Downtown St. Paul’s skyline will again have a fully lit First National Bank sign

The glowing red “1” atop the First National Bank Building will be fully lit again Thursday night.

The sign had been slowly deteriorating for several years until Downtown Revival Trust bought the building earlier this year. The organization’s founder Jamie Rand said the light is about 95 percent fixed and expects it to be fully completed in six months.

Downtown Revival Trust purchased the building in May for $3.8 million with plans to spend $7 million on upgrades. One of those upgrades will be making the sign change colors, Rand said.

Rand plans to change its colors for Minnesota Wild games, purple for Prince’s birthday and green for St. Patrick’s Day.

The light is currently turned on through a switch on the 30th floor, but he said it’ll eventually be changed through an app.

“Sign’s been dark for way too long,” he said. “It’s my hope by relighting the sign and all the other restoration work that I’m doing. We’re spending millions of dollars, this is just one little piece of the puzzle. I want to be the light to be a strong visual reminder of what downtown can be.”

The sign is three-sided, and Rand said one side was almost completely not working. The other two sides were operating at about 30-35 percent. Rand said it took three different sign companies to make the sign work.

“I’m not stopping here, I believe in St. Paul. I believe in downtown,” he said.

Founder of the St. Paul Downtown Alliance, Joe Spencer, said he’s excited about what the relighting will mean for downtown.

“When that sign went dark, that said something, right, and we had a tough couple of years, but so too does this sign getting relit also mean something and it means something real,” Spencer said. “It’s important for us to create a shared sense of place. It’s an important part of our shared story, and that is a key, an important part of a downtown revitalization.”

Rand said he plans to keep First National as an office building with plans to open the skyway to increase foot traffic. He said he’s close to announcing “a few large leases” soon.

Investments by public and private groups have resulted in a collective $1.293 billion investment in downtown, according to Spencer.

“Just in the last year, we’ve counted up over 20 storefront businesses that have opened in downtown St. Paul,” Spencer said. “We have this palpable sense of momentum, and I want to say again, this doesn’t happen by accident, it happens because of intention, it happens because of partnership.”

The sign will light up Thursday night at 9 p.m. at a relighting ceremony event.