Joe Thornton and his colleagues in the Lowertown offices of the marketing firm AIMCLEAR aren’t holding out for a downtown promenade overlooking the Mississippi River, a longtime goal of outgoing St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s administration, as well as the mayoral administration before it.

Thornton can trace his St. Paul roots back generations — his uncle was once part of a private partnership that owned the downtown St. Paul Union Depot transit hub. Nevertheless, he’s not rooting these days for a towering mall where West Publishing once sat along Kellogg Boulevard, or any other among the longstanding efforts that begin with the words “reimagining downtown” or “reinventing downtown.”

Instead, he’s holding out for air conditioning.

In fact, he’s been praying for a fix to his downtown office building’s rooftop air conditioning unit for nearly eight months, long enough that the higher-ups in his St. Paul and Duluth-based company have begun scouting out potential new homes for their marketing business, which employs 20 people across the street from downtown Mears Park.

“We have space identified, some in downtown and some outside of downtown, some outside of St. Paul,” said Thornton, a vice president with AIMCLEAR. “It’s unfortunate because we want to be part of downtown. The owners of our company bought a condo (downtown).”

‘Up to 90 degrees’

The long saga of the Railroader Printing House building on Sixth Street and its malfunctioning rooftop air conditioning unit has become something of a metaphor for the nuts-and-bolts challenges facing downtown, if not the city as a whole, at least in the minds of Thornton and other commercial tenants in the five-story, red brick office building at 229 Sixth St. E.

The street corner structure, which faces Mears Park and dates to 1892, hasn’t had a working rooftop HVAC unit since at least May, when, for lack of a better term, the AC conked out.

“The temperature in the space would get up to 90 degrees,” Thornton said. “After about a month, they brought in five portable AC units and broke out windows to vent them, with water draining out onto the sidewalk on Wacouta Street and the patio by the Bulldog restaurant all summer long.”

“There was one really well-watered plant by Bulldog,” Thornton recalled. “It was the healthiest plant in downtown St. Paul. We couldn’t have clients coming in because it looked so janky.”

A surprise owner responds

Thornton took it upon himself to reach out to Bryan Larson, a former downtown resident who was part of the partnership that purchased the Railroader building in 2021. He soon heard back instead from Madison Equities, previously downtown St. Paul’s largest property owner, which has sold or lost several downtown structures following the death last year of its founder, James Crockarell.

“We acquired it jointly,” explained Larson, over coffee at the Bulldog restaurant on Thursday, the building’s most public-facing tenant. “Madison Equities is a 51% owner of that building. Madison Equities is involved … to the point that my hands have been handcuffed.”

To Thornton, that was not good news.

Madison Equities, which once owned 20 buildings downtown, put 10 structures up for sale together en masse in April 2024 and, since then, has been the subject of foreclosures, sheriff’s sales, legal disputes and other entanglements that have shuttered the massive Alliance Bank Center, boarded up the historic Lowry Apartments and led to widespread concern about the future of many of downtown’s most prominent properties.

“Any issues with the building, I was to route them to Madison Equities, and not to Bryan,” Thornton said he was told. “And all of a sudden it’s ‘Oh my God, it’s Madison Equities!”

When will the HVAC system get fixed?

What might strike the casual observer as a picayune air conditioning problem weaves in, in the telling of it over coffee at The Buttered Tin restaurant, many unruly elements. They include the fentanyl crisis, the homelessness crisis, city permitting and government bureaucracy, the uncertain fate and complex ownership surrounding any number of downtown office properties, and public and private efforts to maintain downtown as the economic engine of St. Paul rather than a drag on city coffers at a time of rising property taxes.

Still, where some might see incoming Mayor Kaohly Her inheriting a capital city with a number of tough, almost existential questions before it, Thornton and his colleagues share one question that in the near term for them trumps all others: When is the building’s HVAC system going to be fixed?

The downstairs restaurant maintains a separate HVAC system.

