Was 2024 the “Year of the Broken Lift”?

In downtown St. Paul, the sole passenger elevator in the Northern Warehouse Artist Lofts on Prince Street has been out of commission — again — since Dec. 19, leaving residential tenants of the six-level, 52-unit building taking its industrial-size steps for roughly two weeks.

The building is managed on Artspace’s behalf by MetroPlains Management, which struggled with an extended elevator outage in the same building this past summer.

Many tenants are income-qualified artists who lug equipment and large works, or are elderly and disabled. The building’s bottom two floors host art galleries, a beauty salon, photo studio and other commercial spaces, including the Ethiopian restaurant Erta Ale.

“It’s 75 steps from the first floor to the fifth floor,” said Catherine L. Johnson, a 70-year-old artist and residential tenant who was struggling Friday evening to figure out how to get a full cart of groceries delivered. “If I do a round-trip taking my dog out, it’s 150 steps. If I need to do it twice a day, which I do, that’s 300 steps.”

She noted the building’s tenants saw their rents increase for 2025.

“Tenants signed leases with a functional elevator,” Johnson said. “There’s supposed to be accommodations.”

The elevator issue has been a bane for Artspace, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit developer of residential and commercial spaces for artists. The apartment building, which Artspace has owned since 1990, was the nonprofit’s first artist housing project of what’s now a network of 59 properties in 22 states.

Attempts to reach a spokesperson for Artspace were unsuccessful.

A spokesperson for TKE, an international elevator and escalator engineering and repair company that has handled repairs in the past, said in a statement that “we can’t comment on any particular elevator’s service history out of respect for our customers’ privacy.”

This isn’t the first time that a downtown St. Paul apartment building has struggled to keep its elevator doors open to tenants. The Northern Warehouse suffered a previous elevator outage for at least 10 days last June, and the elevator at the Tilsner Artist Lofts next door was out of order for most of late May. Fargo, N.D.-based MetroPlains also manages the Tilsner.

Passengers boarding the elevator in the now-condemned Lowry Apartments building at Fourth and Wabasha streets became trapped between floors last July, triggering a visit from the St. Paul Fire Department.

Looking back a year, the 300-foot Space Tower at the Minnesota State Fair suffered circuitry issues in August 2023 that left it out of commission for the duration of the Fair.

At the time, operators said the up button sent riders down and the down button sent them back up again. The Space Tower, a staple of the Fair since 1965, was back up and running for the 2024 State Fair.