“Today, a high-rise like 740 River Drive in a neighborhood like Highland Park would draw such indignation from area residents that a developer would have to be delusional to even propose it,” wrote local historian and bicyclist, Wolfie Browender, when happening across the building on one of his epic investigative journeys. It’s certainly true about the odd, 63-year-old apartment tower that still stands along the river bluff in St. Paul’s Highland neighborhood.
I served on the city’s Planning Commission during the debate over reusing the “Ford Site,” the 130-acre former truck factory along Ford Parkway and the Mississippi River in southwest St. Paul. At the time, people routinely came into our meetings to testify about how tall buildings cause mental illness, and other overblown claims. The debate escalated into a heated argument between factions, replete with yard signs, over whether this pocket of the city should have the kinds of very moderate density you might find, not in Europe or Asia, but in places like Calgary or Northeast Minneapolis.
Height was of the key sticking points: How tall could the new buildings rise in what is now “Highland Bridge”? During this entire discussion, I kept glancing at the maps and couldn’t help but notice that there was a 23-story apartment tower just a block away across the street. If that building was fine — and it seemed to be — then what was the big deal about a seven-story apartment building farther from the river? It goes to show how unique the 740 River Drive project turned out to be.
The history of the 740 building
If it seems from another era, that’s because it is. The building was a blip in early post-war modernism, before the city’s era of stricter zoning controls kicked in. It marks a time when the mid-century modernist movement still harbored urban ambitions for places like St. Paul. According to one newspaper account, the people examining the building compared it to the United Nations headquarters building. (Though I don’t really see the likeness, there’s surely no greater hallmark of modernist utopianism than that!)
According to Kraus-Anderson archivist Matt Goff, at the time of its construction it was the tallest residential structure between Chicago and the West Coast. The building, completed in 1960, has a reinforced concrete frame with a curtain wall, and contains 164 apartments ranging from studios to four-bedrooms. At 23-stories and 208-feet, it is by far the tallest building along the Mississippi “river gorge” between the two cities, at least until you get to downtown Minneapolis.
“It is an early example of a residential high rise on that scale,” Goff said. “The regulations weren’t in place that would soon come along and prevent similar examples that close to the river.”
The building also contained an outdoor swimming pool, a first floor “porch cochere auto approach,” a rooftop “party room and sun deck,” and a 105-stall underground parking garage. There were 59 more surface parking spots, incidentally a number that would be below minimum parking standards that emerged later in the 20th century. Adjusted for inflation, the project cost about $57 million.
One account of the 1960 groundbreaking described a red carpet leading into the woods along the river bluff, where the wife of general contractor Lloyd Engelsma smashed a champagne bottle over a huge bulldozer. The developers had a special double-spaded shovel made for the occasion, with the words Minneapolis and Saint Paul inscribed on each blade.
One interesting wrinkle is the name: The building was called 740 River Drive even though there’s no such street called “River Drive.” For some reason, the developers and marketing team did not think that Highland Parkway or River Road sounded elegant enough, and came up with a splashier alternative. The result is another in the long line of confounding St. Paul naming conventions, seemingly designed to befuddle outsiders. In this case, it invokes a street that does not even exist.
The 1950s housing shortage
In the 1950s, then as now, the region was gripped by a shortage of housing, though the dynamics of the solution were different. Massive federal support for suburban development meant that the majority of investment and growth was happening outside the core cities, making 740 River Drive into a notable exception.
For example, Lloyd Engelsma, one of the developers, was a head of Kraus-Anderson construction, and he’d spent much of his time building lucrative new shopping malls like Sun Ray on the city’s East Side. The residential tower was a rarity for the time. Even in the relatively suburban Highland neighborhood, the building illustrated that there could have been more than one path forward for the residential future of the Twin Cities.
By the later 1960s, neighbor pushback against taller residential buildings fused with urban tensions around change, and St. Paul became stricter with its zoning code. And in the late 20th century, specific regulations were put in place to limit height along the Mississippi River. For example, when local developer Paster Enterprises proposed a four-story 93-unit apartment building across the street on Highland Parkway in 2022, it exceeded the “Critical Area Zoning” along the Mississippi by a few feet. The limits seem ironic given that it would be dwarfed by 740 River Drive next door, and the development seems to be on hold for the time being.
Geographically speaking, 740 River Drive marks a notable place within view of the Ford Bridge and its important dam. When the dam was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it triggered a political saga that re-incited the rivalry between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Neither city could agree about who should get the hydroelectric power, and as a result the dam sat unused for years. (The University of Minnesota even got in on the action, demanding a stake in the “free” government energy.) It took some conniving on the behalf of the St. Paul political class, poaching an economic development specialist from neighboring Minneapolis, and then luring Henry Ford himself with the promise of the “natural” amenities of a quiet part of St. Paul next to a rushing river gorge.
As such, the area always served as a sign of competing Twin Cities ambitions. Perhaps that’s why one Pioneer Press columnist wrote that when Minneapolis Mayor Kenneth Peterson did not show up, it was because “maybe he was mad that all this money was being spent in St. Paul.” I imagine that 740 River Drive was perceived as part of St. Paul’s triumph, a residential exclamation mark on top of the then-thriving Ford factory, perhaps the city’s largest industrial success of all time.
At any rate, nothing like 740 River Drive was ever built again in St. Paul, and it was something like a “unicorn” product of unique circumstances.
“The developer, Bill Fine was an interesting character, the [kind of] splashy go-for-broke real estate developer we don’t see enough of anymore,” Kraus-Anderson archivist Matt Goff said.
It’s certainly true that no building in this part of the city will ever block its unparalleled views. Nothing this tall could ever get built there again, a fact that would seem to guarantee that 740 River Drive will remain a coveted address in perpetuity.
Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.
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