On a July day in 1908, 17-year-old Carmine Thomas Simplegio Pitera set sail for America, joining his brothers and a wave of Italian immigrants.

His arrival in a new country called for a new name, at least in the eyes of immigration officials at Ellis Island: Carl Pedro.

Pedro started a small shoe-repair shop that grew with time, evolving into a downtown St. Paul luggage and briefcase retailer under the direction of his three sons, Carl Pedro Jr., Eugene Pedro and Alfred Pedro, his daughter Marilyn Pitera and Carl Pedro Jr.’s wife, Josephine Pedro.

All four men are now gone, as is Josephine.

So is Pedro’s Luggage, the 83,000-square-foot retail center and factory that had occupied 501 N. Robert St. since the 1960s.

The two buildings, which closed in 2009, were torn down in 2011 at the request of the Pedro family, based on promises that the city would remove its adjoining property and build parkland on par with downtown Rice Park or Mears Park.

So far, not much more than a wall mural adorns the site. Not even a tree has been planted. So what happened?

Only Marilyn Pitera remains. And at age 81, she’s not sure she has it in her to fight City Hall. But her anger is hard to contain, and she’s become increasingly vocal about a five-year written agreement she claims the city broke with her family.

“They made an agreement in bad faith,” said Pitera, over coffee recently at Keys Cafe on North Robert Street. “They call it an ‘urban flower field.’ I call it a dump. I’m not proud of it. I’m ashamed of it. I’m ashamed my name is attached to that piece of land.”

Pitera is more than just a little upset.

“She should be,” said former St. Paul City Council member Dave Thune, who retired from office at the end of 2015.

In 2009, around the time Pedro’s Luggage closed, Thune received a surprise phone call from the two surviving Pedro brothers.

If they conveyed the shuttered Pedro’s Luggage to the city, could the city guarantee parkland there within five years in memory of their father, Carl Pedro Sr.? And, could the city someday demolish the neighboring police training building and add to the parkland?

Indeed they could, on both fronts, he remembers all involved agreeing.

“I negotiated the agreement to donate with the family and it was always with the goal of a nearly full block of park named after the Pedro family,” said Thune. Otherwise, “they could have sold the property for a development of their own in a prime location.”

After a decade of waiting, Pitera and dozens of mostly senior residents in the apartments and condo buildings surrounding 10th and Robert streets now are squaring off against efforts by St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s administration and the St. Paul City Council to convert the vacant public-safety annex building next to the old Pedro’s Luggage site into office space.

A tentative partnership with the Ackerberg Group calls for the Minneapolis-based development group to put at least $1 million into improving the existing Pedro Park location over the next 20 years, creating a parklike space.

“The Ackerberg proposal is the first ever commitment of funds to realize permanent improvements to the park space on this block,” said Liz Xiong, a spokeswoman for the mayor’s office.

Opponents claim the city’s redevelopment plans fly in the face of 20 years of efforts and 10 years of written agreements to turn the vacant half-acre Pedro’s Luggage site into an official city park.

The vision called for demolishing the city’s aged and outdated public-safety annex building next door to expand the park’s footprint into at least half a block, if not the entire block. A child care center sits across the alley, limiting options south of the lot, at least for the time being.

Marilyn Pitera was 1/3 owner of 2 buildings+ land that was to be Pedro Park. She thinks Mayor Carter is "a nice man" but "he is wrong." A "180 degree turnaround" from his statement supporting full park during candidates forum in late October. pic.twitter.com/YltjR7acIa — FredMelo, Reporter (@FrederickMelo) March 1, 2018

The city, however, is struggling to maintain the parks and rec spaces it already owns.

“Our experience shows that the estimated costs of developing a park in downtown are between $6 million and $9 million per acre, not including acquisition or demolition,” Xiong said.

City council member Rebecca Noecker, who voted against the Ackerberg Group’s office proposal in November, noted downtown is the only part of the city that is outside the half-mile radius of a rec center.

“We need more green space downtown,” said Noecker, speaking at a Feb. 19 neighborhood forum on the future of downtown parkland. “We have 8,000 people living downtown now. … We need a place where our kids can run around, can just throw a ball around.”

MAYORAL TURNABOUT?

For a while, said Pitera, it seemed that Carter shared those feelings.

Now, Pitera and other downtown residents say they feel the newly elected mayor misled them.

Asked whether the police annex building should be put up for sale for redevelopment or demolished to expand Pedro Park, Carter told voters last fall that downtown lacked public restrooms, basketball courts and other offerings for its growing population.

“Green space or tax base is a false choice,” said candidate Carter, during an Oct. 9 mayoral forum. “Green space has been shown to increase the quality of life in our community, and that’s what we should be talking about. I think we should build that out into a full park with real neighborhood amenities.”

Residents applauded the stance.

Just four months later, Carter and other city officials say they see a different opportunity.

They now have the chance to make Pedro Park a reality, thanks to a tentative agreement with the Ackerberg Group, which is willing to fund a smaller-than-anticipated version of the park for 20 years or more. But the vacant public-safety annex building must stay put.