“I have my own,” said Bulldog owner Jeff Kaster. “But obviously, I walk through the building, and it’s hot. Obviously, it’s problematic.”

Park Square Court’s troubles

The Railroader Printing House adjoins the Park Square Court building, which was once slated by Madison Equities to be converted into apartments or a Marriott hotel. Instead, Park Square Court and its distinctive atrium remain vacant and boarded, with the Madison Equities-affiliated limited liability corporation that owns it having declared bankruptcy following a dispute over an unpaid loan.

“St. Paul Police found people who had scaled up the atrium and basically made an entire encampment up there,” Thornton said. “It’s in receivership, but that’s been vacant for five years.”

For months, if not years, squatters making themselves at home in the derelict Park Square Court space would traverse the skyway over to the Railroader building, where office tenants would sometimes call police to get unruly characters out of the bathroom.

Thornton, a vice president of strategic communications who has worked downtown for 17 years, including a decade with AIMCLEAR, was no stranger to snooping on behalf of his colleagues and his employer. It took him five years to gain regular access to the building’s security camera footage.

“We were having so many problems,” recalled Thornton, who found the security footage to be one of the greatest tools in his arsenal as he appealed for help to property owners, the St. Paul Police and the downtown improvement district’s street ambassadors. “Once I got access I showed (Larson) video clips of people defecating, doing drugs,” he said. “We want people to be treated humanely, but at the same time our building is not a shelter.”

Permitting issue

While far from perfect, the general situation has improved at the Railroader Printing building over the past year, with the notable exception of the malfunctioning rooftop AC unit. Thornton was told by a Madison Equities manager that a contractor had been assigned the task of fixing the unit and hopefully relieving his office of sweltering heat.

The latest visit was from Minnesota Total Refrigeration of South St. Paul.

“There were at least two if not three HVAC contractors that came through in May and June,” Thornton recalled. “I let him in, let him check our thermostat and up to the rooftop.”

A Madison Equities manager informed Thornton last month that progress had been delayed since then by the cyber-security incident that crippled city permitting over the summer.

Still, using the city’s new permitting interface, PAULIE, the contractor finally submitted an online permit application for a crane rental on Nov. 3, and “reached out to St. Paul Public Works many times,” Thornton said he was told, and “the equipment is waiting in their shop for installation.”

‘We’re waiting’

Efforts to reach Madison Equities for comment were unsuccessful Thursday, but a Nov. 13 email from Madison Equities real estate manager Derek Hennen to AIMCLEAR executives reads: “The city experienced major delays due to the hacker which impacted most city operations. … The contractor’s office has been contacting the city Public Works … often. I have also left voice messages following up on the permit approval as well.”

Thornton double-checked with the city. A right-of-way permit manager with St. Paul Public Works informed him they had not yet received a crane permit application. Instead, the company had submitted an application for licensing registration.

“He said, ‘We’re waiting. We don’t have a backlog of applications. We’ll be on it as soon as it gets in,’” Thornton said.

Larson also looked into the situation, and said Thursday he believes the problem could be as simple as the contractor reaching out to the wrong office. “There is some disconnect there,” he said.

Thornton then got the director of the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections on the phone, who told him that given the lack of appropriate paperwork, “We’re on standby.”

After playing go-between, Thornton said he’s hoping someone will pick up a phone soon and talk to someone else directly. He’s also praying for AC before summer hits, which isn’t so far away.

“I’m just a PR guy, and I can get a hold of these people,” said Thornton, who is discussing with his higher-ups the growing likelihood of leasing in another building in or outside St. Paul, and possibly moving to more of a hybrid work model. “We have multiple spaces identified. The frustration level, we have zero confidence that this thing is going to be done.”

Plans for parking ramp, vacant restaurant spaces

Meanwhile, Larson said that holding minority ownership in the Railroader Printing partnership means he’s not in control of next steps, but he’s hoping to step in where he can as Madison Equities retrenches from downtown.

