Complaints over locked downtown St. Paul skyway referred to city attorney

Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press
·8 min read

As a condominium owner in St. Paul’s Lowertown neighborhood, Dr. Sandy Smith enjoys the option of being able to traverse Mears Park at ground level or circle around it using the skyway system, a network of elevated pedestrian bridges linking residential and commercial buildings across streets.

Smith, a retired family practitioner who has lived downtown with her husband for six years, noted that all is not well within the skyway system. For years, questions over skyway hours, which corridors are publicly accessible through city easements and which ones can be locked up early or closed off altogether have dogged relationships between tenants, building owners and City Hall, especially in light of overnight vandalism.

At Sixth and Wacouta streets, things may finally be coming to a head, or so Smith hopes. Repeated complaints to the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections that property owner Jim Crockarell has blocked widespread access to the skyway through the Railroader Printing building have been referred to the city attorney’s office, which is weighing the possibility of misdemeanor charges.

“Reports have been submitted to the … Criminal Division for review of possible criminal charges regarding skyway access to the Railroader Printing building,” said City Attorney Lyndsey Olson, in an email on Sept. 30. “Because the matter is currently under review, we cannot comment further at this time.”

Reached by phone, Crockarell said he had owned the building less than a year and had no knowledge of any controversy over the limited skyway access. He also said he had no knowledge of skyway access changing after he bought the property.

“We’ve left it exactly the way it’s been, for what I understand, for several years,” he said. “DSI has not complained about it.”

“This has been a mutually beneficial situation for all parties, including the city,” Crockarell added. “Someone must have changed the circumstance or arrangement. If there’s any complaint, I’m certainly willing to do whatever’s appropriate.”

LOCKED ENTRANCE

The issue? Access, according to Smith.

The covered skyway corridors form a maze-like pathway through downtown, with a terminus at the River Park Lofts condo building near CHS Field. They’ve become a key selling point for property managers hoping to attract newcomers, especially retirees, to former office buildings leaning increasingly residential.

The skyway closest to Smith’s condo in the River Park Lofts crosses Wacouta Street into the Railroader Printing Building at 235 E. Sixth St., which faces Mears Park. The building is home to such popular eateries as the Bulldog and the Barrio Tequila Bar, as well as small software companies and other office tenants.

Crockarell and an associate bought Railroader Printing from the Brooks Group last December. At least since then, access to Skyway No. 14 has been limited for pedestrians entering from the Park Square Court building into the Railroader Printing building, where a door remains locked continuously. Smith and other condo owners at the River Park Lofts can still get back and forth using a lockbox keycode they’ve been granted.

“One fairly large commercial property owner can basically control what happens in the skyway,” Smith said. “You can potentially end up with portions of the skyway being partitioned out to various parts of the downtown population depending on where you are lucky or unlucky enough to live.”

‘THE SKYWAYS ARE OUR SIDEWALKS’

That’s frustrating enough for Smith and several of her neighbors, some of whom are elderly or disabled and expect unfettered access to the second-floor corridors. At least five of the condo owners use wheelchairs. Some, like Robert Wagner, have trouble accessing the lockbox given its placement.

“That … skyway closing dramatically shrinks my world down to one building, as well as threatens my safety,” said Wagner, who uses a wheelchair as a result of a severe spinal injury 17 years ago. “When that gets closed, especially in the winter, I can’t access the library. I can’t access Walgreens. I can’t access meeting friends for a drink or a meal.”

He added: “The skyways are our sidewalks. He’s closing off a public amenity. He doesn’t own the skyways, and in all the businesses he owns, he advertises skyway access.”

A second skyway — Skyway No. 15 — extends from the Park Square Court building, which is also owned by Crockarell and his real estate company Madison Equities, and crosses Sibley Street to the Mears Park Place Apartments.

Accessing Skyway No. 15 can be hit or miss, Smith said. “It’s locked intermittently,” she said. “One day I was walking to Walgreens, and when I came back it was locked. I feel that the main problem with the skyway is accessibility — egress and ingress.”

“This is clearly in violation of the skyway ordinance and has been cited by DSI multiple times,” added Smith, a member of the city’s Skyway Governance Advisory Committee. “Why is this taking so long? I can guarantee you that if I violated the ordinance, the city would not be as lenient.”

