Main Street – St. Paul (7th St. W. (Ft. Rd.) (Mn. 5))

“Whoever designed the streets (in St. Paul) must have been drunk. I think it was those Irish guys, you know what they like to do.” – Jesse Ventura on Late Night with David Letterman

We start in St. Paul, where 7th Street W. (running on old 8th Street) crosses 6th Street, and then 5th Street. Not being from Saint Paul, the obviousness of the answer to the question “Fort Road is a nice, unconfusing, name why didn’t they use that?” escapes me.

Our origin is roughly at the Ramsey County Juvenile Facility, which is across from the Children’s Museum. Warning to children “Behave.” We then approach one of the two different Mickey’s Diners on 7th Street. The famous one downtown, and another one down the road a 3.7 miles, the latter is subtitled: “By Willy”. I am sure there is a history here.

Mickey's Diner (from Google Streetview)

Mickey’s Diner (from Google Streetview)

We then approach Saint Paul’s attempts at economic development: River Centre, the X, parking lots. It is lifeless here but for the Dorothy Day Center, a Catholic charity which feeds the poor and always seems to have a crowd around.

Next we get some interesting older buildings mostly on the North Side. (St. Paul’s 7 Corners neighborhood) This should be a cool walkable neighborhood. It has some seeds (the coffee shop, the restaurant, the DQ, a real hardware store). But the road is too wide (4 lanes + 2 parking lanes, no median, few or no street trees) for this to have the relaxed, free to cross the street mid-block feel that Grand Avenue possesses.

Down the road to the west are more institutional and industrial and automobile service uses.

Then we get to another neighborhood retail node at Goodrich Avenue. This has a St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store. Nothing wrong with thrift stores, but they are indicators that rents are on the low side. And then lots of parking. Some more random retail. A Liquor Barrel. The road narrows up some.

We go over some rail tracks, and then in the distance, we spy  a brewery. Schmidt’s, the beer that made Saint Paul famous. This is being reused for housing and a taproom.

As we approach Randolph Road, there is another node. Then residential and auto-servicing retail businesses dominate until Otto Avenue. There a new Mississippi Market co-op store, a Shalom House, and some other higher density (but by no means high density) development prevails.

The road has an interchange with I-35E. We follow it past Montreal to the south side of Highland Park. We see the Second Mickey’s as well as a Famous Dave’s. The north side of the road takes on a wilderness character, as it is a steep wooded slope. Pearson’s Candy is on the south side. The street becomes more residential, and then Sibley Plaza emerges on the North side, a strip shopping area. There is a surprisingly random new apartment building on Davern Street. Then the road becomes a grade-separated divided highway.

Mickey's (by Willy) (from Google Streetview)

Mickey’s (by Willy) (from Google Streetview)

7th Street is one of those great pre-Interstate routes, one that lost a lot of business when long distance traffic migrated to I-35E, a route, that like Central Avenue and University Ave has seen better times. It was an early trail from Fort Snelling to Saint Paul that was geographically slated to be a significant transportation route. Running at a diagonal to the grid also makes it much more important, since that makes it a faster route, one which reduces the circuity of the network and attracts traffic. It was one of the early Streetcar routes, and the remnants of that remain.

The region has plans for Arterial BRT. This is a good thing. The transit already gets use, this should make it better. The city is in contrast proposing a Streetcar.

4 thoughts on “Main Street – St. Paul (7th St. W. (Ft. Rd.) (Mn. 5))

  1. Bill LindekeBill Lindeke

    Nicely done. For the record, that St Vincent’s is my favorite thrift store in the city…

    The coffee shop next door used to be a porn store, and now it’s fancy. So things are slowly changing on W 7th.

    I’d like to see the city keep the 4-3 conversion all the way to the Xcel center, but it’s likely that Cossetta would have something to say about that.

  2. Reuben CollinsReuben Collins

    Any discussion of 7th Street is incomplete without discussing Shepard Rd. The two are roughly parallel, but are vastly different in terms of character. People have a lot of strong feelings about both corridors – what they should look like, how much traffic they should carry, what speed they should be, etc.

    One thing to note about traffic volumes on 7th is the sharp distinction between volumes east and west of I-35E. East of I-35E 7th carries 10-20K vehicles per day. West of I-35E it carries 30-35K per day. At least one reason for this difference in traffic volumes is the configuration of the I-35E and TH-5 interchanges. Note that there is a full interchange at I-35E and 7th, but only a partial interchange at Shepard Road. So, for example, someone headed to the airport from Vadnais Heights uses southbound I-35E, then must exit and use 7th Street to connect to the TH-5 bridge across the Mississippi. This person doesn’t really have an option to use Shepard instead.

    Shepard, which is a four-lane divided limited access roadway carries about 15K-18K, well under the maximum capacity of its current configuration.

    Shepard is a local city of saint paul roadway, 7th is a trunk highway.

    Some folks look at this situation and think we should be figuring out how to get the through traffic off 7th and onto Shepard Road. Others don’t see a problem, either because they don’t want more traffic on Shepard, because they worry that diverting traffic of 7th would harm local businesses, or other reasons. Throw in some discussion about the several other things being considered along the corridor, LRT & BRT streetcar, and the 3rd potential corridor to be looked at (particularly for bikes), the underutlitzed CP rail spur that once fed the Ford Plant, and “baby, you’ve got a stew going!”

    1. Monte Castleman

      Also interesting is that the long term goal in the metro is to have the principal arterials, and only the principal arterials, be trunk highways. Shepard/Warner east of I-35E is a principal arterial; no part of 7th street is. It appears they were anticipating a swap at the same time Mn/DOT took over Crosstown and County 18 since the same statute (116.117) that authorized the Hennepin County swap also authorized Shepard/Warner as trunk highways (Legislative Route 380).

  3. Jules Gaudy

    Small thing and was only in the newspapers recently: The hardware store is being sold. Opus is proposing a “mixed-use development” on the site.

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