Demolition of a former 3M building along Phalen Boulevard was photographed nearing completion on May 7, 2010. In the background is what remains of the 3M facility on St. Paul's East Side in photographed in May 2010. (Pioneer Press file photo)

The sunset is reflected on the last of the buildings owned by 3M and the water tower at the East Side location in St. Paul on January 8, 2008. The building was sold. (Sherri LaRose-Chiglo, Pioneer Press)

The sun sets on the last of the building owned by 3M at the East Side location in St. Paul on January 8, 2008. The building was sold. (Sherri LaRose-Chiglo, Pioneer Press)

An announcement was made by 3M on Feb. 7, 2002 that 500 jobs would be lost at its East Side facility which continued the trend of jobs leaving the area, This photo was taken looking north up Arcade Ave. (Pioneer Press: file photo/Chris Polydoroff)

One of the several empty lots that were at one time large industrial sites along East 7th Street in St. Paul. This one at the intersections of East 7th Street and Arcade Street. Photographed on Wednesday, July 13, 2016. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)



Curtis Steffen, left, CEO of MacQueen Equipment Inc. in St. Paul, meets with contractors in MacQueen's new building under construction, Wednesday, August 10, 2016. MacQueen is expanding on the city's East Side, building a new 40,000 square foot administrative, sales and service building on East Seventh Street. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)

Curtis Steffen, CEO of MacQueen Equipment Inc. in St. Paul, Wednesday, August 10, 2016, in the company's showroom under construction where a new 40,000 square foot administrative, sales and service building on East Seventh Street is underway. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)

An exterior view of MacQueen Equipment Inc. which is expanding on the city's East Side,with this new 40,000 square foot administrative, sales and service building on East Seventh Street, Wednesday, August 10, 2016. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)

Curtis Steffen, CEO of MacQueen Equipment Inc. in St. Paul, Wednesday, August 10, 2016. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)

Larry Satovich works in the service bay area of the new MacQueen Equipment Inc. building under construction in St. Paul, Wednesday, August 10, 2016. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)



This 2-acre site is for sale on the 800 block of East Seventh Street in St. Paul, August 10, 2016. The loss of industry on St. Paul's East Side has left many empty lots for sale. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)

A customer flies through the air at St. Paul Trapeze on Thursday, August 4, 2016. St. Paul Trapeze is one of many business that now call one of the old industrial buildings in St. Paul's East Side home. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)

Katie Kimball, owner of St. Paul Trapeze talks to a student/customer as she walks across the net. on Thursday, August 4, 2016. St. Paul Trapeze is one of many business that now call one of the old industrial buildings in St. Paul's East Side home. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)

One of the several empty lots that were at one time large industrial sites along East 7th Street in St. Paul. This one at the intersections of East 7th Street and Minnehaha Avenue. Photographed on Wednesday, July 13, 2016. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)

One of the several empty lots that were at one time large industrial sites along East 7th Street in St. Paul. This one at the intersections of East 7th Street and Minnehaha Avenue on Wednesday, July 13, 2016. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)



This 1968 aerial of the intersection of St. Paul's Payne and Minnehaha avenues includes the Hamm's brewery (foreground), the Whirlpool plant (back left) and 3M (back right). (Minnesota Historical Society)

Employees of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co. manufacture cellulose tape in this 1931 photo. (Minnesota Historical Society)

Workers at the Hamm's Brewery fill and label half-gallon bottles with lager beer about 1950. (Minnesota Historical Society)

Cars line Payne Avenue in 1952, which is dressed up for its annual Harvest Festival. This photo is looking south from Jenks Avenue. (Minnesota Historical Society)

The Theo. Hamm Brewing Co. as it appeared about 1900. The Hamm family's mansion can be seen in the background to the right of the brewery. (Minnesota Historical Society)



Decades ago, the epicenter of St. Paul’s East Side — including industrial cornerstones 3M, Whirlpool and Hamm’s Brewery — was a bustling boomtown, supporting dozens of businesses and hundreds of homes.

But the epicenter died, and the businesses went away. For some time now, the city, the St. Paul Port Authority and a batch of private owners have done their best to battle the blight left behind. The sites, consisting of well over 100 contiguous acres, make up the city’s largest industrial remodel in decades.

So how has it gone?

After tens of millions of dollars of public investment, the blight largely has been replaced by grassland and light industry, and an area that used to support thousands of jobs now supports hundreds. Nobody expected another powerhouse like 3M to take over what was abandoned, and Port Authority officials say the trickle of jobs is adding up. And had they done nothing, they say, the blight might have spread to strangle the city.

But actual new hires — rather than those the businesses brought to the area with them — total in the dozens, not the hundreds. And in many cases, the spaces the new tenants left behind in St. Paul have yet to be filled.

