Vacant CVS in St. Paul’s Midway set for demolition

After years of neighborhood outcry, the city of St. Paul has a plan to tear down the vacant CVS in the Midway neighborhood.

The city ordered the owner of the building on the corner of University and Snelling avenues to tear it down months ago, and after no action, St. Paul has hired a contractor, Veit, to demolish it.

A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections said the contractor inspected the building in December and will obtain demolition permits in the coming weeks. The exact timing of demolition will depend on when the utilities are disconnected, a Veit representative said, but the CVS will be rubble within about two weeks once the work starts.

The move toward demolition signals an end to the three-year saga in which the vacant CVS has symbolized the stagnation of the Midway neighborhood around it. The neighborhood has weathered major store closures, including the Cub Foods that shut its doors last fall, and persistent worries about drug use and loitering that spread from the Green Line to small businesses’ front doors, as construction around Allianz Field took years to get started.

The CVS building even factored into the mayoral race, with Mayor Melvin Carter calling for the building’s demolition and challenger Kaohly Her — who won the election and will be sworn in Jan. 2 — saying the city had made little real effort to contact the property owner.

In September, dozens of neighbors lined up at a city hearing to talk about the problems they had seen at the CVS, and 80 people sent emails calling for it to be torn down.

“That eyesore breaks my heart every time I see it,” resident Angela Pelster-Wiebe wrote in an email. “It’s time to listen to the people who live here and do something positive for the neighborhood we love. Tear that sucker down so we can build a future to love!”

In November 2025, St. Paul declared the building a nuisance and ordered it razed before the end of the month.

But the property owner, a limited-liability corporation with a Washington state address, did not respond to the order within a 15-day window.

Now, it has fallen to the city to organize the demolition and bill the property owner for the service.

Across town, another St. Paul neighborhood is dealing with their own former-CVS eyesore and hoping for relief.

The pharmacy chain closed its store on Maryland Avenue on the city’s East Side in 2022, and, like the Midway location, the building with boarded-up doors and a large parking lot has drawn drug users and other loitering.