Michel Taylor recalled the days when everyone she knew worked at 3M, Whirlpool or the century-old Hamm’s Brewery campus located just steps from the front door of her childhood home near Payne and Minnehaha avenues in St. Paul.

And by everyone, “I mean everyone,” said Taylor, eyeing the massive brewery’s red brick walls with sad nostalgia.

After the Stroh Brewery Co. packed up operations there in 1997, vandals broke its windows. Paper records from its abandoned offices flew out and down the street, decorating her East Side neighborhood with small, bitter reminders of disinvestment. Men in pickup trucks drove in and out with loads of stolen copper.

What had once been hailed as one of the city’s largest employers fell to literal ruin. Taylor, president of the Friends of Swede Hollow, is ho

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