Geraldine Balter just wanted to take a load off her feet. And that's when her problems began.

One Sunday in April, the 69-year-old woman was walking in the St. Paul skyway after shopping at the downtown Walgreens when she pulled a muscle in her leg and decided to stop and rest at a dining area in the Town Square building. A security guard approached her after she was there for a few minutes with her backpack and warned her that if she didn't leave in five minutes, the police were going to be called.

A YouTube video posted last week of Chris Lollie, who is black, being arrested in the skyway by police after he was told that he needed to leave a seating area designated for tenants only in the First National Bank Building has sparked renewed debate about public use of the downtown pedestrian routes and how the law should be enforced. The St. Paul city attorney has said that Lollie was in a public area when he was confronted in January.

When a security guard approached her, Balter, who is white, said she was also angry at how she was treated. There was a sign saying that the food court in that area was closed, but she hadn't interpreted that to mean she couldn't sit in a chair in that area. She decided not to fight it, Balter said Friday.

There's a problem with a lack of public seating in the St. Paul skyway, said Balter, who is a member of the Skyway Governance Advisory Committee of the downtown CapitolRiver Council.

"There's long distances where there's no place to sit and we have lots of seniors in the downtown area," she said.

Balter, who also lives in downtown, said she started a project in June where she walked through the whole skyway (some of the photos she took are shown above) and asked all the security guards she met what their policy was about people sitting in areas of their building. She said she was shocked to learn that most of the guards she spoke with were told by their bosses not to let members of the public sit there.

"I was surprised," she said. "To me, if you see a chair I don't see why you can't sit down."

At First National, she said she was told by the security that only tenants could sit in that seating area. However, she has sat there before and no one said anything to her.

Balter said she was going to try to personally call the different building managers and owners and see if they will add public seating in their buildings.