Checking in with the Spruce Tree Center, a Christmas-themed office building if there ever was one

No St. Paul building is a more misunderstood lightning rod than the Spruce Tree Center, the massive emerald office building on the corner of University and Snelling. You know the one I’m talking about. Everybody does, and everybody has opinions.

Mention it in conversation, and perfect strangers will butt in. Wits will opine. “That monstrosity?” “What a disaster.” “I kind of like it.” (See also this state flag idea.) As local writer John Reimringer once quipped, in Andy Sturdevant’s decade-old, surprisingly generous MinnPost column: “Spruce Tree Center is your oddball, stuck-in-the-unfashionable-past uncle, wearing plaid and reeking of cologne.”

I’ve been passing the Spruce Tree Center for my entire adult life and, other than to wonder at its strange design, color palette and opaque, vestigial windows, hadn’t given it much thought. But thanks to Chad Kulas, the head of the Midway Chamber of Commerce who offices inside, I had a chance to tour the place. I couldn’t pass it up.

My verdict: Hate it if you want, but Spruce Tree Center is the best building built near University and Snelling for a century. It’s got great views, and until the soccer stadium came around, was the only legitimately urban addition to the area. It’s aged far better than the empty husk of the CVS across the street, though that is faint praise indeed.

The best story I heard confirms all the rumors: Yes, it’s made out of bathroom tile.

The building’s exterior is composed of thousands of small emerald green tiles, exactly the kind you’d find in your home redecoration project. They were imported from Germany and embedded in matrices fitted into concrete panels, adorning the exterior. The building managers keep a stockpile on hand in case of damage.

The design was the brainchild of local business legend Marie Slawik. With her husband Harold, she ran greater Roseville entrepreneurialism in the late midcentury, and the Spruce Tree building was her legacy to St. Paul. (The now largely defunct HarMar Mall was similarly named after the couple, in classic St. Paul neologism fashion.)

The form of the building was a product of Marie Slawik’s imagination. She loved trees and both of the Slawiks considered themselves to be die-hard parkland philanthropists. Many Roseville city parks owe them a debt of gratitude. Spruces were her favorite, and so the building was designed to be shaped like an abstract spruce tree. If you squint from kitty-corner across the street, it resembles the tree icons used in Microsoft Windows 2000.

“She pulled out her business card, which was green, and put it on the table,” said Michael Koch, who has been managing the building for MetroPlains Management for almost exactly 30 years. “She took her lipstick and put a line across the page there and said, ‘It’s going to be green with red accents.’ Marie was a force to be dealt with, a strong personality.”

As Sturdevant said, the architects did their best. I don’t find the building particularly problematic or beautiful, but at least it’s interesting. In the age of Minecraft, I’d venture to say the pixelated brutalism (as one friend of mine put it) has aged better than most 1980s urban mall structures.

(I’m thinking of you, City Center.)

“Marie loved trees, and that’s why it’s green,” explained Michael Koch. “Because this corner was highly polluted with cars sitting and idling at that time, it’s designed so as to pull the exhaust fumes away from the intersection.”

(I have to admit that the physics of how that might work elude me.)

The Spruce Tree Center was a mega-project of its day, an anchor store partly subsidized by city dollars coming in the form of increased road access and a 337-space parking ramp adjoining the building. As envisioned by the Slawiks, it was intended to be a mixed-use urban mall akin to (what was then called) Calhoun Square in Uptown Minneapolis. Thus the building’s flagship Applebee’s location, which even had a separate entrance facing the bus stop.

It was an idea so far ahead of its time that it rapidly foundered.  The building slowly lost its retail tenants and, today, is almost entirely office space. (The H&R Block accountants is one of the few exceptions.)

“It never really succeeded,” Michael Koch admitted. “When the current ownership bought it in 1994, it was 52% occupied [and] the first floor was pretty vacant. There are those who find it to be a very ugly building, and others who find it on a great spot because it’s supported by good mass transit at the light rail and also the A Line bus.”

The Applebee’s closed in the early 2000s after the neighborhood chain was bought by a hedge fund. At the time, the Spruce Tree Center location was the largest square footage location in their portfolio, a fact that doomed it to the arbitrage financiers.

The windows on the sidewalk are now mostly papered over, but the five building entrances, originally intended to encourage circulation from the surrounding neighborhoods, wait for a renaissance. Someday, maybe, the basic premise of the Spruce Tree Center might come back into focus as density fills in around the area.

With the United Village development hopefully rising up from the asphalt ashes across the street — site preparation for a sculpture, playground and hotel is finally happening — and the city’s two highest-ridership transit routes intersecting right outside the door, I can picture retail returning to Snelling and University. But change isn’t coming anytime soon. Like most 2023 office buildings, Spruce Tree Center is weathering a fiscal storm.

“We’ve probably hit the bottom,” Michael Koch said. “We have a couple of existing tenants that are expanding, [but] it’s a fascinating time, the most interesting I’ve experienced in my career.”

Office space elsewhere in the metro and across the world is coping with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hurt occupancy for the Spruce Tree Center. But the building has the advantage of being in one of the best served transit locations outside of either downtown. With easy freeway access and a massive indoor parking ramp, they have the Midway market cornered. (At least, that is, until office space is ever constructed across the street at the United Village site.)

The other little-known fact about Spruce Tree Center is that it’s green in both the literal and figurative sense. About 10 years ago, the current owners invested in LEED certification and added about 32 kW of solar capacity to the parking ramp, making the building one of the most environmentally efficient in the city.

That said, there are other more aggravating legacies of the original design. Michael Koch’s most persistent annoyance is the clock on the top of the tower, which has 6-foot-long arms. It was put in place thanks to a development agreement when the building was constructed, and cannot legally be removed.

“Great big windstorms literally shear the gears from the motors,” as Koch describes it. “The bolt that holds the arm on gets loose and it shakes in the wind. They are an adventure. If I had a choice they would not be there. With Daylight Saving Time, it’s a real trick to get them all the same.”

My big idea: At least seasonally, they should enclose the clock with a giant holiday star or bright shining tree topper. After all, the building is supposed to be a spruce tree.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the internet-friendly debate about whether the 1988 action film “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie or not. The film is set during an office Christmas party in an L.A. office park, where an office building is taken over by terrorists.

You could have the same argument about the Spruce Tree Center, which was built the same year that “Die Hard” came out. Is it a Christmas building, designed to mimic a spruce tree, predicated on bustling window shopping? I think it is, and I’m willing to argue with anyone about it over a holiday beverage.