Will development finally take off at the old Hamm's brewery in St. Paul?

Two years after St. Paul chose developer JB Vang to bring housing to the former Hamm’s brewery site on the East Side, city leaders hope fundraising and planning will see major progress this year.

The hulking red brick buildings on Minnehaha Avenue, where hundreds of workers once produced millions of barrels of beer, have been the focus of decades of revitalization hopes and challenges.

Now, JB Vang has proposed more than 200 affordable apartments split between two buildings at the Hamm’s site. Turning the buildings into apartments will cost more than $200 million, the developer estimates.

In an update for St. Paul’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority on Wednesday, Jules Atangana, the city’s housing director, said the project has received more than $2.2 million from the Metropolitan Council and $500,000 from Ramsey County, and the developer will apply for state funding this year.

Over the next two years, Atangana said, the project will move through city zoning and permitting and JB Vang will work with the city to line up the rest of the funding.

The city is also pursuing placement for the buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, which could unlock other funding to preserve the 19th-century buildings.

The Theodore Hamm Brewing Co. grew fast and remained dominant for decades before the Hamm family sold the company, which was eventually purchased by the Milwaukee-based Pabst Brewing Co. Detroit’s Stroh Brewing Co. bought the Minnehaha Avenue brewery in the early 1980s.

By 1989, Stroh was brewing up to 3.5 million barrels a year. That’s somewhere around 10 times the capacity of today’s Summit Brewing. But Stroh closed the St. Paul brewery in 1997, and a developer subsequently sold most of the property to the city.

Almost immediately, the city and St. Paulites set about trying to figure out what to do with the Hamm’s buildings.

St. Paul has spent decades imagining what could be done with the buildings that made up the Hamm’s complex. But it’s not yet seen the full-campus reimagining that repurposed the Schmidt Brewery on W. 7th Street in 2012, when apartments and live-work studios for artists brought residents to the neighborhood (and, until it closed, the Keg and Case Market brought diners and shoppers).

Even before Stroh halted brewing, the St. Paul Police Department began using an old garage on Payne Avenue that was part of the brewery as its Eastern District headquarters. Hope Community Academy, a charter school, opened its doors in another former Hamm’s building in 2000.

A group in 2007 proposed to open an Asian Pacific Cultural Center in the brewhouse, which would have included a theater, banquet hall and office space for nonprofits.

A company called Urban Organics set up an aquaponic farm at the brewery in 2013, growing greens and raising tilapia in an indoor farm. The operation expanded and moved to the former Schmidt Brewery, where it was briefly hailed as the largest indoor fish-and-greens farm in the world before it was closed by the parent company in 2017.

Smaller businesses have taken root in some of the complex’s smaller buildings. St. Paul Brewing makes craft beer at the site and has a taproom, and the Twin Cities Trapeze Center marked its 12th anniversary there last week. A distiller, 11 Wells Spirits, announced last summer that it was closing for renovations.

Despite excitement about the addition of apartments to the Hamm’s site, however, some businesses are beginning to raise questions about what the new construction would mean for them.