Jim Crockarell, the sometimes cantankerous real estate developer regarded as downtown St. Paul’s largest private constructing owner, died Thursday at age 79.

Relations in November said Crockarell was battling an infection they didn’t think can be fatal.

“We’re grieving the lack of my father, Jim,” said his daughter, Carol March, an actual estate broker and principal asset manager along with his company, Madison Equities, in a temporary written statement. She said the family requested privacy while funeral arrangements were made.

Raised in Clarksville, Tenn., Crockarell made St. Paul his adopted home, serving as each a proprietor of the town’s architectural history and a sometimes foil to City Hall.

He was 28 when he arrived in Minnesota within the Seventies, working in planning and research on the architectural firm Ellerbe Becket. By the early Nineteen Eighties, he’d begun dabbling in real estate, buying homes in St. Paul’s Ramsey Hill neighborhood.

Crockarell bought his first downtown property, the Degree of Honor Constructing, in 1999, then kept on buying.

Through Madison Equities, the developer held stakes in a minimum of 32 buildings, lots of them storied old downtown office buildings and former office buildings that underwent residential conversions under Crockarell’s direction. The firm owns St. Paul’s Thirties-era landmark First National Bank high-rise and its iconic, illuminated No. 1 sign, in addition to the Alliance Bank and U.S. Bank buildings, and shopping centers in Roseville, St. Anthony, White Bear Lake, Oakdale and St. Cloud.

His many real estate holdings also positioned him as landlord or part owner of a few of the city’s newest and most stylish restaurants, recently including Noyes & Cutler, the Handsome Hog, Ox Cart Ale House and Gray Duck Tavern.

Madison Equities maintains all the Lowertown Mears Park buildings between Sibley and Wacouta streets, home of the Barrio and Bulldog restaurants, in addition to the adjoining Park Square Court constructing. A 12 months ago, when Crockarell bought the seventh Place Apartments on Wabasha Street — which had entered the world because the St. Francis Hotel within the Nineteen Twenties — he excitedly predicted that the house of Afro Deli and Candyland soon can be joined by a 9,000-square-foot restaurant within the vacant space previously occupied by the Wild Tymes Sports Bar. The Wrestaurant on the Palace, a full-service restaurant and bar serving Wrecktangle Pizza, opened in August.

City Hall antagonist, downtown advocate

Crockarell’s battles with St. Paul City Hall, labor advocates, state regulators and even fellow business partners were about as quite a few as his downtown investments.

When officials with the St. Paul Downtown Alliance — a partnership between City Hall and downtown business owners — launched a dues-based Downtown Improvement District in 2020, they took care to effectively gerrymander its borders to avoid Crockarell’s many properties, avoiding a legal fight over the fees charged to constructing owners for the district’s street greeters, graffiti removal and other services.

“There’s no one officing downtown, and consequently crime has proliferated,” Crockarell said in March 2022, bemoaning the rise of distant work following the coronavirus pandemic. “What we want is a critical mass of individuals. It’s very essential to get the employees back. … I don’t think the Downtown Alliance could have any significance. There’s only so many little old ladies you may escort across the road.”

It wasn’t the primary time Crockarell did not see eye-to-eye with downtown advocates, whilst he played an advocacy role himself in promoting his properties as the very best places to live, work and play. “Apparently, Jim Crockarell can’t get enough of St. Paul,” wrote a reporter for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal in 2013 when Crockarell acquired the 26-story U.S. Bank Center on Fifth Street.

Nearly a decade later, when 3M Co. announced it might spin off its massive health care division into what could possibly be its own Fortune 500 company, Crockarell made a public pitch to have the brand new company locate downtown. He told a reporter that the vacant land surrounding the Central Station light-rail stop off Cedar Street could easily accommodate a 40-story office tower, which might have been St. Paul’s first latest office constructing in many years to be erected from the bottom up.

“It’s an enormous hole in the midst of St. Paul, and it deserves a high-rise tower,” said Crockarell, in September 2022. “3M could locate there together with a convention hotel, condominiums, apartments. We can be eager about making a proposal to the town. … It will tie your complete downtown together.”

Crockarell had a knack for obtaining downtown properties at bargain prices by acquiring them out of foreclosure or in financial distress. In May 2022, a limited liability corporation owned by Crockarell and family purchased the Capital City Plaza parking ramp at 50 E. Fourth St. in a foreclosure sale.

In 2015, Crockarell galvanized business owners along Wabasha Street to fight against the town’s proposed Capital City Bikeway, a sidewalk-level bicycle loop, given the variety of on-street parking spots that will be eliminated.

“I own 16 buildings in downtown St. Paul, and a minimum of five of them are on the proposed bike loop,” Crockarell told a reporter on the time. “I like bicycling. It’s like, do I like apple pie? Yes, I do. But Wabasha needs on-street parking.”

His opposition toward the bikeway could have delayed construction, however it didn’t stop it. The loop’s west segment along Wabasha Street was installed in 2022.

Last June, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office sued Madison Equities after security guards alleged they were told to punch out of labor and clock back in as if working for a separate company as they walked from constructing to constructing, allowing various limited liability corporations related to the constructing owner to work them long hours without time beyond regulation.

The attorney general began investigating Madison Equities’ labor practices in fall 2019, however it took 4 years to get to court as Crockarell refused to show over payroll data and other potential evidence, arguing the statute of limitations had run out.

Concerns in regards to the future

Asked in October in regards to the way forward for U.S. Bank at U.S. Bank Center on Fifth Street, Crockarell acknowledged the corporate had been consolidating offices within the remote-work era and he was unsure in the event that they would renew their multi-story lease. He blamed the federal government sector, as much because the private sector, for failing to revive downtowns within the aftermath of a pandemic that sent office employees home by the hundreds.

U.S. Bank’s departure “would decimate the constructing by way of occupancy, and it might hurt the town by way of real estate taxes,” said Crockarell on the time. “The worth of the constructing would go down dramatically. That’s true of many buildings across St. Paul. They’re all facing lower tax payments and lower valuations because their tenants are leaving when leases are coming up for renewal.”

“I can’t inform you what they’re going to do with the office facility,” he added. “Downtown St. Paul needs all the assistance it may possibly get bringing employees back.”