Despite its well-documented challenges, some business advocates call reports of the fall of downtown St. Paul premature, if not entirely off base, given ongoing investment in office-to-residential building conversions, new eateries and other fresh offerings.

Construction is underway on the Avalon, a new event hall within the long-dormant James J. Hill Center overlooking Rice Park. The former business research center, which opened in 1921, closed in 2019 amid growing maintenance needs. The Avalon could throw open the doors to weddings, cultural events and musical performances amidst its 14 Romanesque interior columns by late fall, according to developer Peter Remes of First & First Creative Real Estate in Minneapolis.

Developer Peter Remes looks over blueprints for the remodel and renovations of the James J. Hill Center in downtown St. Paul on Tuesday, May 27, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“I was born and raised in St. Paul,” said Remes, who chafed at the idea of a century-old historic library sitting idle. “It was very important to me. Having this building shuttered was not a benefit to anyone.”

Remes, who is perhaps best known in St. Paul for reviving the Vandalia Tower business center, said it’s taken four years to obtain permitting, secure state and federal historic tax credits and work through other obstacles for the site, which is getting a $3.5 million upgrade. That includes new bathrooms and heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems, as well as a new interior stairway to a new basement egress door.

The James J. Hill Center overlooks Rice Park in downtown St. Paul on Tuesday, May 27, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Despite the hefty price tag, “much of it is stuff that you won’t even see,” he acknowledged.

Despite the well-chronicled foreclosures and other property setbacks downtown associated with major property owner Madison Equities, “there’s a lot of great things happening here,” Remes said. “It’s not widely talked about. The bad news gets the attention. But there are people who are really dedicated to St. Paul.”

Bright spots elsewhere

On Wabasha Street, chef Terry John Zila has relaunched the former Gallery Kitchen in the basement of the Osborn 370 building into a softly-lit event center geared toward private gatherings, cooking classes and musical performances.

Terry John Zila, owner of HepCat Coffee makes a cup of coffee in his new downtown St. Paul eatery, which is seeing renewed signs of life after two years of the pandemic, March 3, 2022. (Scott Takushi / Pioneer Press)

In addition to pop-up dinners to “test the waters” on his catering menus, Zila plans to expand his HepCat Coffee space on the ground level, reorienting it toward the lobby of the former Ecolab building with the help of a city STAR grant.

“People are still discovering us,” said Zila, who moved his catering operation and coffee shop into Osborn 370 in February 2022. “Two or three times a week, (customers) say, ‘I didn’t even know you were here.’”

Zila hopes to become a bit of a commissary for the 174 new market-rate apartments under construction next door within the Stella, the former Ecolab tower at Sixth and Wabasha streets.

Those apartments may be online by early next year, adding to the foot traffic already evident at Osborn 370, the former Ecolab Corporate Center, which has drawn a wide range of both young and established planning and financial firms, including Bridgewater Bank and the Greater MSP Partnership, since its repositioning under PAK Properties.

‘Coming soon’

A “Coming Soon!” sign advertises the imminent arrival of Six Mears, a new Sixth Street restaurant where Barrio once opened its doors onto Mears Park. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Meanwhile, across downtown, a “Coming Soon!” sign advertises the imminent arrival of Six Mears, a new Sixth Street restaurant where Barrio once opened its doors onto Mears Park.

Another event center, Le Venere — a new addition to the A’Bulae event center — will host a Roaring 1920s-themed grand opening celebration toward the end of the month within the Gilbert Building on Wacouta Street.

Prince Coal Fired Pizza is expected to open in July within the former Black Sheep Pizza space at the Rossmor Building on Robert Street.

Palace Pub will be opening soon on Seventh Place in the space previously occupied by Wrecktangle Pizza’s Wrestaurant at the Palace.

Recent arrivals

Sherman Associates has completed its $80 million to $100 million conversion of Landmark Towers on St. Peter Street from a 26-story office building. It’s now home to 187 new luxury apartments, with each layout named after 1980s icons like “The Bruce” and “The Axl.” The converted structure welcomed its first new tenants around the start of May.

