There’s ample evidence this summer that St. Paul is reinventing itself, with demolition work making way for new construction downtown and elsewhere around town.

It’s a moment worth marking, one that includes the potential to return some sites to the tax rolls and generate jobs.

An office-warehouse building will rise on the site of the old Midway Stadium. Along the riverfront downtown, the walls of the former Ramsey County Adult Detention Center and former offices of West Publishing are coming down to prepare a site that’s “shovel ready” for development. Crews last week cleared away the old Labor and Professional Center near Xcel Energy Center to make way for new facilities to serve the homeless. And a few blocks away, a development with a hotel, market-rate apartments and retail space will fill the site of the former Seven Corners Hardware store and a church razed earlier this summer.

It’s all welcome evidence of economic vitality.

The Midway site, near Highway 280, is “just an A-plus location,” said Monte Hilleman of the St. Paul Port Authority.

It’s evident that the market agrees. “Right now, we’ve got about 400,000 square feet of interested tenants for a 200,000 square-foot building,” Hilleman told us. The Port Authority and United Properties are working together on the project, to be completed at the end of next year.

The site will be back on the tax rolls Jan. 1, 2017, and 250 to 300 jobs are projected among the tenants.

We agreed with the “best-use” argument for the Midway Stadium site’s return as a tax-base-supporting, job-producing, commercial location, and it’s good to see it approach fruition.

The Port Authority, its president Louis Jambois said, was among the voices that advocated what amounted to a “land swap,” putting “industrial development where industrial development belongs and a recreational facility where a recreational facility belongs,” with the ballpark, now CHS Field, in Lowertown.

Across downtown on the riverfront, the jail was in use from 1979 to 2003; the county acquired the adjacent West property in 1991 and used it for offices until 2013, when all of its employees had relocated elsewhere.

Putting the site back on the tax rolls will grow the property tax base, and “all property taxpayers in Ramsey County will benefit from that,” County Board Chair Jim McDonough told us.

The county board’s vision is for a “functional, mixed-use site,” including residential, office and retail space, McDonough said, expressing confidence that it’s “really going to attract some creative ideas from developers.”

Preparing the site for the market includes stabilizing the adjacent bluff “to reduce the risk” for a future developer, Hilleman said.

We’ve debated the pros and cons of the county adding development to its portfolio of responsibilities, but the site presents a challenge: The area to be stabilized — a vertical one on the bluff face — amounts to the square-footage of an entire acre. It also would amount to “a huge additional cost for someone looking to land a great corporate headquarters, for example, there,” Hilleman told us.

Among the other high-profile building projects on the St. Paul skyline, work at the labor-building site will begin what will become a two-building campus operated by Catholic Charities to better serve those in need in our community.

Nearby on West Seventh Street, Opus Development is overseeing the project on the former hardware store site. Construction is expected to wrap up by the end of 2016, the Pioneer Press has reported.

The work on these sites and elsewhere around town is part of “a grander St. Paul story that we’ve been talking about for a long time, and it’s not just wishful thinking,” Jambois told us. “It’s real. St. Paul is on the move.”

In St. Paul this summer, the hum of heavy equipment is a good sound indeed.