Not far from the St. Paul river bluffs, across the street from St. Paul City Hall and the Ramsey County Courthouse, Scott Goltz is dusting off buried treasure. At least, that’s what it sometimes feels like to Goltz, a principal with the Blue Earth Land Management firm, which is overseeing the $15 million renovation of the old Lowry Hotel building, a Jim Crockarell property.
With the notable exception of the leased apartments on floors 4 through 8, the mission is to gut and remodel the ground level, basement, rooftop and hotel suites, much of which hasn’t seen daylight in some 15 years. Built in 1928, the 12-story Lowry, and especially its former basement dance venue the Oz Nightclub, was once a downtown St. Paul hotspot, but those disco/rock-era days of the 1970s and 1980s are long gone. The ground level has been shielded from public view by plywood for over a decade.
On Wednesday, the last of the street-level plywood came off the windows. Goltz showed a reporter the building’s new bay-window like doors at the corner of 4th and Wabasha, which open inward for an open-air feel. That’ll be the perfect complement to a new restaurant and bar, he said. And that’s just on the ground level.
Check out pictures here, here, here and here.
“It’s really taking blight off the face of the city,” said Ron Engen, a project manager with the Lowry renovation.
Work started Dec. 1, 2012. The ceiling has been painted and the electrical is all in. Three new elevators have been installed, and work begins on replacing the fourth and final lift on Sept. 9, Goltz said. Nevertheless, months of work remain on the future restaurant space alone, which has been pretty much gutted. Goltz is hoping that former building owner John Rupp will have a restaurant installed before this time next year (though plans once called for a restaurant to be in place by this summer.) Rupp was on site this morning to check progress himself.
So far, the biggest tenant is Ramsey County. County Attorney John Choi moved some 125 employees to the Lowry Hotel in late July, with 30,000 square feet of offices on the ground level and second floor. (If you start trouble in the future restaurant, can you meet your prosecutor for a drink and work it out at the bar? No, probably not…)
Goltz ventured downstairs to the basement level, where hanging lanterns from the old Oz Night Club still hang from the ceiling. The dream is to reopen a night club venue there, possibly as soon as a year or so. That, too, would be a Rupp venture. As Pioneer Press columnist Don Boxmeyer pointed out — way back in 1996 — Rupp has been promising big things at the location for a long time. Fast forward to 2004, when former Pioneer Press writer Karl Karlson wrote: “After nearly 10 years of trying, St. Paul developer John Rupp is restoring downtown’s Hotel Lowry with hopes of elevating the building to its former status as an elegant, ‘must go’ place to dine, dance and hobnob.” The Scoop has to sigh a little here.
But the new renovations feel pretty real, at least to the Scoop. Crockarell acquired the Lowry during Rupp’s bankruptcy proceedings last year, and has continued to work with Rupp on the Lowry and other properties. Hotel suites on the upper levels are also being brought back to their former glory, and a U-shaped rooftop could easily accommodate a restaurant and bar with both indoor and outdoor seating on the 11th and 12th floors, he said. Fingers are crossed. Breath firmly held in.
Pioneer Press business reporter John Welbes interviewed Crockarell and Rupp last year, and Welbes has chronicled some of the recent evolution of the Lowry here and here.
So why was the Lowry ever boarded up in the first place? Some blame commercial flight to the suburbs, but there’s also an insidious story dating back to a certain mayor in the 1970s, who decided that when it came to downtown real estate, he knew best.
Here’s the colorful Boxmeyer column from 1996:
1 / 1 – Monday, February 12, 1996
Edition: Metro Final
Section: Express
Page: 1C
Source: Don Boxmeyer, Staff ColumnistLOWRY HOTEL LEGACY BOOKED SOLID WITH COLORFUL CHARACTERS
The Loughrie Athletic & Culture Society was an indispensable organization, absolutely vital to democracy, that met only when necessary – and that was every Election Day when all the saloons were closed.
