The Saint Paul Condo Blog

The bridge between Lowertown and Downtown.  One of the recognized historical buildings located in Lowertown, but connected to the skyway system, this building offers a lot of bang for the buck.  River Park Lofts starting marketing the old Lowertown Business Center about 2 1/2 years ago and now the first residents have finally moved in.  There was a lot of work that the building to bring it to it's current state. 

Just about every unique piece of architecture in this building came with some sort of controversy.  The exposed beams had to be sandblasted clean and the debris had to be treated like contaminated material because of the age of the building.  The atrium in the building almost didn't happen because of smoke ventilation.  One of the proposed solutions was to put a plexi-glass cover over every floor, creating a cleaning nightmare!  The balconies on the back of the building also almost didn't make it past approval from the Historic Preservation Committee.  Then when they did they received the OK from the the city to use Trex decking.  When the City came through for their final inspection for the C.O.O. (Certificate of Occupancy), they nixed the Trex decking as a fire hazard, this was a week from the first resident scheduled to move in.  They had to throw away $75,000 worth of unusable decking and replace it with aluminum decking.

If anyone ever said that converting 100 year old warehouses was easy, they were crazy!

River Park Lofts is still constructing some of the individual lofts, but most of the building is complete.  With over 100 workers on site Monday - Friday, the building tends to be a mess.  My guess is that the building will look really sharp come September, when just about all of the construction should be completed.