If all goes well at closing on Dec. 15, he’ll be the new owner of the Stadium Ramp at 255 Sixth St., which overlooks CHS Field, home of the St. Paul Saints.

The parking ramp, which has been in receivership, hosts the A’Bulae wedding venue on the sixth floor, as well as ground-level and rooftop restaurant space, both of which are vacant.

His goal is to have both restaurant spaces occupied and greeting customers by spring.

“St. Paul is a beautiful neighborhood city that you can also do business in,” Larson said. “You can still feel that in the air.”

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Missed opportunities early and missed assignments late turned out to be a bad combination for the Minnesota Wild on Thursday night.

A trio of third-period goals by Calgary broke open a tie game, as the Flames skated to a 4-1 win and handed the Wild their first regulation loss in nearly a month.

Yakov Trenin scored the only goal for Minnesota, which had previously claimed at least a point in a dozen consecutive games. While things fell apart in the final 20 minutes, the game may have been lost early, as Minnesota was 0 for 4 on the power play in the first period, missing repeated chances to grab a critical lead on the road.

“I thought we got out-played tonight,” Wild coach John Hynes said. “It was the first time in a while I’ve seen us get out-competed, get out-skated, get out-executed. It wasn’t a good night for us.”

Filip Gustavsson finished with 26 saves, falling to 7-8-3 as Minnesota’s goalie of record this season. He went to the bench with more than three minutes remaining in the third in favor of an extra attacker, but the effort fell short as Calgary hit the empty net with just under a minute to play.

Since a 4-3 loss in Carolina on Nov. 6, the Wild had gone 10-0-2 prior to Thursday.

Calgary, which is the Western Conference’s most-penalized team thus far this season, upheld that reputation in the first period. The Flames spent eight of the opening 20 minutes playing short-handed, which allowed the Wild to enjoy decided advantages in shots and in possession time but not on the scoreboard, as the Calgary penalty kill was perfect.

The Flames’ penalty kill has been among the NHL’s best this season. They did admirable work disrupting the Wild offense, and goalie Dustin Wolf did the rest, with 11 first period saves.

“You’ve got to be ready to go, and tonight we weren’t,” Hynes said. “And that’s what happens. In this league, every night it’s a hard night. And tonight, for whatever reason…no excuses for it tonight, that’s for sure.”

Momentum swung, hard, to the home team in the middle frame, with the Flames taking a lead and holding the Wild without a shot on goal for nearly 14 minutes in the second. Jonathan Huberdeau got the game’s first goal, scoring from his knees after Ryan Hartman blocked the initial shot in front of Gustavsson, but the rebound proved to be dangerous.

“Obviously I don’t think we played up to our best standard, but I still think we created a bunch of chances early on,” Wild forward Mats Zuccarello said. “Second period, third period was so-so, but in the first first two we were creating those chances to lead the game…It’s disappointing to lose, but you’ve got to move on.”

The Wild did some line juggling later in the second to try and generate some offense, putting Joel Eriksson Ek at center between Kirill Kaprizov and Matt Boldy. That trio got some needed offensive zone time and tested Wolf.

Minnesota finally forged a tie when Trenin redirected a Zach Bogosian shot late in the second. The assist was the first point of the season for Bogosian, who missed more than a month with a lower-body injury.

“They played a better long game,” Bogosian said, giving credit to the Flames. “I think they capitalized on their chances and Gus definitely made some big saves to keep us in it there right until the end.”

The third turned out to be disastrous for the Wild. Calgary scored twice in the first six minutes, both of them off defensive miscues by Minnesota, taking control of the game.

Wolf finished with 26 saves for the Flames, who will decide the winner of their season series with the Wild on Jan. 29 when they visit St. Paul. The Wild won their first meeting 2-0 at Grand Casino Arena on Nov. 9.

Minnesota’s four-game western road trip continues on Saturday night when the Wild visit Vancouver for the first time this season. The opening faceoff is at 9 p.m. CT.

