There’s finally hope for new life at the former home of St. Paul’s Hamm’s Brewery

Ninety years ago a whole world orbited around the Hamm s Brewery on St Paul s East Side A sprawling complex of industrial brick buildings Hamm s was once one of the largest breweries in the country employing hundreds of workers around the clock making lager beer for generations That was then The decline of the brewery is a familiar story of consolidation competition and changing tastes The brewery has been sitting largely empty since with existing businesses like Saint Paul Brewing and Wells Spirits Co using only a small fraction of the sprawling complex Now it looks to be turning round After decades of historic purgatory local developer JB Vang is going to bring housing into the bulk of the site With a combination of new construction and rehab of the existing building almost new homes are set for construction A latest historic designation means that majority of the financing is in place If all goes well construction could break ground by A brewery and a bear At its peak the Hamm s Brewery had become the fifth-largest brewery in the U S easily the largest beer operation in the Twin Cities As late as the s in part thanks to its famous cartoon bear the label had the likely to become one of the insufficient macro-brewers that might survive a fiercely competitive era During this time lager quality had reached national parity and competition revolved around marketing and distribution which ruthlessly eroded profits for smaller companies Related From the land of sky-blue waters a history of Hamm s beer Unfortunately a bad expenditure in Baltimore largely doomed its expansion plans By the s Hamm s was in debt and for sale and fleetly got bought by competitors and specific questionable operations Despite lingering for decades the brewery would never be the same scale or quality During its final years thanks to a weird anti-trust agreement it was producing Stroh s Beer a Michigan label while Hamm s itself was brewed in Wisconsin Since then the buildings have sat mostly empty The craft brewer and distillery that have operated inside part of the facility for the last years both rely on the haunted beauty of the old brewery ruins for atmosphere But there s no ignoring the fact that the bulk of the building lodged into the city s famous Swede Hollow is in various stages of entropy attracting graffiti pigeons and urban explorers willing to hop fences The Hamm s building has been playing a substantial role in the East Side for a very long time disclosed Kou Vang the head of JB Vang companies I moved up here in and I believe that when I moved here everyone was talking about redeveloping Hamm s already I ve been up here for years and we re still talking about it Saint Paul Brewing is housed in the Hamm s Brewery Complex on Thursday Nov in St Paul Minn Credit Ellen Schmidt MinnPost CatchLight Local Statement for America Vang s plan involves a mix of funding streams and housing types including new-build apartments and apartments in the old brewery complex The results will be what he calls artistic in nature Its a little bit quirky but it s nice Vang announced Because of the floor plate that is a little bit off certain areas have taller ceilings than others It takes a lot of engineering This rehabbed brewery will mirror the reuse of other big landmark industrial sites like Minneapolis Pillsbury A Mill and the Schmidt s Brewery complex on West th Street both of which used historic tax credits to convert into artist lofts In this event though there won t be an aesthetic gatekeeper involved The apartments set to draw on low-income housing tax credits will be income-restricted at various levels As Vang describes the complex occupies a lynchpin site for the city s East Side Sitting on Minnehaha Avenue just down from an intersection with key streets like Arcade and East th it literally links the rest of the neighborhood to Railroad Island an otherwise cut-off section of the city It also serves as a connection down into Swede Hollow which once offered the greatest illustration of the city s th century stratified class structure In the old ravine off the grid and the sanitation system literal shacks were occupied by the city s newest immigrants In the shadow of the bustling brewery they survived on scraps and gardens Meanwhile overlooking the whole scene atop the bluff sat the Hamm family mansion housing brewery scion Theodore who owned the enterprise during its profitable years Tax credits will help fund project The brewery is all that s left of that old landscape Both the mansion and the Swede Hollow homes have burned the former by neglect and the second by the moralistic insistence of the city This day the hollow is a park and the new redevelopment includes plans to connect the businesses and homes to the recreational trail that runs through the old hollow The historical designation seems rather obvious for a building of this magnitude and importance and it will allow Vang to use special tax credits for rehabbing old properties Related Exploring Swede Hollow once a neighborhood carved out of the wild Historical tax credits are a big part of the capital stack Vang announced Knowing that we have them now we can go ahead and this summer finish up all of our funding Hopefully we ll have final approval allocations by the end of or early The only wrinkle so far has been a dispute over the use of the existing surface parking lot for the new apartment building Earlier this year Rob Clapp the owner of St Paul Brewing went all-in on trying to save the parking lot rebranding the lot as a shared parking amenity with a populace pressure campaign Compared to the idea of new housing saving a parking lot is a lost cause in my view My hope is that the existing businesses which have a lot of strengths can be productive enough to overcome Minnesotans unfortunate aversion to walking a bit farther to their destinations Meanwhile it s exciting to imagine the Hamm s Brewery becoming a neighborhood lynchpin again bringing people together like a magnet There s still a lot of economic uncertainty and Vang warns that even small changes to interest rates could send him back to the drawing board But if everything goes well from here he s looking at groundbreaking in It seems like a long time from now but after years of an empty building it s soon enough for me The post There s at last hope for new life at the former home of St Paul s Hamm s Brewery appeared first on MinnPost