Development - President's Message

Recently, our staff attended our annual retreat. We were blessed to have Abbot John Klassen, OSB from Saint John’s Abbey, lead the retreat on Benedictine Spirituality. Over the last several years, we have been working with Benedictines from both Saint John’s Abbey and Saint Paul’s Monastery to reconnect with our Benedictine heritage. This tradition was rooted deeply in our community and the underlying sense of values helped form each of us who attended Saint Bernard’s into Saints, Scholars, Ladies and Gentlemen. The Benedictines knew the importance of their place in the community even beyond the school and church.

In the earliest days, Saint Bernard’s stood as an anchor of the North End neighborhood. Our parishioners and families knew the importance of providing support to the neighborhood businesses and, in turn, the businesses created a strong community in which our parish and school could grow. One could not exist without the other. This same partnership exists today.

Over the years, the North End neighborhood has changed. However, in this change the importance of Saint Bernard’s as an anchor remains. We have become involved in many of the community revitalization efforts to create a strong viable area of Saint Paul because of this. We are members of the North End Business Association, and we host many of the community events including: Rice Street Spring Clean-up, Neighborhood Walk-Abouts, community meetings with the Mayor, Saint Paul’s Oktoberfest, District 6 Community meetings, Strategic Planning Meetings and numerous other events.

For the past four years, I have been a member of the board of Sparc (our community development corporation). Sparc serves the North End and Hamline Midway area focusing on business development, housing and neighborhood revitalization. This year, as chair of the Sparc board, I have been proud to see some of the hard work by community leaders take shape.

One major project that has been in the works for the past five years is The Winnipeg (see page 10). Located at the intersection of Winnipeg and Rice Street, these two multi-use buildings will provide housing on the top three floors and retail space below. The Winnipeg is the first major project in Mayor Coleman’s “Invest St. Paul Initiative.”

Another neighborhood group on which I serve is the Rice Street Action Team. Our purpose is to attract new businesses and encourage physical improvements to the commercial area of Rice Street.

Over the past couple of years we have seen the opening of Dar’s Double Scoop, Classic Pizza (previously PaPa’s Pizza), and the re-opening of MaMa’s Pizza after water damage closed the business for a year. We have also been able to connect business owners with city funding in order to improve the streetscape through new building facades and painting.

The City of St. Paul has also completed installation of new side walks and lantern style street lights from Sycamore to Maryland. There are two traffic projects to start this spring as well. The bridge at Rice and Ivy will be rebuilt, and hopefully next year, the city will be improving the busy intersection at Rice and Maryland with the addition of left turn lanes in order to ease traffic flow.

With the helpful input of hundreds of neighborhood residents and business owners, our Sparc committee created a new “Rice Street Logo” to further help identify this part of town. Through sponsorship from the Pioneer Press, new banners with this new logo have been installed on Rice Street. In addition, the local businesses helped the “Blooming Rice Street” initiative and chipped in to purchase hanging flower baskets for the new street lights.

If you haven’t already heard, Ace Auto has a new building, there is a new Health East clinic, the Rice Street Library is busy as ever and United Products plans to build a new headquarters on Rice Street. These are just a few of the positive changes happening on Rice Street. All of these improvements make our neighborhood more attractive and continue that connection between businesses and homes which has always been an integral part of our area.

The pride and tradition of our neighborhood that began over 100 years ago continues today through the dedication and commitment of neighbors, business owners and others who continue to build a vibrant community. My hope is that you will always come back home.