To readers: Some people in this report have requested their full names not be used.
Out-of-state alcoholics and drug addicts agree: St. Paul is a great place to move in, get settled and stay sober.
The city is wrapped in a web of support services for what’s called the recovery community — people who’ve had severe problems with alcohol or drugs and who are trying to build lives that don’t involve drinking or using.
For example, five years ago, Kat M., a longtime Manhattanite, decided to give alcohol-addiction treatment another try — this time at Hazelden in Minnesota, partly because her brother lives in the state.
“My plan was to come to Minnesota for 28 days, spend a week with my brother for vacation, and then go home,” she said.
“I never went home.”
Now, she lives and owns a business in St. Paul. She said she decided to stay because she appreciates the manageable size of the city and how it caters to both practical and spiritual needs.
There’s recovery all over town: The big deal is the Big Book, with more than 300 traditional Alcoholics Anonymous meetings each week in locations ranging from repurposed houses to church basements to a Summit Avenue mansion. In a Macalester-Groveland meditation center are 12-step meetings with a Buddhist bent; downtown, there’s the Alltyr Clinic, founded by an alcohol-abuse expert formerly at the National Institutes of Health; in Merriam Park are a range of services provided by Transitions, which refers to St. Paul as “the recovery capital of the world”; and in the West Seventh neighborhood, you can even find something called “recovery yoga.”
St. Paul has a lively cottage industry of “sober houses,” where people live after completing treatment programs. There’s a job network for the newly sober and strong contacts with big corporations. There’s inpatient and outpatient treatment, with specialties for senior citizens, teenagers, gays and lesbians, and people who have mental health diagnoses.
And there’s a social scene. Up and down Grand Avenue are coffeehouses whose most loyal patrons are in recovery. There’s a St. Paul sober softball league, and there’s the annual Dry Bones Blues Festival, this year in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood.
William C. Moyers is a former cocaine addict from the East Coast who for the past 20 (sober) years has resided in St. Paul’s Crocus Hill neighborhood.
Moyers, who now works at the newly merged Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, foresees the city will gain even greater nationwide prominence as “the heart of the heart of recovery in the country” as Hazelden, headquartered in Center City, Minn., begins a dramatic expansion of its outpatient presence in St. Paul this summer.
BEYOND QUITTING
As any AA member can point out, the 12 Steps mention alcohol only once, in the first step. The goal is to figure out how to live happily and productively without abusing alcohol or drugs. For many people, it takes more than simply quitting to prompt this metamorphosis.
That’s why, more and more, organizations and people in recovery are taking the long view.
“We used to see recovery as an acute episode. People would go to Hazelden for 28 days and we would expect them to be cured. There is the beginning of a shift … to help people after they get treatment,” said Judson “Kim” Bemis, board chairman of the Minnesota Recovery Connection, which recently moved from St. Paul to Minneapolis. Its program is based on providing peer support, including a 40-hour academy to train “recovery coaches.”
Through the Minnesota Recovery Connection, people can sign up to get a weekly phone call or have a face-to-face meeting to talk about the practical issues of recovery, such as finding a place to live, a job and day care.
“You develop a lot of sober friends and sober connections,” said Bemis, who is originally from New York. The idea is to promote an “I’ve established a new life here” feeling, he said.
“People come here either to go to treatment or come to a sober house that’s here. They get established in the community, and they like it, and they stay,” Bemis said. “If they become stable and have a program, whatever that program is, they’re going to be contributing citizens; they’re taxpayers. Having a recovery community in St. Paul really helps that get established.”
In 1992, Andrew Zimmern’s friends organized an intervention and put him on a plane to Minnesota. After going through treatment at Hazelden, he stuck around, first at Hazelden’s Fellowship Club halfway house in St. Paul, and then, for 17 years, on Grand Avenue in the Crocus Hill neighborhood. All the while, he was building a career as a chef, writer and “Bizarre Foods” television host.
“My life kept getting better; my world just kept getting sweeter, and a lot of it had to do with the community of people I was living in and among,” he said.
Although he eventually moved to Edina, he believes in a sort of St. Paul magic: “You find hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who all tell you, ‘Stick around! Why leave something that’s working?’ That just feeds on itself in a miraculous and delightful way.”
COMMUNITY IS KEY
Chris Edrington, a former Colorado resident who described himself as “a miserable heroin addict for nearly a decade,” says the best promoter of long-term sobriety “is not the treatment center — it’s the (recovery) community. Eventually, if you want to get into the life that’s involved in recovery, you’ve got to get into the community — live with ’em, work with ’em and hang with ’em.”
Like many others who are now St. Paul residents, Edrington came to Minnesota for a treatment program, and “while I was there, interacting with sober people, I ran into … a guy (who) took me in his truck over to St. Paul and introduced me to everyone on Grand Avenue; Grand Avenue in St. Paul, Minn., is Sober Center, USA.”
Creating good relationships with people, he found, “is a giant part of the medicine of getting better. In the first few years of sobriety, you’ve got to surround yourself with people who are doing the same thing.”
Edrington focused on the “live with ’em” part of recovery when, working in property management, he arranged in 2001 to use his boss’s rental property as a sober house. He now has a business, St. Paul Sober Living, with nine single-family homes in St. Paul, one in Minneapolis and two in Colorado, totaling about 100 beds.
Following treatment, many clients are advised not to go straight home. That’s, in part, because the best friends at home may still be doing a lot of alcohol and drugs, and in part because it takes time to establish a new path before returning to a familiar environment.
Some go from treatment to transitional care such as a halfway house, where they get additional counseling and maybe help to find a job. From treatment or a halfway house, people may go to a sober house, which centers on social, rather than clinical, support, Edrington said.
