Cecilia Schiller’s woodcarving studio looks over the Mississippi River onto the First National Bank Building and the St. Paul skyline.

Schiller has had a good relationship with her landlord, who for years has rented out six levels of warehouse studios on the West Side at reasonable rates. But her new yearlong lease makes clear that if a new mortgage holder buys the property, as expected, she’ll have 90 days to pack up and get out.

“I’m not going to move forward with alternate plans until I know,” Schiller said last week. “We’ve kind of gotten to form a bit of a community. Historically, artists have been the ones that have gone into kind of undesirable locations and brought the property values up. And then they get kicked out.”

In 2016, several artists who lost their Lowertown work studios at the Jax Building on Fourth Street to new housing development fled across the river to the ACVR Warehouse at 106 Water St., at the edge of Harriet Island Regional Park.

Old lettering visible from the across the river is a reminder of its early days as the Farwell, Ozmun, Kirk & Co. warehouse, affectionately referred to as the “F.O.K. Building” by many artists.

Dating back to at least 1900, the six-story warehouse is now home to some 70 or 80 tenants, from print screeners and wood-turners to a computer repair company, an antique bicycle collector and an antique furniture restorer.

For tenants, the lease they were asked to sign this winter cements what many had already heard directly from one of the property owners: Negotiations with a potential buyer are underway, and their days at the ACVR may be numbered.

‘NOTHING SET IN STONE’

In mid-November, tenants were told that the building was being sold and they would likely be asked to move out. The paperwork was to be signed Dec. 3.

Tenants said they were later told the closing on the sale to Peter Deanovic and Buhl Investors of Edina has been pushed to Feb. 15, and that the majority of the building will be used, ultimately, for storage of high-end goods.

“Nothing is set in stone yet,” said Leslie Sandberg, a member of one of the two ownership groups behind the warehouse. “Their leases are being renewed. The only people who are leaving the building right now are those who are asking to leave when their leases come up.”

Her father, Bert Sandberg, a principal of the American Crane company, and his neighbor Victor Reim, a principal of what later became known as Alliance Bank, acquired the old warehouse from the St. Paul Port Authority in 1979. Sandberg died in 2003, and Leslie Sandberg and her brother Nels Sandberg came to manage the building, whose “ACVR” moniker is shorthand for “American Crane-Victor Reim.”

“We believed it was our civic duty to support artists,” said Leslie Sandberg, who now lives in Massachusetts. “We were able to give them rates that were fair. The building has been in our family for 40 years. My father was a fixture in the St. Paul scene, and we wanted to do what was right.”

“We’re all getting old, to be honest with you,” she added. “We’d love to manage it forever and own it forever, but the generation that currently has it is approaching retirement age. We got an offer on the building, and we’ll see what happens.”

A second group of owners, Gross-Edgerton LLC, is associated with the former Gross-Given Manufacturing Co., which was once a prominent supplier of vending machines.

In a Tuesday interview, Deanovic said, “We really do want to retain folks. Storage will be a component, but not the only component, (of the new use). It’s a pretty big building.”

MOVING SALE FEB. 21

Artists have called rents at the ACVR reasonable, and lamented that finding a new, affordable space with appropriate wiring and venting and relocating there would be a huge financial blow.

The warehouse is also home to non-artists.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Irish Fair, Cooks of Crocus Hill and Domace Vino wine distributors all lease storage or work space in the building. The ACVR Warehouse has taken part in the St. Paul Art Crawl for roughly a decade.

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St. Paul poised to redraw residential zoning rules near major public transit Some artists say in the event the building is sold, 90 days’ notice won’t be enough time to find new accommodations and they’ll have to start looking now.

“We’re trying to plan ahead and get a space to go to that we can work in,” said Kendrick Smetana, who produces handbags and other leather goods for Heimie’s Haberdashery in downtown St. Paul.

Rather than wait on pins and needles to learn their fate, at least a handful of artists say they prefer to pack up and leave on their own terms.

Artist Barbara Evan, who moved to the ACVR from the Jax Building in 2016, has already planned a moving sale for Feb. 21. She said she’ll be joined by 11 other artists and possibly more. She still plans to be around for the spring art crawl in late April.