If the crack of the bat at St. Paul’s Midway Stadium gets you salivating for Cracker Jack, just imagine the crack of the bleachers.
Actually, it’s probably too soon to tell what will become of the bleachers at the home of the St. Paul Saints on Energy Park Drive, but the end isn’t so far away for the stadium, which will be demolished sometime around September 2014 or shortly thereafter. The Saints will move to the city’s new regional ballpark, soon to be under construction in downtown St. Paul, for the 2015 season.
What happens to the land on Energy Park Drive? Louis Jambois, president of the St. Paul Port Authority, is pretty confident it will soon blend in a little better with its industrial surroundings.
“There’s already, I think, some serious interest in that site,” said Jambois, whose organization has brokered a deal with the city to acquire the stadium and convert it into industry. “If we take possession of that property at the end of the Saints last season, maybe September 2014, it should be ready to go, the ballpark should be demolished, it should be cleaned up, and the geo-tecnical problems should be addressed by September 2015.”
Geo-technical problems?
Yeah, as in horse crap.
A fair amount of the land the stadium sits on was once a dump for material from the nearby state fairgrounds, “and one of the things that was dumped there was horse manure,” Jambois said. “And horse manure doesn’t turn into good dirt. It turns into methane and some solids.”
That will have to be dug out in favor of “much more stable soil,” said Jambois. From a cost perspective, a kind of worst case scenario might be installation of “geo piers” that would be installed down through the old manure and into bedrock, but Jambois is hoping not to have to go there.
“We know approximately where the dump is and we know how deep it goes,” Jambois said. “We are guessing it will cost at least $3 million, and possibly as much as $5 million to deal with the demolition, the contamination clean-up, and the geo-technical corrections. So there’s going to be a bunch of money invested. There’s just no way around it. But when we’re done, it’s going to be quite a site. And that’s why it’s generating interest already, which is pretty unusual.”
The Port Authority has developed a long swathe of Energy Park Drive, bringing various forms of jobs and industry to St. Paul, and Jambois is pretty confident that the current home of the St. Paul Saints will be no different.