Neighbors’ reactions have been mixed. But one thing is often repeated: Unlike the East Side’s old claim to fame, “The people that work here live somewhere else, and the people that live here work somewhere else,” said Deanna Abbott-Foster, executive director of the Dayton’s Bluff Community Council.

It’s something some of the site’s newest tenants say they desperately want to tackle — creating a workforce based in the East Side again.

ALL BUT ONE — GONE

Scott Hamlett remembers when he bought Northern Iron and Machine, a century-old business that abuts the old Whirlpool and 3M plots.

It was 2006, and that same day he heard a loud noise out his office window. Peering down, he saw a swarm of DEA agents raiding a house across the street.

He started in the Northern Iron machine shop in the 1980s. The two bars that were once within a block of the site are now gone — one, he recalls, had its electricity cut, and the owner tried to run a wire to the pole on his own. Didn’t last long.

Northern Iron itself swallowed up a chunk of the old Whirlpool site, and the rest was demolished to make way for the nearby Seeger Square strip mall. Of the old East Side’s Big Three, private industry wholly swallowed one site.

Northern Iron — the sole survivor from the area’s big industrial era — has had its ups and downs. It now employs about 60 people, down from 120 some years ago — and employment fluctuates with the fates of the oil, trucking and agricultural industries.

But Hamlett looks beyond his borders, to the old gem of the East Side: the 3M plots. And for the first time in a while, he notes changes for the better.

“They cleaned up the area, which was sorely needed,” he says.

Still, tearing down all those 3M buildings, starting in 2010, rubbed some community members the wrong way — particularly history buffs.

“Meeting after meeting, it became clear at the very beginning that Port Authority wanted to tear everything down,” said former state Rep. Steve Trimble, who has also written about the East Side for the Ramsey County Historical Society.

St. Paul Port Authority officials — in charge of the 3M site — say they did what they could, using a Minneapolis marketing firm to pitch the buildings for sale for two years, with barely a bite.

“The only offer — and I don’t even know if it was serious — was cold storage,” said Monte Hilleman, the Port Authority’s vice president of real estate development. It didn’t help that the marketing effort came at the tail-end of the housing crisis, which hit the East Side harder, and lingered longer, than anywhere else in the city.

By 2010, large-scale demolition began. All but one of the buildings — 3M’s corporate headquarters, known locally as “Building 21” — were torn down.

Over 1.5 million square feet of structures, gone.

$55 MILLION, 114 NEW JOBS

The Port Authority’s grand plan for the area — including a couple of big projects along Phalen Boulevard, as well as a couple of other properties adjacent to 3M’s old campus — was 1,000 jobs.

Data shows that by the end of last year, the 3M project, called “Beacon Bluff,” had netted 482 of those jobs, with an average wage of $15.66 an hour. So far, about half a dozen businesses have moved in, either buying the land or signing a contract with the Port Authority.

Of those jobs, however, the majority — 368 — were brought to the site from elsewhere. Just 114 of the jobs were new.

That came at a cost, to date, of $54.7 million — just shy of an initial estimate of $57 million. The 64-acre project has been acquired, demolished and cleaned, but about a third of the land — 24 acres — remains vacant, including an 11-acre plot that is the largest available shovel-ready industrial site in the city. Hilleman estimates new costs will be $1 million or less, with most of the work done.

The area will generate roughly $820,000 in real estate taxes in 2016.

Hilleman counts the jobs at new businesses along Phalen Boulevard toward his “1,000 job” tally — including Williams Hill, which is far from the old center of the East Side, and closer to Interstate 35E. Throw those businesses in, and you add 548 new jobs to the area.

City and Port Authority officials say some of the businesses that moved to the 3M site could have moved out of the city, instead. Baldinger Bakery — one of the site’s larger employers — was considering a move to Eagan, despite sentimental ties to St. Paul. Retention is as important as attraction.

Still, the spaces left behind by most of the St. Paul businesses who moved in to the area have yet to be refilled. The building that used to house Viking Electric, on the east edge of downtown, is now a parking lot. The space the East Side Family Clinic used to take up in the Seeger Square strip mall remains vacant. And the space left by Loomis remains for lease, though the process has been hampered by an adjacent residential renovation.

HAMM’S IS ALL BUT FULL

Though the city owns a portion of the site, the big gains at the Hamm’s Brewery site have largely been private.

The site was bought from Stroh Brewery Co. in 1998 by the Gelb family through their business, St. Paul-based Everest LLC, and a big chunk south of Minnehaha Avenue was sliced off and sold to the city. It now houses a brewery, a distillery and an urban farm, with another brewery considering moving in.

And unlike the Port Authority, the city opted to keep its buildings standing.

