In St. Paul, History and Renovation Come to Terms at 3M's Old Site PAUL - The squat, unassuming building at 900 Bush Avenue here seems an unlikely centerpiece for a battle between the St. Paul Port Authority and neighborhood preservationists. The two-story structure is dwarfed by a former factory across the street, and the only hints of its significance are brass letters above the door that proclaim Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, today known as 3M. The building, designed by the industrial architect Alfred Kahn and built in 1939, previously served as 3M's executive office building. Known locally as Building 21, it sits at the center of the former 3M manufacturing campus, whose 46.5 acres are currently being redeveloped by the Port Authority as an office and light industrial park a few miles from downtown St. Paul. Given its size, structures and the economy, the former 3M site has been a challenging project for the Port Authority, which typically handles smaller projects of 10 to 15 acres. After 3M itself was unable to find a buyer willing to pay an asking price of roughly $30 million, it turned to the Port Authority, which then bought the land in 2008 for under $5 million. "The impediment was 1.5 million square feet of manufacturing and office space that was structurally sound but functionally obsolete," said Louis Jambois, the Port Authority's president. The market was just not the least bit interested in this property. But the Port Authority, which saw it as a chance to replace the thousands of manufacturing jobs that had vanished from the neighborhood, was. Since 2008, the authority has invested more than $30 million in the 3M redevelopment, which has received financing from federal, state and local governments, including $5.2 million in grants and loans from the Environmental Protection Agency for assessments and cleanup at the site. After a century of industrial use of the site, the soil was polluted with solvents, heavy metals and other contaminants. The authority did not expect neighborhood opposition to its efforts, but perhaps it should have. 3M was founded in 1902 and was a major presence on the city's East Side from 1910 into the 2000s. Now based in Maplewood, Minn., 3M employed nearly 5,000 workers in the 1940s at the site, and many East Siders still feel a strong connection to the company, the site and its structures. More than 200 people attended a community meeting in 2008 on the Port Authority's plans for the site, and they were upset to learn that the agency planned to demolish all the buildings to create the new business park. "The Port Authority does some really terrific work, but they have a system, and it involves scraping sites and making things into something else," said Kathy Lantry, the president of the St. Paul City Council and a Port Authority commissioner. It's very different when you're doing that with an old junkyard or brownfield, versus 3M. Those emotions caught the Port Authority by surprise. "We were so excited about the project that it didn't even register with us until we got smacked in the face with it," Monte Hilleman, the Port Authority's project manager for the office park, called Beacon Bluff, said of the opposition. It was very eye-opening. Residents and preservationists, then stinging from the loss of a local bar demolished by the Port Authority, say nearly the same thing. "It was a wake-up call," said Carol Carey, executive director of Historic Saint Paul, a preservation group. Andrew Hine, a St. Paul native and second-generation 3M employee who started a Facebook page to lobby for saving the headquarters structure and others on the site, said: "Building 21 is a very special place, for many reasons. A lot of innovative things happened at that site, so it's not just for architectural reasons that I want them saved. History in itself is an economic driver, and with none, no one will want to visit or live here. In 2010, the neighborhood won a reprieve of sorts for the four buildings in the historic core of the property. The Port Authority agreed to market the structures for two years in the hopes of finding a preservation-minded buyer. But it faced difficulties because of low demand for commercial space in the Twin Cities, real estate financing challenges, brownfield problems and the weak national economy.