The hollow carcass of the CVS store on the corner of Snelling and University avenues assumed legendary status in St. Paul circles. The chain pharmacy had been shuttered since 2022, becoming a lightning rod for concerns about economic decline and public disorder. Once a shining 33-foot loon statue was erected kitty corner across the intersection, sculpted in an aggressively territorial posture, it was clear CVS’ days were numbered.
Last year, the City Council acquired the legal ability to commandeer the building for demolition. Tuesday morning, the wrecking ball finally arrived, a moment of catharsis for a community that’s been through years of everyday strife. Enjoy the vague schadenfreude.
I shed no tears for the CVS, a badly designed building in a particularly bad location. The real mystery of its existence is that it was built there in the first place, and then why the corporation shuttered and abandoned the retail site. It’s been obvious for years, if not from the very beginning, that allowing the big-box pharmacy to be built there in the first place was a mistake.
So let’s look back. The CVS Pharmacy was built in 2005 on the roughly one-acre footprint of a bank, its drive thru and a furniture store. At the time, there was a contentious debate about whether the project was an improvement, or whether the city should demand more of the developers.
For example, the one-story proposal featured a large parking lot, and a floor-area ratio of only .25. Even worse, it offered a blank wall to an intersection with a nascent light-rail station, an omission that would be awkwardly corrected years later. The one gesture that the corporation made to the community was to include a cupola that offered the illusion of a second story, faux urban density.
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At the time, voices like University United, an urban development advocacy group, pushed the city to reject the proposal and demand better designs at the intersection. They argued that a hypothetical, denser mixed-use building could better serve the city, and even came up with renderings of what that might look like.
Meanwhile, the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce argued that the city should approve the CVS store, hoping that the new-to-the-region corporation would come with lasting benefits. This led to months of community meetings and opposing analyses about how different proposals would shape the city. The pharmacy was approved in 2004.
In retrospect, if urbanist organizers had gotten even half of what they had demanded, it would have been a tax base boon. When it closed in 2022, the CVS store was generating about $15,000 per year in property taxes for local governments. This is a poor result compared to the nearby buildings — for example the CVS on Grand or the Harper Apartments mixed-use project — and has led to the city only reaping around 20% of its potential taxable revenue. Over decades, that’s a loss that amounts to millions of dollars, not to mention the abandoned denouement.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and cities face difficult choices when it comes to vacant land. Do they hold out for an ideal development proposal that might never arrive, or settle for a more mediocre improvement with an immediate timeline?
These aren’t easy questions. In general, the political appetite for change tends to side with short-term incremental improvements, thus the age old urban politics mantra: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Sometimes this kind of thinking leads to big mistakes. Minneapolis’ notable vacant lot fiascos — the Lake Street Kmart and Block E urban mall downtown — stand out, but St. Paul’s CVS is another glaring case study of opportunity costs. To put it another way: the bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, surely, but is it worth five or 10 bush birds? In this case, 20 years ago St. Paul made the wrong decision. Today we have another vacant lot on a key corner.
Related: What’s next after the death of the Midway St. Paul CVS
As the rubble piles up behind the chain link fence, it’s important to remember that the yellow bulldozers are tearing down what was once a useful store. Like it or not, CVS sold staple products like medicine and milk, and I shopped there many times. It was particularly good for people relying on transit, with the A and Green Lines converging at the intersection. Now, with the Cub Foods and its pharmacy having closed last year, there’s a pharmacy desert in the area, other than the last independent speciality stalwart, Lloyd’s, up the street.
Given its post-apocalyptic facade and magnetic qualities for drug use and disorder, the CVS demolition is addition by subtraction for the community. But it’s hard to cheer too hard for another vacant lot on University Avenue. This is not really progress, and it’ll likely be many years before another building rises in its place, hopefully spurred by the totemic shadow of the giant loon across the street.
It’s a sign of optimism that the demolition of CVS is occurring simultaneous to the construction of the first phase of “United Village,” the (taxable) development around Allianz Field that is the raison d’etre for the soccer stadium in the first place. And another local advocacy group, Sustain St. Paul, is using the CVS demolition to push for a land value tax along University Avenue at the Legislature this year, a policy that would surely spur development.
When that conversation about the former CVS property eventually happens, let’s hope city leaders don’t make the same mistake, settling for disposable architecture that serves corporate margins more than the community. If there’s anything to be gained from the CVS rubble, it’s a bit of wisdom about how we should place more value on our land and our neighborhood.
