Riverview Corridor
Riverview Corridor
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Riverview Corridor

The Riverview Corridor is a transit corridor connecting Downtown Saint Paul and the Mall of America in Bloomington via the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. The corridor serves an area from the Saint Paul Union Depot to the Mall via a route along West 7th Street, which runs southwest from Downtown Saint Paul. The corridor creates a triangle connecting opposite ends of the Blue Line and Green Line.

The corridor has served as an important transportation link in the Twin Cities since territorial days when it connected downtown Saint Paul and Fort Snelling. Streetcars and later buses connected destinations along West Seventh St, the main thoroughfare of the corridor, since 1884. Streetcars were removed in 1952 and from 1998 to 2012 bus service improvements were identified as the preferred alternative with busway and later arterial bus rapid transit projects studied.

Renewed study started in 2013 and the results of work done from 2014-2017 identified a modern streetcar system similar to systems in Portland, Kansas City, and Detroit as the locally preferred alternative with an alignment along West Seventh Street and MN-5. On September 6th, 2024 Ramsey County announced that planning efforts for the modern streetcar project were cancelled.

In March 2025, the City of Saint Paul announced a renewed effort to pursue BRT along the corridor, with a projected cost of $500 million and planned opening in the early 2030s.

West Seventh Street is also known as Fort Road because the road began as a route to Fort Snelling. The original Fort Road ran further south of West Seventh along the river bluff. Modern day Cliff Street and Stewart Avenue follow around the route of Old Fort Road. The road was platted in 1849 but the route had been used before as the last stretch of an oxcart trail for a fur trading route connecting Canada to Saint Paul via Fort Snelling.

The West Seventh neighborhood is one of the oldest in Saint Paul. The neighborhood follows along West Seventh Street and is bound on the north by I-35E or the River Bluffs and by the Mississippi River to the South. It formed in the late 1830s from discharged soldiers and other pioneers building houses along the Mississippi River. Later, a boat dock south of Fort Snelling known as the Upper Landing became an important landing spot for dropping off settlers and supplies. The neighborhood grew as waves of settlers and immigrant came to the area to farm or work for local industrial sites. A sizable amount of industry is located between the Mississippi River and south of West Seventh Street. Workers built their houses close to local industry and different ethnic enclaves developed with the different waves of immigrants.

Development tended to spread southwest from the Upper Landing, later known as Uppertown, southwest to Fort Snelling along Fort Road. By 1884 a horse drawn street car line traveled along a portion of West Seventh Street. The streetcar line later became electrified by 1891. The line extended to Tuscarora Street by 1890 and to river bluff by 1891. Four other lines also traveled partially along the corridor on their path to Downtown. The line stopped just short of Fort Snelling on the Saint Paul side of Fort Road Bridge. The lack of an extension to Fort Snelling became undesirable to soldiers who wanted an easy connection to the city and civilians who worked on the military reservation. After a new bridge was constructed in 1909 the line was extended to the other side of the river. A free streetcar shuttle was constructed in Fort Snelling that met with the West Seventh line and then traveled in a single track in Fort Snelling. The Fort Snelling shuttle stopped operating in 1952 and the streetcar line was converted to a bus line in 1952 along with the rest of the Twin Cities transit system.

The Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport was constructed near Fort Snelling in 1921. When it became a major transit hub the corridor was extended to the airport. In the 1989 a county transit plan for Ramsey County was made. The corridor between the airport and Downtown Saint Paul was considered an important corridor. When the Mall of America was constructed the corridor was extended to the mall. The route was first named the Riverview Corridor in February 1997 after the Ramsey County board unanimously voted the corridor as a higher priority than the Central Corridor.[page needed]

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