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Phe Coffee opened within the Market House on Fifth Street in Lowertown this past January. SoYen Desserts, which opened in March 2024, continues to draw a sell-out crowd every weekend down the street in the Northwestern Building at 275 E. Fourth St.

The Union Depot’s retail spaces are now fully leased with the recent additions of Story Line Books and the 1881 Eating House, which debuted its new outdoor summer patio on Thursday.

Global Storage Partners, of Carlsbad, Calif., was unable to install mini-storage in the Allen Building so it recently purchased four of the six floors in the annex building to the Custom House Apartments on Kellogg Boulevard. They’ve installed Extra Space Storage as manager, with large illuminated signage that has irked some neighbors.

Relocations, reopenings and new acquisitions

On Wabasha Street, Afro Deli is moving across the street from its current location and prepping a new food counter where Slice Pizza briefly served up pies within Treasure Island Center, a former Macy’s department store.

In July, St. Paul Brewing and Can Can Wonderland plan to reopen the recently-shuttered Dark Horse bar on East Seventh Street, with a new chef, decor and menu.

The Town Square food court and skyway has drawn several former tenants from Alliance Bank Center, including B’s Barbershop, Greenwolf Hemp and Organics and Paul Hartquist Jewelers.

Other reopenings over the past year include Mickey’s Diner, Ruam Mit Thai and Alary’s — now home to Pete’s BBQ. Two temporarily-shuttered downtown storefronts — La Noire Bridal and Garso Mini-Mart — also plan to reopen in new downtown locations this summer.

In April, Exchange Ventures LLC of Lake Forest, Calif., purchased the Gallery Professional Building, a former medical office building at 17 W. Exchange St., from the Salvation Army for $199,000. Despite the rock-bottom sales price for the vacant eight-story structure, property taxes based on its assessed market value are high, as are maintenance costs, and parking is limited, said the buyer, who did not disclose his full name when reached by phone May 20. He said he’s hoping to get some leeway from the city and county before renovating, likely for office and retail uses, he said.

Parks

Following an $8 million planning and construction effort, the long-awaited Pedro Park will open by late summer at 10th and Robert streets.

Along Kellogg Boulevard, Kellogg Mall Park will soon host a publicly available restroom and a designated “park ambassador” to keep the park clean and amenities fresh, according to St. Paul Parks and Recreation. A full schedule of summer events is online at kelloggmallpark.com.

Osborn Plaza, the city-owned plaza along Wabasha Street, will be reconstructed this summer and fall.

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St. Paul Parks and Rec will soon replace a retaining wall in Mears Park, a $98,000 project. The free summer concert series “Lowertown Sounds” returns this summer with the New Standards, Salsa Del Soul, Yam Haus, Kiss the Tiger and the Flamin’ Ohs. A complete schedule is online at LowertownSounds.com.

A downtown block party was scheduled at Mears Park from 5 to 7 p.m. May 30, with live music, as well as food and drinks provided by Barrel Theory, the Bulldog and Lost Fox.

Vandals uprooted 60 freshly-planted trees along Shepard Road last November. St. Paul Parks and Rec replanted them on May 16.

Not far outside downtown, the Victorian-style Irvine Park fountain has returned home following an eight-month, $120,000 restoration effort.

A full schedule of downtown park events is online at stpaul.gov/downtownparks.

By HOLLY MEYER

BREMEN, Ga. (AP) — Singers at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church in West Georgia treat their red hymnals like extensions of themselves, never straying far from their copies of “The Sacred Harp” and its music notes shaped like triangles, ovals, squares and diamonds.

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In four-part harmony, they sing together for hours, carrying on a more than 180-year-old American folk tradition that is as much about the community as it is the music.

It’s no accident “The Sacred Harp” is still in use today, and a new edition — the first in 34 years — is on its way.

Since the Christian songbook’s pre-Civil War publication, groups of Sacred Harp singers have periodically worked together to revise it, preserving its history and breathing new life into it. It’s a renewal, not a reprint, said David Ivey, a lifelong singer and chair of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company’s revision and music committee.

