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Hot property: St. Paul's Monastery
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Where: NW. corner, Larpenteur & Century avenues, Maplewood
Type: Religious, multifamily housing
Size: 50,000 square feet (monastery)
Units: 88 (rental townhouses, senior-citizen housing)
Cost: $11 million
General Contractor: McGough Companies
Details: The Benedictine Catholic nuns of St. Paul's Monastery who have owned and operated Hill-Murray high school on a scenic 34-acre campus in Maplewood since the late 1950s are about halfway through a transformational development project on the property.
Its main features are a new monastery and 88 units of affordable rental housing.
With only 56 Benedictine sisters left of the nearly 250 that moved to Maplewood in the 1960s -- and only 35 of them living at the monastery -- the new facility will be only half the size of the current 100,000-square-foot edifice next to the high school.
That imposing, poured-concrete 1965 structure was designed by well-known St. Paul architect and longtime University of Minnesota instructor Val Michelson.
Rather than tear it down, the sisters have teamed with nonprofit developer CommonBond Communities and the Tubman Family Alliance to rehabilitate it into a women's shelter.
"Because it is so well constructed, there's a lot of peace in that building," said Jean Hartman, St. Paul's Monastery's finance consultant who's in charge of the project. "The sisters felt it was part of their spiritual mission to see that it was used and not razed."
Unlike their current home, the order's new monastery will have a proper chapel, along with a green roof and other environmentally conscious features, Hartman said. It will also feature a distinctive bell tower designed by Pope Architects.
But the truly new development within the monastery project is the housing element, a first for the Maplewood property. CommonBond, a Catholic nonprofit housing developer, is constructing an affordable rental townhouse complex called Trail's Edge. The 48-unit development will include an "advantage center," which provides after-school programs for children and job placement services for adults.
A 40-unit senior-citizen housing rental complex will join the townhouses on the St. Paul's campus in the future.
Even though the monastery project has multiple components and many moving parts, Hartman said it is progressing quickly and is on schedule for a spring completion.
"Everybody is working together for the same end, which is to provide affordable housing, to enable the sisters to continue their ministry and to provide a place for people to be safe," she said. "There's been amazingly few problems for a project this complex because of that."
DON JACOBSON
Don Jacobson is a freelance writer based in St. Paul. He can be reached at hotproperty.startribune@gmail.com.
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