Neighbors beg for city action on long-vacant CVS in St. Paul’s Midway

After years of complaints about drug use, loitering and vandalism, St. Paul on Tuesday started the process to tear down the vacant CVS at Snelling and University — and it can’t come soon enough for neighbors.

The empty pharmacy is more than an eyesore for many living nearby. It has become a symbol of distant corporations, a feeling that the city left the area behind after the pandemic and unrest in 2020, and damage from the unrelenting fentanyl crisis in a neighborhood eager to reinvent itself.

About a dozen Midway residents attended a hearing Tuesday morning to speak about what they have endured around the vacant building, and more than 40 more submitted letters expressing frustration.

“We, along with so many of our neighbors, are exhausted,” said Rev. Kirsten Fryer in a letter to the city. Fryer’s congregation, Bethlehem Lutheran Church, has seen fewer people attend services because the neighborhood feels unsafe, she said, and the church spends time and money dealing with people using drugs nearby.

After the hearing Tuesday, city hearing officer Marcia Moermond recommended that the building be torn down, but the process will extend until early November, when the City Council is set to vote on the matter. The property owner, a limited liability corporation registered in Washington state, did not attend or send a representative.

The Hamline-Midway Coalition, the local district council, has been organizing for years to get the building re-occupied or torn down, and strongly favors demolition to help Midway move forward.

Neighbors agree, and said the empty building has blemished the place they love.

Snelling and University is an important intersection, said former Midway resident Jacob Hooper, but the vacant building is holding the whole area back.

“When people say that’s the worst intersection in St. Paul, they’re talking about the CVS,” Hooper said.

Resident Natalie Singer said the vacant building had pushed her out of the neighborhood. In a letter, she said after the CVS closed, people started urinating and using drugs in her backyard. People slept and fought in her side yard, she said, and used needles became a common sight.

“It is an embarrassment and took many years too long to take any sort of decisive action on this,” Singer said. “That CVS is a blight, a symbol of inaction and apathy.”

Many slammed the national pharmacy chain for abandoning the building and some said they felt the city had neglected the problem.

“For CVS to let go or get booted out, and for Midway to reclaim our place, would be an act of collective justice and liberation,” neighbor Nicole Brown wrote.

Though the city is moving to tear down the CVS building, the Washington company will still control the property, Moermond cautioned. Several neighbors who attended the hearing said they wanted to see a grocery store and affordable housing on the corner, but the site will just be planted with grass until the owner decides to redevelop it or sell it.

A ballot initiative this fall could give St. Paul more tools to push negligent property owners to make repairs through more fines or “administrative citations.” If voters agree in November, the city could issue citations on nuisance properties.

The city would still not be able to compel the CVS property owners to redevelop the site, but neighbors think anything would be better.

Hooper said Tuesday that he preferred a vacant lot to the empty building and fenced-off parking lot.