“That’s credited for keeping our book vibrant and alive,” said Ivey.

First published in 1844 by West Georgia editors and compilers Benjamin F. White and Elisha J. King, revisions of the shape-note hymnal make space for songs by living composers, said Jesse P. Karlsberg, a committee member and expert on the tradition.

A 1911 edition of “The Sacred Harp,” a shape-note hymnal from the 1800s, opened to song No. 43, “Primerose Hill,” at the Sacred Harp Publishing Company and Museum in Carrollton, Ga., on Friday, March 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

“This is a book that was published before my great-grandparents were born and I think people will be singing from it long after I’m dead,” said Karlsberg, who met his wife through the a cappella group practice, which is central to his academic career. It’s also his spiritual community.

“It’s changed my life to become a Sacred Harp singer.”

Cuts, additions and other weighty decision making

The nine-member revision committee feels tremendous responsibility, said Ivey, who also worked on the most recent 1991 edition.

Sacred Harp singers are not historical reenactors, he said. They use their hymnals week after week. Some treat them like scrapbooks or family Bibles, tucking mementos between pages, taking notes in the margins and passing them down. Memories and emotions get attached to specific songs, and favorites in life can become memorials in death.

“The book is precious to people,” said Ivey, on a March afternoon surrounded by songbooks and related materials at the nonprofit publishing company’s museum in Carrollton, Georgia.

Sacred Harp singing is a remarkably well-documented tradition. The small, unassuming museum — about 50 miles west of Atlanta near the Alabama state line — stewards a trove of recordings and meeting minutes of singing events.

Sarah George, who met her husband through Sacred Harp singing, holds their son while leading a song from the hollow square at a Sacred Harp gathering in Bremen, Ga., at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church on Saturday, March 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

The upcoming edition is years in the making. The revision, authorized by the publishing company’s board of directors in October 2018, was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It now will be released in September at the annual convention of the United Sacred Harp Musical Association in Atlanta.

Ivey hopes singers fall in love with it, though he knows there is nervousness in the Sacred Harp community. For now, many of the changes are under wraps.

Assembled to be representative of the community, the committee is being methodical and making decisions through consensus, Ivey said. Though most will remain, some old songs will be cut and new ones added. They invited singer input, holding community meetings and singing events to help evaluate the more than 1,100 new songs submitted for consideration.

Singing unites generations of family and friends

Sarah George, who met her husband through Sacred Harp and included it in their Episcopal wedding, hopes his compositions make the 2025 edition and their son grows up seeing his dad’s name in the songbook they will sing out of most weekends.

More so, George is wishing for a revival.

Her hope for “the revision is that it reminds people and reminds singers that we’re not doing something antiquated and folksy. We’re doing something that is a living, breathing worship tradition and music tradition,” said George, during a weekend of singing at Holly Springs.

Dozens gathered at the church for the Georgia State Sacred Harp Convention. Its back-to-back days of singing were interrupted by little other than potluck lunches and fellowship.

Sharing a pew with her daughter and granddaughter, Sheri Taylor explained that her family has sung from “The Sacred Harp” for generations. Her grandfather built a church specifically for singing events.

Sheri Taylor, left, sits with her daughter, Laura Wood, and granddaughter, Riley McKibbin, 11, while singing from “The Sacred Harp” in the tenor section at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church in Bremen, Ga., on Saturday, March 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

“I was raised in it,” said Taylor.

They’ve also known songwriters. Her daughter Laura Wood has fond childhood memories of singing with the late Hugh McGraw, a torchbearer of the tradition who oversaw the 1991 edition. While her mother is wary of the upcoming revision, knowing some songs won’t be included, Wood is excited for it.

At Holly Springs, they joined the chorus of voices bouncing off the church’s floor-to-ceiling wood planks and followed along in their songbooks. Wood felt connected to her family, especially her late grandmother.

“I can feel them with me,” she said.