Briefly

The Wild were without rookie forward Danila Yurov for a second consecutive game. He is on the road trip but is still working his way back from a lower-body injury.

“He skated today in practice,” Wild coach John Hynes said following the team’s morning skate in Calgary. “He’s going to do some extra hard skate now and see how everything feels. So, it looks like he’s imminent but not tonight.”

Yurov has three goals and four assists in his first 21 NHL games.

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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Julius Randle had 28 points and nine rebounds, carrying Minnesota on a quiet night from Anthony Edwards, and the Timberwolves beat the New Orleans Pelicans 125-116 on Thursday night.

Edwards finished with just 11 points in 31 minutes. He scored a season-high 44 points on Tuesday in Minnesota’s 146-142 overtime victory in the opener of the two-game set.

Naz Reid added 19 points, seven rebounds and six assists for the Timberwolves, who won their fourth straight. Rudy Gobert had 15 points and 12 rebounds, and Donte DiVincenzo also had 15 points.

Trey Murphy III had 21 points, eight assists and seven rebounds for the Pelicans, who have lost five straight and fell to 3-20. Jeremiah Fears and Saddiq Bey each added 20 points.

The Pelicans scored the first point of the fourth quarter for a 91-88 lead. The Wolves then scored 15 straight for a 103-91 lead and held on from there.

Reid, who played at LSU, had two 3-pointers and an alley-oop dunk during the run.

Up next

Timberwolves: Host the Los Angeles Clippers on Saturday.

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“Stauffenberg pointed the way: if your obedience requires you to do criminal, unhuman things, you are no longer bound by your oath. A soldier’s final benchmark must always, in the last instance, be his conscience, not his orders.” That’s what Jan Techau, a friend of mine with a special vantage on this matter (more about Stauffenberg in a minute), told me when I asked him what he thought about a controversy now raging in the United States.

It’s about six members of Congress who used to serve in the military or the CIA, and who made a video in which they remind active service members that “our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders.”

The American president responded to their video by accusing the six of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” His department of defense — or of “war,” as he prefers — is going after one of them: Mark Kelly, a retired naval aviator and former astronaut. The FBI has opened investigations into all six. They report receiving all manner of threats.

Many Americans, and especially those who have taken similar oaths, find this reaction “really disgusting, and frightening.” That’s what Rachel VanLandingham, a former military lawyer to top generals, told me. She thinks that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, “should be impeached for his abuse of power; threatening to court-martial a sitting senator for simply re-stating the law.” According to her, that “reminder to disobey unlawful orders needed to be said, given the current abuse of the military by this administration (ordering them to commit murder in the Caribbean with the boat strikes, for example).”

There’s another, and more historical, way to grasp how right the senators are, and how wrong Hegseth and President Donald Trump are. And for that I turned to Techau, who used to be a speechwriter in the German defense ministry (he’s now at the Eurasia Group). The speeches he wrote included addresses given by the German defense minister when she oversaw the swearing-in of German recruits in the Bendlerblock.

The Bendlerblock is a complex of buildings in Berlin. It was the headquarters of Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht during World War II, and the site where, on the second floor, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators plotted to kill the Fuehrer. It is also where — in the courtyard, lit by the headlights of trucks — they were executed by firing squad when Operation Valkyrie failed on July 20, 1944.

Starting in the 1950s, the West Germans erected a plaque, memorial and museum in the Bendlerblock, which was by then in West Berlin, not far from the Wall. After reunification, the German defense ministry made the Bendlerblock its second headquarters (the other remains in Bonn). And on July 20 of most years, newly minted soldiers, sailors and airmen take their oath to the German constitution on the parade ground, right next to the memorial to Valkyrie.

Over the years, I’ve seen Angela Merkel and other grandees of German politics (including Annegret Kramp-Karrenberger, for whom Techau wrote) in attendance. This year the current defense minister, Boris Pistorius, addressed the troops and, like his predecessors, explicitly placed the modern German army in the tradition of the heroes commemorated behind him.

