that is 20 to 30 years farther along than St. Paul’s.” Griffin is Director of the Saint Paul on the Mississippi Design Center, the prime mover in Saint Paul’s urban design renaissance. The Design Center has only been around since 1995. Griffin points, in contrast, to the tenure of Minneapolis’ riverfront guru, the Community Planning and Economic Development (CPED) Department’s Ann Calvert, who has been with the city for 30 years.
Which brings us quickly to planning. City codes govern most urban design moves (height, density, use, street layout), but planning has degrees: degrees to which uses are controlled, degrees to which streetscape and architectural details are prescribed, and, most important, degrees to which all those rules can be bent. The 400-pound planning gorilla in St. Paul is the Saint Paul on the Mississippi Development Framework Manual, a vision document prepared in 1995. This colorfully illustrated manual is the design bible for the city, and it has, in its first 10 years, outlasted mayors, city councils, neighborhood activists, and even Design Center directors. It has been used to justify public expenditures (Wabasha Bridge, Harriet Island) and oppose high profile projects (more on that later). It is the vision of the city. All other plans grow from it.
In Minneapolis, there is no 400-pound gorilla. There is, instead, Ann Calvert. “I have unofficially become the riverfront point person,” she admits. “I help gather information, answer questions, and stand back to look at if this is all working as a package.” I asked her the obvious question: whether Minneapolis has a document like St. Paul’s. “There is a plan,” she replies. “Can I give you the document? No. Because it’s encompassed in [a variety of] plans that have built upon each other.” Here are a few: Mississippi Minneapolis (way back in 1972); a river corridor open space plan; an historical interpretive plan; several neighborhood plans, including Marcy-Holmes and the North Loop; and a Mills District Plan with two subsequent updates.
I found myself surrounded by a few of these plans when I visited with David Showalter at URS Corporation in Minneapolis. When I asked him the same “big plan” question, he started pulling documents from his office shelves: A West River Parkway extension through the central riverfront, a Mill District streetscape plan, an industrial redevelopment plan for the upper river called “Above the Falls,” and Mill Ruins Park master plans. Showalter, Director of Planning and Urban Design at URS, says that his company has become a plan holder of sorts, because Minneapolis’ riverfront vision “is kind of a sum of ideas. I don’t think there was ever a real concise, pointed initiative that said, ‘OK we’re going to create this vision.’ It was more informal.”
Two Tales
But planning style wouldn’t really matter if it didn’t affect built works. Based on my discussions with developers, architects, and landscape architects involved in riverfront projects, I would argue that the key planning-related difference between our fair cities is this: Minneapolis is willing, on a project-by-project basis, to modify, update, or ignore its plans; St. Paul is not.
In 2003, for example, Shafer Richardson acquired eight acres on Minneapolis’ east bank, a parcel that included the Pillsbury A Mill, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It hired Elness Swenson Graham (ESG) Architects to work on a master plan for the whole site, and later contracted with a bevy of local talent to design individual buildings -- Cermak Rhoades Architects for the A Mill complex itself and Warehouse 2, Urban Works Architecture for the Cooper and Archer condo buildings, ESG for the now-under-construction Phoenix and future high-rise towers D, E, F, and G. Also on the team were historical consultant Miller Dunwiddie Architecture, civil engineer URS, and Close Landscape Architecture for streetscapes and building-specific design.
I met David Frank, a project manager with Shafer Richardson, at the project’s sales office, where there is a highly detailed model of the development. It is undeniably urban, both in its bulk (buildings more than 20 stories high) and in its layout. The neighborhood street grid is preserved, and a new mid-block avenue, Prince Street, creates even more pedestrian and vehicular access. The development appears to be a seamless continuation of St. Anthony Main and the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood, except for the extreme building heights. Those heights were specifically forbidden by the Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Master Plan, the Mississippi River Critical Area regulations, and regulations of the St. Anthony Historic District, but Frank was able to make the case to the neighborhoods and the City that taller, thinner buildings would be less likely to create a wall of architecture between the neighborhood and the riverside parks. It helps, of course, that Frank’s project meets most of the neighborhood’s other goals – preservation of the public street grid, a quality pedestrian environment on Second Avenue, and provision of owner-occupied housing, to name a few. With neighborhood support, Frank went to the city’s Historic Preservation Commission and was rejected for height (as expected) and for architecture deemed too contemporary for the historic district. He changed the look of the buildings, appealed the height decision to the city council, and was approved.
Later, while examining a model of the highly controversial and oft-written-about Bridges of Saint Paul, I heard a very different story. The project history in a nutshell is this: Jerry Trooien, a long time local developer, has control of much of the west bank downstream of Harriet Island. He hired the planning, architecture, and landscape architecture firm Hart Howerton in 2002 to create a master plan for the area based on extensive market, environmental, and feasibility research. The project would be huge. Plans call for approximately 1,000 housing units, more than 350,000 square feet of retail space, a Westin hotel, a movie theatre, and (perhaps later) an interactive educational attraction called Mythica. The Bridges would include semi-public (private but open to the public at all times) streets, plazas, and marinas, and would have its main activity spaces (the first floors) at the level of the top of the river levee. Like the Pillsbury projects, Bridges would exceed rules and recommendations for height (buildings of up to 30 stories are planned). But unlike its Minneapolis counterpart, it has not succeeded in gaining approval, or even neighborhood buy-in. The Design Center has officially opposed it, and in August the city council voted down Trooien’s rezoning request, dimming the project’s prospects considerably.