Fa, sol, la, mi and other peculiarities of shape-note singing

Like all Sacred Harp events, it was not a performance. “The Sacred Harp” is meant to be sung by everyone — loudly.

Anyone can lead a song of their choosing from the hymnal’s 554 options, but a song can only be sung once per event with few exceptions. Also called fa-sol-la singing, the group sight-reads the songs using the book’s unique musical notations, sounding first its shape notes — fa, sol, la and mi — and then its lyrics.

“The whole idea is to make singing accessible to anyone,” said Karlsberg. “For many of us, it’s a moving and spiritual experience. It’s also a chance to see our dear friends.”

The shape-note tradition emerged from New England’s 18th century singing school movement that aimed to improve Protestant church music and expanded into a social activity. Over time, “The Sacred Harp” became synonymous with this choral tradition.

“The Sacred Harp” was designed to be neither denominational nor doctrinal, Karlsberg said. Many of its lyrics were composed by Christian reformers from England, such as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, he said. It was rarely used during church services.

Instead, the hymnal was part of the social fabric of the rural South, though racially segregated, Karlsberg said. Before emancipation, enslaved singers were part of white-run Sacred Harp events; post-Reconstruction, Black singers founded their own conventions, he said. “The Sacred Harp” eventually expanded to cities and beyond the South, including other countries.

“The Sacred Harp” is still sung in its hollow square formation. Singers organize into four voice parts: treble, alto, tenor and bass. Each group takes a side, facing an opening in the center where a rotating song leader guides the group and keeps time as dozens of voices come from all sides.

Christian or not, all singers are welcome

“It’s a high. I mean it’s just an almost indescribable feeling,” said Karen Rollins, a longtime singer and committee member.

At the museum, Rollins carefully turned the pages of her first edition copy of “The Sacred Harp,” and explained how the tradition is part of her fiber and faith. She often picks a Sunday singing over church.

“I like the fact that we can all sing — no matter who we are, what color, what religion, whatever — that we can sing with these people and never, never get upset talking about anything that might divide us,” she said.

Though many are Christian, Sacred Harp singers include people of other faiths and no faith, including LGBTQ+ community members who found church uncomfortable but miss congregational singing.

Trees encircle Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church, which has been a historical meeting site for Sacred Harp singers for generations, in Bremen, Ga., on Sunday, March 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

“It’s the good part of church for the people who grew up with it,” said Sam Kleinman, who stepped into the opening at Holly Springs to lead song No. 564 “Zion.” He is part of the vibrant shape-note singing community in New York City, that meets at St. John’s Lutheran Church near the historic Stonewall Inn.

Kleinman, who is Jewish but not observant, said he doesn’t have a religious connection to the lyrics and finds singing in a group cathartic.

Whereas Nathan Rees, a committee member and Sacred Harp museum curator, finds spiritual depth in the often-somber words.

“It just seems transcendent sometimes when you’re singing this, and you’re thinking about the history of the people who wrote these texts, the bigger history of just Christian devotion, and then also the history of music and this community,” he said.

Matt Hinton, a shape-note singer, leads a song at a Sacred Harp singing event held at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church in Bremen, Ga., on Saturday, March 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

At Holly Springs, Rees took his turn as song leader, choosing No. 374, “Oh, Sing with Me!” The group did as the 1895 song directed — loudly and in harmony like so many Sacred Harp singers before them.

“There’s no other experience to me that feels as elevating,” he said, “like you’re just escaping the world for a little while.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

By Renuka Rayasam, KFF Health News

Brian Rigsby was lying with his right wrist shackled to a hospital bed in Montgomery, Alabama, when he learned he didn’t have long to live.

It was September 2023, and Rigsby, 46, had been brought to Jackson Hospital from an Alabama state prison 10 days earlier after complaining of pain and swelling in his abdomen. Doctors found that untreated hepatitis C had caused irreversible damage to Rigsby’s liver, according to his medical records.