Crockarell said he was taken aback by the accusations.

If anything, he said, the condo owners have blocked access through the River Park Lofts to the parking ramp he owns at Sixth and Wall streets.

Residents have pointed out that no city easement allows public access there.

“They’ve locked it off for the last three years,” Crockarell said. “I haven’t complained about that. I don’t know why they’re complaining about the locking system the previous owner put in place. This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

‘I’LL TAKE THE FINE’

This isn’t the first time Skyway No. 14 has garnered negative attention from the city.

In June 2017, a divided city council voted 4-3 not to allow the Brooks Group to continue to close the skyway connection eight hours early, effectively ordering the property owner to maintain skyway access to the Railroader Printing building until 2 a.m.

In response, then-building manager Jaunae Brooks pledged civil disobedience. “I’m going to continue to close at 8 p.m.,” she said in an interview at the time. “Sue me. Take me to skyway jail. I’ll take the fine.”

Since then, the city has compromised somewhat on skyway hours, ordering the skyway network to remain open from 6 a.m. to midnight.

Bill Hanley, who was chair of the city’s Skyway Governance Advisory Committee in 2017, said the lockbox is a blatant snub of city ordinances.

“Everybody agrees it’s a violation,” said Hanley, a downtown condo owner. “The people at River Park Lofts, they’re red hot over this.”

Some building owners have said that as much as they take pedestrian concerns seriously, they’ve also been inundated with complaints about homeless or transient individuals sleeping in the skyways, damaging property and even urinating and defecating in the halls.

OVERNIGHT DAMAGES

Those concerns haven’t fallen on deaf ears at City Hall.

In an interview Thursday, Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher said she has been attending bi-weekly meetings to discuss safety concerns downtown with St. Paul police, building owners and key stakeholders such as the Greater St. Paul Building Owners and Managers Association and the Downtown Alliance. Crockarell’s real estate firm, Madison Equities, is represented in those conversations.

That doesn’t eliminate the possibility of misdemeanor charges against the building owner, but it does open the door to other solutions. Tincher noted the city has assembled a homeless-assistance response team among other strategies to work with transients.

“If there are things the city attorney needs to take action on, that would be separate and distinct from conversations I would be having,” Tincher said. “My thought on it, though, goes back to what are the reasons a property owner feels like they need to lock the door? If I can problem-solve around that, then it’s not a punitive approach.”

“There are challenges that well pre-date COVID, but the city now has a lot of tools we didn’t have before, that we’re really leaning into, to answer that bigger-picture question,” she added. “What I’m hearing from a lot of property owners is they are frustrated with vandalism, or public urination or drug use that is happening in parts of the skyway. … If there’s a reason they felt like they needed to lock the doors, I want to dig into that and see if we can problem-solve together.”

PANDEMIC ADDED STRESSES

Still, in recent years the city council, the Department of Safety and Inspections, the skyway advisory group and any number of residential tenants have all asked building owners for uniform hours, standards and security.

The COVID-19 pandemic has added special stresses and curveballs. By April 2020, during the first official weeks of the pandemic in Minnesota, some building owners “went rogue and just closed” their skyways without city permission, Hanley recalled.

Throughout the first two years of the public health emergency, the city later allowed property owners to close the skyways at 7 p.m. instead of midnight.

Since early April of this year, when the mayor lifted his local state-of-emergency declaration, the skyway system has been ordered open from 6 a.m. to midnight, with key exceptions such as the entrance to the federal courthouse on Robert Street.

Despite differences of opinion over how to structure skyway access, most everyone agrees that more eyes and ears from residents and passersby would be an improvement over the dog days of the early pandemic, when downtown was left nearly devoid of office workers.

Crockarell said he is optimistic about downtown foot traffic picking up, and he plans to have three restaurants operating in the near-vacant Park Square Court building in 2023, as well as several levels of residences completed by the end of next year.

Among the new eateries, a breakfast-and-lunch diner developed by head chef Justin Sutherland “is going to open in the next few months once we get a few more people downtown,” Crockarell said.

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