At a time when freedom, democracy and the rule of law are again threatened at home and abroad, Pistorius said, the plotters of July 20, 1944, exhort modern Germany’s “citizen soldiers” always to heed their conscience, always to think for themselves, and always to protect human dignity, enshrined in article 1 of the postwar constitution.

This embrace of the July 20 legacy was far from obvious in the early years after World War II. Turning Stauffenberg, Henning von Tresckow and the other plotters from traitors (a word Trump used for the six senators) to heroes required a huge rethink of war, morality and law, not just in Germany but in the world. This legal and ethical revolution, as it happens, was led by the Americans.

Its forum was the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, and its mentor was Robert Jackson, an American supreme court justice whom Harry Truman appointed to lead the world’s first international tribunal for the purpose of prosecuting “crimes against humanity,” starting in 1945. The three other Allied Powers initially had different ideas about retribution against the Nazi leadership. But Jackson and Truman insisted on a demonstration of due process to lend credibility to new global norms, subsequently called the Nuremberg Principles.

In Principle IV, Jackson and others established that “the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility.” This invalidated the “just following orders” defense that all the Nazi defendants attempted.

It also set the precedent for the Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949 and later its Additional Protocols, which emphasized individual responsibility in war and the duty to disobey unlawful orders. And it became the foundation for all subsequent tribunals against war crimes, such as those committed in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda. It also led to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which the United States midwifed in the 1990s but later turned its back on.

The norm also applied in domestic law, at least in liberal democracies. Germany most explicitly spells out the duty to disobey unlawful orders (nobody has ever questioned the duty to obey lawful ones, obviously), while France, Britain, Israel and other Western countries have analogs.

So does the U.S., where the Uniform Code of Military Justice stipulates that service members must obey lawful orders, while surrounding laws clarify what is unlawful. That definition includes any order “that directs the commission of a crime (for example, an order directing the murder of a civilian, a noncombatant, or a combatant who is hors de combat, or the abuse or torture of a prisoner).” In one famous case, for example, First Lieutenant William Calley testified that he was only following orders from his captain during the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam — and was nonetheless convicted of murdering 22 infants, children, women, and old men.

Nobody is suggesting that invoking the memory of Stauffenberg to inspire modern soldiers also equates their superiors to Nazis. The point of the exhortation is to take the most extreme situation imaginable and pose a simpler question, one that Kramp-Karrenberger (in words written by Techau) put to the recruits: In the midst of an inhumane dictatorship, a reign of terror, a war of aggression and genocide, “What would I have done?”

The situation in the U.S. today is completely different. And yet some American service members are asking themselves similar questions, not least about the U.S. strikes against boats of civilians who are suspected, on unclear evidence, of smuggling drugs. (In October, the admiral who was to oversee this campaign stepped down, less than a year into his three-year term.)

Elissa Slotkin, the senator who organized the video, also worries about troops deployed in American cities. In a committee hearing earlier this year, she grilled Hegseth about whether he would obey presidential orders to shoot at protesters (an order that Trump considered giving in his first term to one of Hegseth’s predecessors). The secretary made light of Slotkin’s questions and avoided answering.

“We know you are under tremendous stress and pressure right now,” the senators say in their video to service members. Which is why they found it necessary to restate the law of the land. Slotkin considers it “most telling” that the president believes this reminder should be “punishable by death.”

Fortunately, such threats from on high seem to be inspiring more courage than fear so far. “If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work,” says Senator Kelly, who as an aviator had a missile blow up next to his jet and, with his wife, knows political violence all too well.

The obligations of warriors in a republic are clear. They are to be loyal not to any individual leader but to their country’s constitution, and to obey lawful orders while disobeying those that are manifestly unlawful. Reminders of this bounden duty are anything but “insurrection.” At times, they amount to acts of the highest patriotism — and even heroism.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.