Requesting anonymity, a source close to the Star Tribune submitted this reflection on the $45 million sale of four blocks of the paper’s Warehouse District property to the Minnesota Vikings:

Last month Publisher/CEO Par Ridder went to a meeting of Strib circulation executives in a conference room named for Charles A. Freeman, one of the best-loved employees the newspaper ever had.  The glass-walled room was named in Freeman’s honor in 1991 after the company’s circulation/distribution manager collapsed in his office and died of a stroke at age 60.

So here you have Par Ridder, who demonstrated his sense of integrity by jumping from the Pioneer Press to the Star Tribune under questionable circumstances, and whose next court date is June 25, walking into a room that has a memorial to Chuck Freeman etched into an eye-level glass panel on the door.  The tribute is titled “A MAN OF UNQUESTIONED INTEGRITY.”

So what is Par Ridder response to having to confront the ghosts of past Strib executives and a door with “A MAN OF UNQUESTIONED INTEGRITY” etched in the glass?

Not a problem:  Par sells 4 square blocks of Strib land to Zygi Wilf.  The Charles A. Freeman conference room is not in the newspaper’s main building at 425 Portland Av.; it’s across the skyway in the Freeman Building, named for another former executive, Gale Freeman.  Wilf will demolish the building, so the wrecking ball will obliterate the Charles A. Freeman conference room and its etched-glass door, an inconvenient reminder of a time when integrity was a core value at the Star Tribune.