If you look at the current Visit Saint Paul map of downtown, you’ll see it divided into three districts: “Lowertown”, “West 7th”, and “Downtown”. Of course, this is simply representative of what the livelier sections of DtStP are, but not long ago I was introduced to the idea of additional such boundary lines downtown, including names of additional districts: “Fitzgerald Park”, “Central Business District”, “Rice Park Area”.

I was very taken with this idea as it immediately made talking about downtown much easier for me. I believe making such boundaries some kind of official, perhaps in the updated Downtown Development Strategy, it would almost as instantly give a few under recognized areas of DtStP a sense of place. There’s room for some semantic discussion, such as minor debate over the boundary lines or names of each area. I also like the name precincts more than districts. This project page exists to push this agenda and illustrate the proposed idea in a clean way. Some cities pay consulting firms lots of money for these kinds of ideas, let’s see if we can skip that part.

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