Saint Paul Pioneer Press

September 27, 2003

FLOWER POWER
DOWNTOWN ST. PAUL IS BLOOMING, THANKS TO A COLLABORATION OF CIVIC-MINDED GREEN THUMBS.

By MARGE HOLS, Pioneer Press Columnist

As the greening of downtown St. Paul shifted into high gear this summer with the mass planting of Kellogg Boulevard, it was easy to forget what a colorless face our downtown presented just 10 years ago.

"Drab," "dull" and "depressing" are among the kinder adjectives longtime St. Paul boosters use to describe the 1994 downtown landscape.

"Everything was bleak, and there really were no flowers downtown," says Ruby Hunt, a veteran city council and Ramsey County Board member. That's when St. Paul garden designer Sally Ross decided to intervene.

"The city lacked amenities and wasn't very people-friendly," Ross recalls. "We thought planters filled with flowers would help on Wabasha Street, which Mayor Coleman was trying to make the entry into St. Paul. Plants give a city a fresh look and give people the feeling that somebody cares about making it attractive."

Ross recruited Perrin Lilly, Jean West, Pat Hart, Millie McAdams, the late Ramsey County Commissioner Diane Ahrens, Hunt and others interested in downtown. Organized as The Ross Group, they got a small grant from the St. Paul Foundation to buy 60 sturdy planters; arranged them along Wabasha, St. Peter and Sixth streets; and filled them with flowers in the spring of 1995. The previous fall, the group had enlisted volunteer help from Lowertown artists to paint flowers and landscape scenes on empty storefront windows.

"We think we were responsible for getting things started," says Hunt. "We encouraged business owners. We had hoped they would see the value of flowers and continue to do something, and that's exactly what has happened."

Today, the original pots, which the Ross Group still arranges to have planted each year, have been joined by a rush of flower power. Leading the charge to garnish St. Paul is Mayor Randy Kelly, a gardener who's been known to pull a few weeds before heading to City Hall in the morning.

"Blooming St. Paul is a major element in our strategy to make St. Paul the safest city of our size in the nation and one of the most charming cities," says Kelly. "There are studies from across the world showing that if you soften the urban environment and add greenery and flowers, you increase the feeling of people toward their community and increase the safety index. When things are beautiful, people are less likely to commit crime."

The mayor's chief greening lieutenant is Bob Bierscheid, who heads the city's Parks and Recreation Department. Bierscheid says other benefits of greening are tempering the downtown heat shield, creating a more inviting environment for people who live and work downtown and making people more willing to look at St. Paul as a destination.

"The city can't do it alone," Bierscheid says, "so we're trying to bring all our partners together."

Capitol City Partnership pays for the lush hanging baskets of petunias, geraniums and impatiens decorating downtown streets in summer as well as lighting for trees in winter. The St. Paul Hotel maintains an extensive English country garden on Market Street. Ecolab has installed a tree-filled plaza on Wabasha Street, and the Markham Co. bedecks the Hamm Building on St. Peter Street with flowering pots.

In the new northeast quadrant of Lowertown, housing developers have set gardens into the sidewalks Chicago-style. And up along St. Peter Street, ornamental grasses and black-eyed Susans join Peanuts characters in decorating the new Landmark Plaza, which the Riverfront Development Corp. created and gave to the city.

"The secret is timing and bringing all the puzzle pieces together," says Bierscheid. "The St. Paul Garden Club has been tremendously supportive. Paula Soholt, Deni Svendsen and especially Betsy Kelly -- she's such a gentle nudger."

Kelly says she was inspired by Chicago's acclaimed greening program, which features merchant-funded massive plantings of perennials, annuals and grasses along Michigan Avenue.

"I stood on a street corner in Chicago during a 1999 visit and practically wept at what they had done," Kelly recalls. "I came back and started advocating." The garden club, which plants flowers in Rice Park, supported her efforts.

With help from Coleman's office, the garden club organized a meeting for government, business and civic leaders at Landmark Center in April 2000. It brought in Douglas Hoerr, the landscape architect largely responsible for Chicago's urban greening plan, to inform and motivate St. Paulites to support development of a unified landscape plan for downtown St. Paul. Efforts languished, however, until Randy Kelly took office and declared flowers a priority.

Bierscheid and his parks staff, with advice from Hoerr, began preparing a master plan this spring for year-round greening. The Riverfront Development Corp.'s Design Group is helping with the effort.

Parks staff inventoried existing efforts, both public and private, and identified Kellogg Boulevard as a kickoff point. Eventually, Bierscheid hopes to extend plantings along major arterial roads, such as East and West Seventh streets and University Avenue.

This summer's lavish plantings of flowering shrubs, shrub roses and perennials on Kellogg were funded by a $50,000 grant to the garden club for a downtown beautification demonstration planting. The club gave $10,000 toward the required $50,000 match, and the city came up with the rest.

Boulevard corners feature such plants as mums, ornamental grasses, cabbages and pansies that will be changed each season.

"Beauty is a big draw," Betsy Kelly says, "and it's nice to have St. Paul be a destination. Flowers soften the atmosphere and increase stability. They're good for the economy."