Are you one of 90,000 music fans heading to the Minnesota Yacht Club Festival later this month? If so, be sure to skip the light rail.
All 13 of the Green Line’s St. Paul stations — from Raymond Avenue to the stop outside Union Depot in Lowertown — will be offline for maintenance from late on the night of July 11 to early on the morning of July 21, dates that overlap with the three-day music festival at Harriet Island Regional Park.
The unusual nine-day closure will allow Metro Transit to replace worn track and perform other routine track work in the corridor, as well as conduct concrete work on the Cedar Street bridge.
Word of the closure took the St. Paul mayor’s office by surprise this week, drawing some consternation inside City Hall and a flurry of calls from Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher to Metropolitan Council Regional Administrator Ryan O’Connor, who was previously the county manager for Ramsey County. Tincher met with Met Council and Metro Transit officials around 2 p.m. Thursday for some tense talk, but the mayor’s office had no immediate changes to announce afterward to the maintenance schedule that was posted this week on Metro Transit’s website.
“We just found out this week along with everybody else,” said Emily Buss, a spokesperson for St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s office, as the meeting unfolded.
Tincher “called him right away and was like, ‘What’s going on here? You guys have known about this event for months now.’ We’ve been communicating with the Met Council since January saying, ‘Hey, this is coming up,’” Buss said. “I guess they decided routine maintenance had to happen right now.”
The closure coincides with two Minnesota United home games at Allianz Field — 7:30 p.m. July 12, versus the San Jose Quakes, and 7:30 p.m. July 16, versus the Los Angeles FC — as well as the three-day Yacht Club festival, which runs from July 18-20 at Harriet Island Regional Park. Some 30,000 fans are expected to attend each day of the festival, which brings together 30 bands, including widely-recognized acts like Hozier, Sheryl Crow, Weezer, Green Day, Fall Out Boy and Sublime.
How do you get 90,000 people to Harriet Island without the light rail? Metro Transit will offer bus alternatives, but details have yet to be announced.
This will be the second consecutive year of the Yacht Club Festival at Harriet Island, which hadn’t hosted marquee acts since the River’s Edge Music Festival in 2012.
St. Paul City Council President Rebecca Noecker was surprised to be informed Thursday that the Green Line would be offline in St. Paul for the entirety of the festival.
“That’s really concerning. We obviously need all of our partners pulling together when we’re doing something as significant as the Yacht Club Festival,” said Noecker, who took in the shows with her family a year ago. “We went both days last year and it was incredible. I’ve never seen Harriet Island so full. You couldn’t see the grass, which is the way it should be in that space.”
A reporter’s calls to Metro Transit were not returned Thursday morning.
Kathryn Kovalenko contributed to this report.
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