When I moved to Philadelphia in 1968 to go to graduate school in history at Penn, the city was rapidly de-industrializing, leaving behind hundreds of vacant buildings, abandoned docks, and rusting railroad yards. As I explored them, I wondered why new uses couldn't be found that would preserve and restore some of the legacy from our past. Except for a few years working as a starving artist (in sculpture) after graduate school, most of my career has been in the nonprofit and government sectors. I was a community organizer for a civic association in the Old City neighborhood of Philadelphia just as it was beginning to be redeveloped in the late 1970s, and then for an historic preservation organization, after the Tax Act of 1976 tipped the scales in favor of preservation. I moved to the Twin Cities in 1982 to raise a family, where my first job was working for the Wilder Foundation subsidiary that developed the old Como Railroad Shops into Bandana Square and the housing around it. In Minneapolis I worked as the director of economic development for the West Bank Community Development Corporation. Since 1989, I have worked in economic development and strategic planning for the Saint Paul Department of Planning and Economic Development where I have written applications for grants that sparked the redevelopment of the Phalen Corridor and the cleanup of the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary, and helped merge the City and County workforce development systems. Most recently I have been working on redeveloping the Central Corridor, where I created a program to help finance parking improvements to help mitigate the loss of 85% of the parking on University Avenue due to light rail. In that capacity I got to know the neighborhoods north and south of University Avenue really well. In the neighborhood around the Raymond Station Area I saw that there were a lot of abandoned railroad sidings that were going to be lost, and that Saint Paul stood to lose a key part of its railroad heritage unless new uses could be found for them. As I got to know about the grassroots movement to establish the Creative Enterprise Zone in the Raymond Station Area, I realized that here was a potential reuse for those abandoned railroad sidings, and when I realized that the Minnesota Commercial Railway wanted either to rip their rails out of Charles Avenue or give them to the City, the vision of The Art Train germinated in my mind and took root in the fertile soil of the Forever Saint Paul Challenge Grant.