Dan Carlson, the new owner of the troubled Lowry Apartments in downtown St. Paul, plans to keep the currently-vacant building residential. Beyond that, the fate of the shuttered, century-old former hotel remains unclear, even to him.
“We haven’t settled on anything yet,” said Carlson, principal of Burnsville-based New Life Properties, which purchased the 11-story, 134-unit Lowry Apartments for $5 million at the end of June. “We haven’t decided if we’ll go with market rents. There was a senior home that did talk to us. I don’t know if anything will come of it.”
He may know by Sept. 1 what direction he intends to take with the Lowry, said Carlson, in a phone call from England, where he and his wife Lily were waiting for a connecting flight back to the United States. The couple have spent two weeks each year for the last four years in Zambia, a land-locked country in south-central Africa, where they sponsor young people in a children’s home.
Carlson said he had no illusions about the status of the Lowry Apartments, which were built in 1928 and were once a go-to hotel destination for visiting dignitaries. Burst pipes and a myriad of other challenges led the city to seek a court-ordered receiver for the property a year ago, and then condemn it, relocate tenants and board up the property last December.
“The plumbing and sprinkler system were destroyed when it froze,” said Carlson, whose company maintains its own construction crew under the title “Up We Go LLC.” Still, for that level of repair, “we subcontract that,” he said.
New Life Properties, which got its start around 2020, remodels single-family homes and multi-unit properties, and has also built five apartment buildings from the ground up in the past five years, all of them in Minneapolis. Carlson named his favorite project — a 52-unit apartment building he constructed from scratch at 3601 Nicollet Ave. S. — “The Lily Pad” after his wife, Lily.
He’s held onto the Lily Pad, but some other properties have been constructed to be sold. New Life Properties’ first apartment building was located at 2810 Park Ave. South, a 40-unit complex that found new owners, as did the Pearl Apartments, a 48-unit apartment building he constructed at 5405 Chicago Ave. S.
That said, he’s no stranger to remodels.
The Lowry Apartments represents his sixth foreclosure purchase, he said.
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