Thus far, $2,526,000 in public funding has gone into the city’s site — including $445,000 in STAR grants to the private businesses. That doesn’t include an additional $550,000 in low-interest STAR loans, and there are still vacant areas to be cleaned and renovated.

The city estimates there are more than 30 jobs at the site now.

While historians are happy the buildings remain standing, others question why the city doesn’t make them look less abandoned.

“It looks like you’re driving down a back alley. It’s like, what the hell are they doing? It doesn’t look to me like they have any plan at all,” said Abbott-Foster, of the Dayton’s Bluff Community Council. “You have to be a major St. Paulite to know about Flat Earth (Brewing Co.). … They would never let anything in Highland Park look like this.”

But across the street, the run-down factor hasn’t hampered vacancy rates for the 7-acre Hamm’s plot still retained by Everest LLC. It’s all but full — with 55 businesses, and only two vacancies, as of last month.

“We pretty much stay full,” said Dan Kuckler, who manages the property for Everest. “We don’t advertise anything, it’s kind of word of mouth.” It helps that the rates there are cheaper than downtown.

Most of the businesses at the site now are small, with few employees: artisans and artists, wood shops, screen printers, a person who makes business cards, another who makes hats.

Katie Kimball is typical of many who came after the Big Three left: a comparatively small employer, taking up a lot of space. Her Twin Cities Trapeze Center occupies what used to be a large Hamm’s industrial floor, with high ceilings.

She has 11 employees, all part-time coaches. And while “our landlords are great and the space is great,” she adds: “There’s a lot of broken windows and stuff like that. We are kind of lucky because we don’t need walk-up traffic.”

But there are more jobs on those 7 acres right now than the 64 owned by the Port Authority. In all, Kuckler estimates 500 to 550 jobs on the site — anchored by its only large business, Health Systems Laundry, which does laundry for local hospitals and employs about 325 people.

SPLITTING EAST SIDE IN HALF

Tally it up, and you have well over 1,000 jobs on all the sites, not including the other projects along Phalen Boulevard, a project in part meant to replace the void left by the industrial crash.

But as far as feeding the surrounding neighborhood, like the East Side’s old industrial heart did, even that project has its critics. Walking traffic seems a thing of the past, and some call the thoroughfare project a thoroughly divisive spear that splits the East Side apart.

“It’s like a mini-freeway that goes through St. Paul, but you’re not connected to St. Paul. You put something down in a ditch, and make it so no people are ever around it, and then call it ‘urban renewal’? That’s ridiculous,” said Abbott-Foster. “I hear from employees (there) that say they would never even come out on the streets, and people were proud of it, were afraid of coming out on the streets.”

Hilleman, of the Port Authority, responds by talking about the “50 by 5” rule.

“For a site to be attractive (for a light-industrial user), you want to be going 50 mph within five minutes, or your site’s off the map,” Hilleman said. “And there was no good light-industrial thoroughfare to quickly get across the East Side.”

Still, Hilleman admits that for the Port Authority: “Weaving that social fabric is a challenge; it’s not something we can do ourselves. … That’s not really in our wheelhouse.”

Northern Iron and Machine owner Hamlett likes Phalen Boulevard for the same reason a lot of people don’t: It isolates his business, at least from transients.

Before, he said, he had a lot of homeless people cutting through his lot to the rear of the Seeger Square strip mall and camping out in some of his smaller outlying buildings. Now, not so much.

But still, getting the site’s workers to live in the area is something some incoming business owners say they desperately want.

“Part of our agenda is we would like to have our new employees walk to work,” said Curt Steffen, president of MacQueen Euipment Co., which will open a newly built 40,000-square-foot facility in October and hopes to hire 10 to 15 new employees over the next few years. “This is where their home is, right in their neighborhood. We really hope our (current) employees move over here to live, too.”

Northern Iron’s Hamlett said he wanted the same thing — at one point, he entered into an agreement with the Port Authority, which incentivizes local hires by counting them double toward employment quotas.

But the effort was a bust. “The people that live around here aren’t applying for the jobs. … We advertised, but they never came in,” he said, speculating that the old tradesmen either moved or died.

But longtime East Side residents still miss the old campuses — many talk about the decline as if reliving a traumatic experience.

“The thing about 3M is it generated a whole culture on the East Side. Just that monolithic presence. So now what we have are a variety of things along the corridor, but it doesn’t have that central theme of pulling the community together,” said Leslie McMurray, former executive director of the Payne Phalen District 5 Planning Council.

City and Port Authority officials say they’ve done the best with what they had — and there’s more to come.

“We look back historically and think, ‘OK, what if we didn’t do this?’ You would have a cancer,” said the Port Authority’s Hilleman. “And that cancer would have just spread disinvestment upon disinvestment and would have really started to strangle the city.”