At issue are several concerns. Decision makers feel that the project will compete with downtown for shoppers, restaurant-goers, and tourists. Additionally, the project has been criticized for not maintaining a traditional street grid and for blocking views of the bluffs. Held up as justification for denial are the Framework Plan, which calls for 17 urban villages flanking the existing downtown core, and the West Side Flats Master Plan, prepared by Hammel, Green and Abrahamson (HGA) in 2004, which specifically deals with the blocks just upstream of Bridges but has been extended to the Bridges site. The latter plan, an outgrowth of the Framework, shows a tight urban grid (roughly 300-foot block faces) and buildings of around four stories. Bridges, has pedestrian pass-throughs to the river on a similar grid, but not all of these are complete streets (with vehicular and pedestrian access), and none are actually public streets. Roland Aberg, managing prinripal of the Minneapolis office of Hart Howerton, says the West Side Flats plan is financially and functionally unrealistic, and makes a compelling case that even building according to that plan would block bluff views. As for the urban village versus downtown expansion question, Aberg says, “Westin is not going to go in downtown Saint Paul.”
He says the impasse is really about height and density. Lucy Thompson, senior planner with St. Paul’s Department of Planning and Economic Development, has a slightly different take, focusing on urban form. “The best thing the public can do,” she says, “is put a good street and block pattern down.” She also stresses that the West Side Flats Master Plan is exactly that, a master plan – one that in her opinion could have done more. “I would admit that we didn’t strive high enough on that master plan,” she says. “If we were to do it today, I would advocate for showing some places with taller buildings. On the Upper Landing, heights are low, but developers ended up building out the entire site. It is a wall.” Thompson suggests that lower buildings at the river’s edge with higher ones behind, or a few “wedding-cake towers,” might have helped.
The Upper Landing, which is on the downtown side of the river just upstream from the Science Museum, was master planned in 1999 by Close Landscape Architecture, who has subsequently worked for the City and several developers on refining it. Schemes with narrower, taller buildings (like the Pillsbury project), had been proposed, but firm founder Bob Close says concern from the adjacent bluff-top neighborhood – backed up by the Framework Plan – led to the building heights (four to five stories) that were ultimately mandated. Subsequent architects such as Pope Associates, who designed the downstream-most structure, tried height again but were denied.
Project by Project
Meanwhile, back in Minneapolis, the first Mill District plan actually did envision a wall of sorts: a strong frontage of buildings facing the downtown-side river parkway and river corridor. The perpendicular street corridors perforating an urban edge and flowing into the natural valley conjures New York City’s Central Park. Today, however, despite early plans to the contrary, Gold Medal Park sits on the downtown side of the parkway, the product of philanthropy that might have been spent on other river-way parks. “Nobody envisioned that being a park site,” suggests the Design Center’s Tim Griffin, “and suddenly it’s there.”
Examples like that lead him to believe that Minneapolis develops in a somewhat haphazard way, project by project, and that’s why the riverfront is dense and diverse. Calvert bristles at this assessment. “Yes, we’ve had project by project but St. Paul has had project by project, too,” she counters. “I think Tim is unaware of the depth of [our] planning. In St. Paul they have their one big plan; we have just as much planning, but there is this layering effect.” So why so many changes, variances, alterations? It could be because Minneapolis’ big plan is not centrally documented, allowing developers to slip between those layers (like Shafer Richardson did) to get the projects they want. Or it could be because the big, layered vision is actually hoping for projects like Pillsbury. Either way, Minneapolis’ beefier, taller, denser riverfront will likely continue to develop along those lines. St. Paul, in contrast, is all about the urban villages complementing downtown and the appearance of a valley – the mighty Mississippi emerging from its gorge.
Higher Up
We arrive at last at the third reason for the difference: geography. St. Paul is on a bluff. Minneapolis is on the river. It’s a two- or three-story drop from the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to the river, and about an eight-story climb from Shepard Road to Kellogg Boulevard (and there aren’t many places to make that ascent). “Saint Paul isn’t a river city,” says Roland Aberg, boldly. “It is a city on a bluff overlooking the river.” Tim Griffin agrees: “The awkward phrase ‘St. Paul on the Mississippi’ means it’s not a river valley city, it’s a city on the bluffs.” And it’s a city that has decided, through its Framework Manual, to stay mostly up there.
The effects of this geographical difference on urban design are most evident in the street grid. Even if St. Paul is able to establish an urban-scaled grid down on the flats, like it did at Upper Landing, that grid will never be a continuation of existing grids. There will always be a break at the bluff edge. In Minneapolis, the grid can run right down to the parkway, as it does today. And that, ultimately, is why I felt like I was in the city while watching the Aquatennial fireworks. I was. The grid ended just steps away. But, I must admit, it was also nice on the Fourth to be in St. Paul’s wide, idyllic valley, with the city lights in the middle distance, up on a hill.