Floyd and Linda Ruggles opened West St Paul Antiques on April 22, 1998, at 880 Smith Avenue South in West St. Paul, Minnesota, just minutes from downtown Saint Paul. More than a quarter century later, the mall has grown into what its own marketing calls the largest antique mall in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro, spread across three full floors, and was voted Minnesota’s Best Antique Mall every year from 1998 through 2016.
The Ruggles built the business on a specific philosophy: dealing in traditional antique furniture and collectibles in fine, original condition, priced sensibly rather than aspirationally, an approach that has attracted both private buyers furnishing homes affordably and professional interior designers and dealers who travel from around the world scouring the mall for quality inventory. That professional draw gave rise to the shop’s well-known slogan, shop where the dealers shop, reflecting the mall’s reputation among industry insiders as much as casual collectors. Inventory across the three floors spans furniture, artwork, jewelry, toys, militaria, primitives, glassware, barware, vintage advertising tins, Matchbox cars and Hot Wheels Redlines, movie and travel posters, railroad memorabilia, and seasonal Christmas and holiday decorations, giving the mall genuinely comprehensive category coverage.
What sets West St Paul Antiques apart from a typical multi-dealer mall is its integration of actual museum space into the shopping floor. The third floor houses a free Winter Carnival Museum, open year-round and dedicated to the unique history of the St. Paul Winter Carnival, alongside additional exhibits covering the Odd Fellows fraternal organization and other local history topics. Visitors specifically recommend budgeting time for the museum alongside the shopping itself, treating a trip to West St Paul Antiques as part retail excursion and part genuine local history lesson. The mall markets itself as an environmentally conscious operation as well, noting that roughly 99 percent of its inventory is previously owned, positioning secondhand shopping explicitly as a form of recycling and waste reduction.
The mall keeps a Wednesday-through-Sunday schedule, open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. those five days and closed Monday and Tuesday. Staff are generally described as knowledgeable experts able to speak to the history behind individual pieces, though as with any large multi-employee operation, service experiences can vary between staff members on a given visit.
For anyone in the Twin Cities looking for a genuinely enormous, professionally respected antique mall paired with real local history exhibits, West St Paul Antiques remains one of Minnesota’s most established shopping destinations. West St Paul Antiques is a three-floor, more than 25-year-old antique mall in West St. Paul, Minnesota, founded by Floyd and Linda Ruggles in 1998, known as a favorite among professional dealers and home to a free Winter Carnival Museum.