Rigsby decided to stop efforts to treat his illness and to decline lifesaving care, a decision he made with his parents. And Rigsby’s mother, Pamela Moser, tried to get her son released to hospice care through Alabama’s medical furlough policy, so that their family could manage his end-of-life care as they saw fit.

But there wasn’t enough time for the furlough request to be considered.

After learning that Rigsby was on palliative care, the staff at YesCare, a private prison health company that has a $1 billion contract with the Alabama Department of Corrections, told the hospital it would stop paying for his stay and then transferred him back to Staton Correctional Facility in Elmore, according to the hospital record his mom provided to KFF Health News.

Moser never saw or spoke to her son again.

“The last day I went to see him in the hospital, I was hoping he would take his last breath,” said Moser, a former hospice nurse. “That is how bad I didn’t want him to go to the infirmary” at the prison.

A week later, Rigsby died of liver failure in the infirmary, according to his autopsy report.

Officials at the corrections department and YesCare did not respond to requests for comment.

As the country’s incarcerated population ages rapidly, thousands die behind bars each year. For some researchers, medical providers, and families of terminally ill people in custody, Rigsby’s situation — and Moser’s frustration — are familiar: Incarcerated people typically have little say over the care they receive at the end of their lives.

That’s despite a broad consensus among standards boards, policymakers, and health care providers that terminally ill people in custody should receive treatment that minimizes suffering and allows them to be actively involved in care planning.

But such guidelines aren’t binding. State policies on end-of-life care vary widely, and they generally give much leeway to correctional officers, according to a 2021 study led by Georgia State University. The result is that correctional officers and medical contractors make the decisions, and they focus more on security concerns than easing the emotional, spiritual, and physical pain of the dying, say researchers and families.

People in jails and prisons often die while shackled to beds, separated from loved ones, and with minimal pain medication, said Nicole Mushero, a geriatrician at Boston University’s Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine who studies and works with incarcerated patients.

“When you’re coming at this from a health care perspective, it’s kind of shocking,” Mushero said.

Security vs. Autonomy

Patients are often suspended or dropped from their health coverage, including commercial insurance or Medicaid, when incarcerated. Jails and prisons have their own systems for providing health care, often funded by state and local budgets, and therefore aren’t subject to the same oversight as other public or private systems.

The National Commission on Correctional Health Care, which accredits programs at correctional facilities across the country, says terminally ill people in custody should be allowed to make decisions about treatment options, such as whether to accept life-sustaining care, and appoint a person who can make medical decisions for them.

Jails and prisons should also provide patients with pain medication that wouldn’t otherwise be available to them, allow extra visits with loved ones, and consider them for medical release programs that let them receive hospice care in their communities, said Amy Panagopoulos, vice president of accreditation at the commission. That approach is often at odds with security and safety rules of jails and prisons, so facility leaders may be heavily involved in care decisions, she said.

As a result, the commission plans to release updated standards this summer to provide more details on how facilities should handle end-of-life care to ensure incarcerated patients are more involved in the process.

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State laws on medical decision-making, informed consent, and patient privacy apply even to incarcerated patients, said Gregory Dober, who teaches biomedical ethics and is a prison monitor with the Pennsylvania Prison Society, a nonprofit that supports incarcerated patients and their families.

But correctional officers and their medical contractors often prioritize security instead, Dober said.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons allows guards to override do-not-resuscitate orders if they interfere with the security and orderly operation of the institution, according to the agency’s patient care guide.

“This is a wildly understudied area,” said Ben Parks, who teaches medical ethics at Mercy College of Ohio. “In the end, it’s all about the state control of a prisoner’s life.”

About a third of all people who died in federal custody between 2004 and 2022 had a do-not-resuscitate order, according to Bureau of Prisons data obtained by KFF Health News through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The prison bureau’s policy of forcing CPR on patients is cruel, Parks said. CPR can break ribs and bruise organs, with a low likelihood of success. That is why people sign do-not-resuscitate orders refusing the treatment, he said.

“This is the inversion of the death penalty,” Parks said. “Resuscitation against your will.”