For example, if it’s 5:30 p.m. and the AA meeting is at 6, a person may think twice about going if he’s tired and alone, Edrington said. But if four people who live with him are going, he’ll probably go along. Likewise, there’s a group dynamic in going out for coffee or to a barbecue, or playing on the sober softball or volleyball teams.
“I decided to come back and go to a sober house and jump back into the sober community,” said Shawn E., who moved away after graduating from high school here and still has relatives in the area. “I came back to St. Paul specifically for that reason. I’ve tried to get sober in several other areas of the country, but I didn’t feel the support that I felt here.”
In his experience, Shawn said, “You’re always welcome back; that’s the spirit within the people of this community. People will give you a second chance. I think there’s some Minnesota Nice in that. A lot of the friends I’ve made are not from here. Some stay and build a life here, and that’s what I’ve done. They start to build their own lives outside of AA, but AA and the sober community are always there for them.”
DECADES OF SUPPORT
The footings of that second-chance perception stretch back decades. Greg Ekbom, owner of Day By Day Cafe on West Seventh Street, said he recalls St. Paul in the 1980s being a destination for people who wanted to stay sober. Back in the day, he said, the nearby Hazelden Fellowship Club halfway house served as a source of cafe employees; a recent employee hired is in recovery, too. Ekbom has friends who came here 30 years ago and ended up settling in St. Paul.
Since Jim Burt started Reclaim Center Inc. in St. Paul 27 years ago, he has hired hundreds of people fresh out of treatment; some have lasted a few days, while others became permanent employees. There were medical surgeons and low-life junkies, he said, and “they’re the best people; they’re people of second chances. We’re all here getting sober.”
The main business of the company is selling close-outs, including grocery items close to their sell-by dates, along with a seasonal roasted-nut operation. Burt himself is a 1979 alumnus of St. Paul’s Twin Town Treatment Center, and he understands what work means to people in transition.
“This whole company is much more than a business. This company is like a ministry to me,” he said. “It’s always facilitated sobriety. I’ve always done anything I can for the sober community.” St. Paulites, he said, are empathetic rather than judgmental, and their city is the bedrock of sobriety in the United States.
Job opportunities also can come through the big corporate recovery community network, said Bethany, who moved from Minneapolis because she wanted to live in a sober house in St. Paul. When she was about six months sober, “I was in a job interview in San Francisco, and I realized the people who were really here to support me, day in and day out, were in St. Paul.” So she, too, stuck around.
SECOND CHANCES
Just because you stay in St. Paul doesn’t guarantee you’ll stay sober, said Moyers, Hazelden’s vice president of public affairs and community relations. After treatment, he wound up in a crack house in the Summit-University neighborhood and relapsed another time in Atlanta. But in his experience, it’s easier to recover from a lapse here because the city’s friendliness contributes to its transparency.
“When people slip in this community, it’s easier to be seen and get picked up,” Moyers said. St. Paul figures prominently in Moyers’ book, “Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption,” written with Katherine Ketcham.
“Whenever I seemed in danger of falling off the edge … it wasn’t long before somebody dropped by the house or tracked me down at the local coffee shop to find out what I was up to,” he says in his book.
“No wonder God whispered ‘St. Paul.’ The city was thick with people like me who had come to Minnesota for treatment and stayed because of the strength and sheer mass of the recovering community.”
In response to growing demand, ground was broken this summer for a $25 million expansion at the Fellowship Club campus in the West Seventh Street neighborhood near the Mississippi River, which has outpatient care and structured sober housing where Moyers once lived. Over the next two years, a new 55,000-square-foot facility will be built and the existing building, an elegant historic home, will be remodeled.
Mind Roads Meditation Center founder Therese Jacobs-Stewart also is an anchor of the recovery community. Her book, “Mindfulness and the 12-Steps: Living Recovery in the Present Moment,” is written from a secular Buddhist perspective that doesn’t shut out faith in a higher power, which is a cornerstone of the AA 12-step program.
“Mindfulness is a huge thing in terms of relapse prevention. It’s thriving — the appetite is growing,” said the meditation teacher and psychotherapist. “On a very pragmatic level, I can learn to watch my urges go by without having to do something about it.”
Mark attends the Mind Roads meeting in the Mac-Groveland area, along with others in St. Paul.
“I really immersed myself in all the resources the recovery community has to offer,” he said. “I was also able to see that you could have a social life built around people you know in recovery. There was a community that gathered not only to stay sober, but also to have fun. You have this one thing in common that’s powerful and draws you together.”
Katie S., who is from the Detroit area, had tried treatment a couple of times before entering The Retreat in Wayzata, chosen in part because it was a relatively inexpensive program that uses a lot of volunteers.
“I had nothing left except the good grace of my family, and I was on thin ice there, anyway,” she said. “I had $100 and a carton of cigarettes from my parents.”
She had no intention of staying in Minnesota, though.
“The second I landed here, it was like, ‘Yep, I’ll do this, and then I’m going home,’ ” she said.
But nearly five years later, “home” is a St. Paul apartment, her roommate is someone she met when both lived in a sober house and her boss just happens to be in recovery. She’s on a sober softball team; she does service work; and at the grocery store, she bumps into people she knows from AA.
“Part of the beauty of it is, there are so many people in St. Paul that are active members of Alcoholics Anonymous, it almost feels there aren’t any ‘normies’ out there,” Katie said.
“I’m still here,” she said. “I’m thriving in St. Paul for a million different reasons.”
Debra O’Connor can be reached at 651-228-5453. Follow her at twitter.com/DebOConnorPP.
