When St. Paul City Council Member Rebecca Noecker pursued the idea of a downtown teen center, some property owners were livid.

For months, if not years, building and business owners complained of young people loitering in the Skyway and by the Green Line’s Central Station off Cedar Street.

“One thing our community ambassadors would say, ‘we don’t have a great place to direct them to’,” Noecker said. “Downtown is the only entire neighborhood that is not within a half-mile of a rec center.”

Noecker wasn’t discouraged — and neither was Bill Bisanz, CEO of Selby Avenue-based Real Estate Equities, which bought the former St. Paul Pioneer Press office building at 345 Cedar St. to convert it into income-restricted apartments.

Could a teen center be part of the new development? Bisanz agreed that it could. Though Noecker’s initial vision — a Skyway hangout — was soon retooled for ground level.

“We were really excited to support the tech center,” Bisanz said on Friday. “We had some concerns, but I went and saw the tech center in the Minneapolis Central Library. … I think they’re doing good work, and I think it’ll be good for downtown. It was a nice way to be able to give back to the city.”

On Feb. 19, high school students greeted a who’s-who of St. Paul officials at the YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities’ new Best Buy Teen Tech Center on Fourth Street.

“Everything is running through technology now,” said Owen Yang, 16, a junior at Johnson High School, while watching two of his classmates editing digital rhythms at a beat-making station. “I’m into making videos. I’ve done a little video editing myself, but it’s new to me.”

Halfway between City Hall and the Green Line in what had been the newspaper’s vehicle garage offices, the free weekday drop-in center offers activity stations dedicated to 3D printing, computer coding, button-making, video and music production — even a sound booth where the next Beyoncé or Nick Jonas can stretch their vocal pipes. The YMCA provides staffing, and the center enjoys a five-year lease rent-free.

It’s an unlikely addition to an area that has sometimes struggled to balance the demands of office tenants, higher-end and income restricted residential housing and the bar-and-restaurant crowd against the needs of young people who also study in or pass through downtown.

Few areas of the city offer quite the same mix of uses.

Meanwhile, downtown appears to be evolving in multiple directions, with the residential population nearly doubling to 9,500 people in eight years — among the fastest residential growth of any downtown in the nation. The downtown area added 500 people in 2017 alone.

It’s also adding students: Upper Mississippi Academy, which has 290 students in grades 6-11, plans to move into a former McNally Smith College of Music Building downtown by this fall and grow to 425 students.

Still, there’s been notable departures. McNally Smith closed in December 2017. The former site of the Urban Academy Charter School at Seventh and Robert Streets is being converted into upscale apartments called the Lofts at R7.

AN OVERNIGHT EFFORT

Noecker acknowledged that where government and industry converge, the wheels of change often feel achingly slow. In relative terms, the Best Buy Teen Tech Center, in contrast, sprung up virtually overnight.

“Things often don’t happen that quickly in government and civic spaces,” Noecker said.

She recalled an email she received in early 2017 from former Planning Commissioner Pat Connolly, who had taken a job as a real estate director with the YMCA: “He said, ‘I was at an event and learned of this cool Teen Center concept from Best Buy. This could be a game-changer for downtown.’ ”

Best Buy, which has opened nearly two-dozen centers nationwide, had already installed a site in downtown Minneapolis. Noecker pulled together a meeting with the YMCA, which already runs a gym facility near Mears Park, and Best Buy executives Deb Morris and Andrea Wood, two key decision-makers.

“It turned out the application deadline was five or 10 days away,” Noecker recalled. “The Y said we’ll have to get approval all the way up the chain, but we’ll try. Then we had to get a space — and that had to be in the application.”

Noecker reached out to Bisanz at Real Estate Equities. Not only did the developer have space to share, the company was also wiling to put up cash almost on the spot.

“We needed a (funding) match, and they were willing to give a $25,000 match,” Noecker said. Another $25,000 came from the city’s STAR program, which is funded by St. Paul’s half-cent sales tax.

Concerns that a Skyway hangout would exacerbate loitering did not fall on deaf ears.

Former St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Joe Spartz, president of the Greater St. Paul Building Owners and Managers Association, accompanied Bisanz, Noecker and YMCA staff on a tour of a Teen Tech Center at the Minneapolis Central Library.

“Pretty impressive,” Spartz recalled on Thursday. “I haven’t been on the inside of getting the St. Paul location started, but certainly see the value in this initiative.”

The group was surprised to discover the Minneapolis location’s popularity with young people from St. Paul.

“One of the things they told us was kids were coming from our downtown St. Paul high schools all the time to drop in at their teen tech center,” Noecker said.

Funded in part by the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation, the downtown St. Paul location is the fifth Teen Tech Center in the Twin Cities.

In the past year, another center opened at 1150 Selby Ave., west of Lexington Parkway, in cooperation with Keystone Community Services.