You could not legally get an Election-Day drink in St. Paul except at the Loughrie ACS, where it must have been legal because so many judges and cops were there, along with the bankers, the lawyers, the reporters and editors and all the street characters who made the town go.
This was in a suite of rooms on the second floor of the old Lowry Hotel, and an Election-Day session of the society was really an armistice presided over by a jolly, ferociously social public relations man named John Hedback, who somehow kept order among all the politicians who’d just spent months cutting each other to pieces.
When word went out last week that the 11-story Lowry might be reopened as a stylish neoclassic hotel, the news brought back memories of a place that provided St. Paul with some of its richest, most outrageous entertainment, much of it even planned and organized.
The Lowry at Fourth and Wabasha stopped being a real hotel in 1970, on New Year’s Eve. Up until then, it had been operated as a 350-room top-of-the line inn visited at various times by the likes of Charles Lindbergh, Bing Crosby, Ed Sullivan, Harry S. Truman and once, according to old newsboy Lloyd Peterson of St. Paul, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
This was a stop for big-name bands, and Glenn Miller played there, and Benny Goodman, Clyde McCoy, Paul Whiteman, the Dorseys and Red Nichols. It had a Terrace Cafe, and a Driftwood Room (dubbed the “Deadwood Room” in honor of its noon-hour, round-table crowd from City Hall).
But in 1970, the Lowry was on its way out as a hotel and on its way in as a regional showcase for deep skulduggery and advanced, sophisticated hoodwinkery. St. Paul had a mayor, a dabbler in real estate, who decided that the hotel should be acquired by the city and be used as office space.
Mayor Charles P. McCarty Jr. signaled his intentions early when he said that if the owners thought the Lowry was worth more than the $700,000 he wanted to pay, he’d just “raise their taxes accordingly.”
Charlie did work out a dazzling deal for the place, but he had a bad habit of forgetting that six other people – the rest of the City Council – also ran the city. One of those was charitable when he called the deal “the most nefarious, underhanded scheme” he’d seen in 23 year of politics. Another said that Charlie’s intrigue rivaled World War II’s Manhattan Project for secrecy.
Charlie’s Lowry shenanigans, his secret meetings and closed-door deals dominated City Hall news for a year. When it appeared that he’d finally bought the place, the city comptroller – the fellow who wrote all the checks – wouldn’t sign because he said Charlie stole the purchase money from the city’s sewer users.
So Charlie went out and found another buyer, someone just as colorful as himself – Bob Short, a Minneapolis hotel magnate, trucking company baron and professional sports team owner. For the record, Charlie denied he got a finder’s fee.
Short not only bought the Lowry but the St. Paul Hotel as well, and a few others, and called a news conference to say he was going to turn St. Peter Street into a Bourbon Street of the North. He was going to link the Civic Center to his new hotels with skyways or tunnels and install stewardesses as bellhops. Everyone was dancing in the streets that afternoon, which was, appropriately, April Fools’ Day.
A year and a half later, when his plans had turned to dust, when skyway and tunnel links and stewardhops were only joked about, when St. Peter Street was still St. Peter Street, when the hotel bars and restaurants were still closed and his only occupant of the Lowry Hotel, oddly enough, was former Mayor Charles P. McCarty Jr., Short said he’d been “hoodwinked” and wanted only to get himself – and what was left of his money – out of St. Paul.
Since then, the only thing that hasn’t happened to the 70-year-old Lowry building is demolition. It has gone through a succession of owners, and it is now an apartment building, its once majestic ballroom turned into office space for bureaucrats.
Part of what was once a hotel basement and a barber shop has housed a glittery joint called the Oz Night Club. The first floor has been a television station, is now a police station and, for a brief time before it burned out, a popular watering hole named Horatio Hornblower’s. If you look closely, you can still see where the main Wabasha Street entrance to the old Lowry once was and where the hotel marquee was strapped to the second-floor wall.
It is here that developer John Rupp would work some magic and turn the Lowry back into a real hotel. The ghosts await within, John. Go to it, please.Don Boxmeyer’s column runs on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.