The city council could finalize the agreement by June.

“We have in front of us the first viable plan to build out this block in over a decade that includes $1 million … for maintenance of a park,” said Carter, speaking over the audience’s jeers during the Feb. 19 forum. “We owe it to ourselves … to have the conversation out.”

Related Articles After man sentenced to 40 years in St. Paul murder, courthouse locked down and shots fired nearby

Midway Fund offers $840,000 in damage, rebuilding and relocation grants

Carter, Frey declare Sept. 21 RBG Day in the Twin Cities

Choo Choo Bob’s in St. Paul chugs to a permanent close

St. Paul PD highlights surveillance photos of looting suspects, seeks tips Interviewed at the time of an initial city council vote last November, Jonathan Sage-Martinson — the outgoing director of the city’s Department of Planning and Economic Development — said that downtown St. Paul needed new types of work spaces and that a deal with the Ackerberg Group could create 200 permanent jobs.

The decision to seek development proposals for the public-safety annex building “came at a time when the city was hearing from a lot of businesses downtown that they were unable to find the kind of creative, modern office space that they were looking for,” Sage-Martinson said.

Tanya Bell, a principal with Grand Real Estate Advisers, who sat on the city’s “Innovation Cabinet,” said city parks benefit from the property taxes generated by downtown construction.

“When you have so few assets left downtown in terms of quality buildings, why would you tear it down?” said Bell, who recently worked on the Osborn370 project. “You would be taking away 50,000 square feet. That thing could generate probably $150,000 a year in property taxes, minimum. If it were a park, it’s not going to pay any property taxes.”

But residents fear instead of a neighborhood park, they’ll get a pocket park. Or worse, an office lawn.

“It will become a corporate front entrance instead of a family park,” said Kati Berg, a resident of the Pointe condo complex who moved her family downtown four years ago. Berg is now working with other neighbors to form an official nonprofit organization, the Friends of the Pedro Park Expansion.

“The city in no way characterizes this as an office lawn,” Xiong said.

Pitera said she’s not in a position to hire an attorney or ask for the property back from the city — she could never afford the property taxes.

FAMILY DONATION

The Pedro family’s November 2009 donation agreement makes clear that “if (the city) has not obtained the financing within a period of five years for the entire park plan, it will convert the donated parcel to parkland.”

So what happened in those five years?

Following the recession, Coleman’s administration battled a housing foreclosure crisis; weathered construction of Metro Transit’s Green Line light-rail line; and opened CHS Field, a 7,000-seat baseball stadium in Lowertown.

Planning for Pedro Park continued, but major funding did not.

In 2014, with the five-year agreement reaching its deadline, city planners found a creative temporary solution. Instead of a park, they would establish an “urban flower field” — a garden-like placeholder of sorts — and show occasional outdoor movies.

Public Art St. Paul organized a colorful mural painting on the side of the public-safety annex.

Dubbing Pedro Park the “saddest urban lot you can imagine,” a biology professor from the University of St. Thomas teamed with students to plant wildflowers in a spiral, testing the ability of 96 plots of plants to remove trace metals from the soil.

City officials acknowledged at the time that the urban flower field was not intended to be permanent. The lot has some grass, but Pedro Park still doesn’t exist, even on paper.

OFFICE DEPARTURES

And something else happened in the years after the Pedro land donation — the downtown Macy’s department store closed in 2013. Other buildings long occupied by law firms, small shops and lunch counters were taken over by developers for residential conversions.

From 2010 to 2017, the total number of people living downtown grew from roughly 4,800 to 8,900, an 84 percent increase. Downtown’s population had blossomed. But where were the jobs?

By April 2016, the Cray supercomputer company confirmed it was leaving the former Galtier Plaza. Some 350 employees relocated to Bloomington.

In February 2017, Coleman and city council member Chris Tolbert, who now chairs the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority, launched the Innovation Cabinet to help the city figure out how to draw “creative” employers, such as the architecture firms, dot-coms and startup ventures flocking to Minneapolis’ North Loop.

Related Articles After man sentenced to 40 years in St. Paul murder, courthouse locked down and shots fired nearby

Midway Fund offers $840,000 in damage, rebuilding and relocation grants

Carter, Frey declare Sept. 21 RBG Day in the Twin Cities

Choo Choo Bob’s in St. Paul chugs to a permanent close

St. Paul PD highlights surveillance photos of looting suspects, seeks tips By July, the Coleman administration’s “Full Stack St. Paul” effort was calling for better real estate options downtown geared toward creative firms, such as open-air co-working spaces instead of partitioned law offices. Following a request for proposals, Coleman’s administration urged the city council to consider a sale of the public-safety annex building to the Ackerberg Group.

On Nov. 7, Carter handily won election to the mayor’s office.

The next afternoon, a divided St. Paul City Council voted 4-3 to pursue a tentative agreement with the Ackerberg Group, which would redevelop the vacant public-safety building into office space while funding parks improvements next door for 20 years.