By Tim Krohn
The Free Press
MANKATO — For those who’ve been in Mankato for a time, the current discussions about the HECO building and constructing a parking ramp on Second Street may sound familiar.
A developer plans a complete renovation of HECO and is hoping the city will put up a parking ramp behind it with HECO paying for some of the parking space.
The HECO goes largely unnoticed today, but its construction in downtown Mankato in 1982 was a big and somewhat controversial endeavor.
“For Mankato, at that time, it was a big deal,” recalls Bill Bassett, the retired longtime city manager.
The concept of a high-rise of luxury condominiums in a downtown setting was met with ridicule by some, but it quickly filled with tenants.
Its construction would also set off the first of several controversial relocations of the Mankato Piece art sculpture.
The corner of Second and Hickory streets became a vacant lot after a fire destroyed the Elks Club and it became the first home for the Mankato Piece.
The city paid to move the sculpture — the first of a few controversial moves — to make way for the HECO.
The Second Street parking ramp, located behind the building, was also used at the time by tenants who paid the city a monthly rental fee. (That fee quickly became a minor controversy of its own as tenants wanted to be able to pay a partial month’s parking rent if they moved out.)
By the late ’80s and early ’90s, the future of the ramp became a years-long debate. Some money was spent to keep it in repair and up to code, but a total repair of the ramp would cost more than $1 million.
The city councils at the time began favoring tearing the ramp down, partly with an eye toward using the site as a possible hotel location and partly as a new vision toward a downtown parking system — one that would be less reliant on ramps. Conventional wisdom was that those of us in rural Minnesota just didn’t want to drive inside a ramp.
One councilman went as far as to say ramps were all but extinct. He was reluctant to commit large sums of repair money “for a kind of parking which I think has passed us by.”
Guess not.
The city is now poised to build a new ramp on the same spot, to help provide more parking during big downtown events. A proposed hotel never panned out on the site, but they got the new Hilton Garden Inn nearby — which prompted the latest relocation of the Mankato Piece.
Today’s discussions show the cyclical nature of things. Downtown urban renewal — an ongoing effort since the early 1970s — tends to cycle through the same debates, controversies and uncertainties every decade or so.
Bassett, who presided during major and controversial downtown renewal, including covering part of the downtown and later uncovering it, doesn’t worry a lot about whether decisions turned out great or disastrously in the long run.
“You do what you think will work at the time. I don’t know if there’s any right idea of how to decide those things.”
But he is more certain of one thing — a city must try to protect its core.
“You have to make a decision to save the downtown or abandon it. Some will say you shouldn’t throw any money there, and other parts of the community will say this is where we started, and it’s important to save.”
The council and city leaders will have to make their own decisions with the best information and instinct they have available to continue the downtown revival.
As for aversion to parking in ramps — it seems a non-issue today. We rural types might still like the idea of parking in the wide open, but we like it even better if we don’t have to walk far and can do it out of the weather.
Tim Krohn is a Free Press staff writer. He can be contacted at 344-6383 or tkrohn@mankatofreepress.com.
