Downtown St. Paul Lunds gives civic boosters hope

Cored pineapple. Sliced turkey. A rack of bread.

To many they may only be groceries. But to the hundreds of people who poured into the new Lunds grocery store in downtown St. Paul today, they were signs of civilization.

Now that Lunds Food Holdings has opened its 24th Twin Cities location, downtown residents will no longer have to take a long bus ride to buy food and other necessities. For nearby residents and boosters of the state's second largest downtown, the new store has sparked new hope that the area has finally arrived.

Among those who were excited to enter its doors was Bianca Pettis, a musician and artist that lives in the city's Lower Landing neighborhood.

"I am a biker, and I don't have a car, so I take the bus, and I usually take a bus to Whole Foods or I'll take a bus over to Trader Joe's from downtown St. Paul," she said. "So this is really going to make a difference. I walked here today. I'm going to get my little grocery bag, and stop for a cup of coffee."

It isn't the first time St. Paul has gotten its hopes up. The city is dotted with decades of disappointing developments, many of them publicly subsidized, like Galtier Plaza, the World Trade Center, the Amhoist Tower and the vacant Macy's store.

Mayor Chris Coleman said he expects the grocery store to be different because it is a lagging indicator of the kind of change occurring downtown.

"When the projects that were built in the 1970s and 1980s were being built, it was trying to arrest a pattern of people leaving cities and saying, 'what do we need to do to get them back,'" Coleman said. "And now what we're seeing is that in-migration is already happening. People want to be downtown, whether you're a young person just starting off their career, or an empty nester that wants to be more centrally located to activities." Population figures from the state demographic center confirm the trend. The number of residents in the downtown core rose from about 4,400 in 1990 to more than 7,000 in 2010.

The new Lunds store is part of a burst of development activity in downtown St. Paul this year.

A new baseball stadium is under construction in Lowertown. The restored Union Depot just opened last year, the Ordway and Park Square theater are expanding, and new residences are going up on the West Side, in the old downtown Post Office tower and in the Pioneer Endicott buildings on Robert Street.

And all of that will be a short walk from the Green Line light rail service, set to open June 14.

Former St. Paul Planning and Economic Development director Cecile Bedor, who helped seal the Lunds deal, said area employment also has been quietly picking up.

"I think the state's office workers obviously are huge," Bedor said. "All five of our downtown hospitals have done significant expansion, we have Cray that came in. Microsoft, I know there's two other deals that the city is working on to bring more folks to downtown."

The new store also is a testament to how the grocery business has adapted to survive in downtown environments, Lund Food Holdings CEO Tres Lund said.

"There's no question the urban shopper shops differently -- more frequently during the week," he said. "We see this at our Hennepin and out Central locations. The average shopping occurrence at grocery stores across the country is 2.7 times a week. We're probably closer to 4.5 in our urban locations. They're coming in for meals as they need them."

Lund said appealing to urban shoppers involves employing a different product mix, with a wide selection but less depth. Prepared foods and an orientation toward foot traffic are also part of the formula.

Holly Folkers, a grant administrator for the state who has lived in a condo on 9th street for about four and a half years, hopes the store will be part of the glue makes downtown a regular neighborhood. Already, she appreciates its convenience of being able to find sugar, eggs and other staples nearby.

"Having the grocery store next door is going to be pretty big, because the time you spend getting on the bus and going to do your daily activities, it adds up," Folkers said.

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