Cut Off From Family

In addition, corrections officials decide whether and when to reach out to a patient’s friends or relatives, said Erin Kitt-Lewis, a Penn State College of Nursing associate research professor who has studied the care of older adults in prisons. As a result, terminally ill people in custody often can’t involve their families in end-of-life care decisions.

That was the case for Adam Spurgeon, who was incarcerated in a state prison in Tennessee, his mother said. One morning in November 2018, Kathy Spurgeon got a call from hospital officials in Nashville saying her son had only hours to live, she said.

About a month earlier, she had learned from her son that he had had heart surgery and developed an infection, she said. But she didn’t know much about his treatment.

Around noon, she arrived at the hospital, about a three-hour drive west of where she lives. Adam, 32, died that evening.

Dorinda Carter, communications director at the Tennessee Department of Correction, declined to comment on Spurgeon’s case. “It is our policy to not comment on an individual inmate’s medical care,” she said in an email.

Kathy Spurgeon said providers who treated Adam outside of prison were too deferential to guards.

And physicians who work with incarcerated patients say that can be the case: Even when terminally ill people in custody are treated at hospitals, correctional officers still end up dictating the terms of care.

Hospital staff members often don’t understand the rights of incarcerated patients and are unsure about state laws and hospital policies, said Pria Anand, a neurologist who has treated incarcerated patients in hospitals. “The biggest problem is uncertainty,” she said.

Correctional officers sometimes tell hospital staffers they can’t contact next of kin for security reasons, or they won’t tell a patient about discharge plans because of worries they might escape, Anand said.

And care frequently takes place within prisons, which often are not equipped to handle the complexities of hospice decision-making, including types of treatment, when to stop treatment, and who can make those decisions, said Laura Musselman, director of communications at the Humane Prison Hospice Project, which provides training and education to improve end-of-life care for incarcerated patients.

“Our prison system was not designed to provide care for anyone, especially not people who are chronically ill, terminally ill, older, actively dying,” said Musselman, who noted that her group’s training has 15 modules to cover all aspects of end-of-life care, including grief support, hands-on caregiving, and paperwork.

Rigsby struggled with mental health and addiction for most of his adult life, including a stint in prison for a drug-related robbery. A parole violation in 2018 landed him back in prison.

At Jackson Hospital, Rigsby was given hydromorphone, a powerful pain medication, as well as the anxiety drug lorazepam. Before he was transferred back to prison, a nurse with YesCare — one of the country’s biggest prison health care providers, which has been sued over substandard care —assured hospital staffers he would be provided with the same level of pain medication and oxygen he had received at the hospital, his medical records show.

But Moser said she doesn’t know whether he spent his last days in pain or peace. The state wouldn’t provide Moser with Rigsby’s medical records from the prison, she said. She said she wasn’t allowed to visit her son in the infirmary — and wasn’t told why.

Moser called the infirmary to comfort her son before his death, but staffers told her he couldn’t make it to the phone and they couldn’t take one to him, she said.

Instead, Moser said, she left messages for prison officials to tell her son she loved him.

“It breaks my heart that he could not talk with his mother during his last days,” said Moser, whose son died on Oct. 4, 2023.

Two weeks later, she drove to Woodstock, Alabama, to collect his remains from a crematorium.

KFF Health News data editor Holly K. Hacker contributed to this report.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Two people were shot Friday night and one person was arrested following a Wayzata High School graduation ceremony held on the University of Minnesota campus, police said.

University authorities notified students that the 8:20 p.m. shooting occurred outside 3M Arena at Mariucci following the ceremony. University of Minnesota police responded and two people were taken by ambulance to Hennepin County Medical Center.

Their condition was unknown Saturday morning.

Gov. Tim Walz expressed his thoughts on X.

“Horrific news of a shooting near Mariucci Arena during a graduation event tonight – a time of celebration that should never have turned into one of fear and sadness,” he wrote.

The suspect in the shooting is in custody and authorities say they don’t believe there is any ongoing threat to the public. The investigation by university police, Minneapolis police and the Hennepin County sheriff’s office is continuing.

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