First in a series on downtown Minneapolis redevelopment plans
Growing up in Minneapolis, Selena Smith remembered downtown Minneapolis being more family-friendly. Downtown had clothing stores like J.C. Penneys and Howard’s. It also had bathrooms.
Today, she dreads going downtown. “There’s no sense stopping through,” said Smith as she rode a Route 18 bus going south on Nicollet one day earlier this summer. “If you go downtown, there aren’t gonna be any bathrooms. The culture has changed. The level of violence has gone up. Humanity has gone down.”
For years, the powers that be have tried to remake downtown Minneapolis using bulldozers, fences, promotional events and activities, and even through an enhanced police presence. Yet it never seems city officials are able to achieve their vision, in part because their vision does not seem to be what people want.
The pandemic forced many downtown workers to begin working from home, and many are continuing to do so. Using data from mobile devices, the University of Toronto School of Cities found that Minneapolis is one of the slowest cities in the country to recover its downtown activity, with 40 percent fewer people spending time downtown compared to before the pandemic began. Downtown retailers closed as the pandemic took hold, some before the pandemic (Saks Off Fifth) and some after (Nordstrom Rack and Marshalls).
Additionally, a study by commercial real estate company Avison Young found that at least 21 percent of downtown Minneapolis office space was available for lease earlier this spring. And Metro Transit commuter express routes are among the slowest in the system to recover: Ridership this past winter was at 262,737, or 14 percent of ridership during the same period in 2019.
Still, the city has tried to attract visitors to downtown. They’ve closed North 1st Avenue to cars on Friday and Saturday evenings so food trucks can park and people can sing karaoke and play lawn games. Those events, which last to 3 a.m., are sparsely attended, even during a recent Twins game.
The city has had more success partnering to host one-off events such as the “Taste of Minnesota,” an event that attracted over 100,000 people to the former Gateway District to sample cuisine from various food trucks.
Struggle to define downtown
Downtown Minneapolis has long been the center of a struggle between powerful business interests and the working class. The Minneapolis Downtown Council created Aquatennial in the 1940s to distract from annual picnics organized by local unions to commemorate the deadly 1934 General Strike, where two striking workers were killed.
In the late 1950s, as corporations like General Mills fled to the suburbs, the city bulldozed the Gateway District. Civic leaders decided downtown Minneapolis needed to look like a “suburban campus,” according to what Andy Sturdevant wrote in the book “Downtown: Minneapolis in the 1970s.” Entities like bars, pawnshops, social service agencies, rooming houses that housed migrant workers, even a small Chinatown fell to the wrecking ball.
For a time though, much of the land became parking. Some office towers were built that housed entities like the Federal Reserve. Many of those offices were connected by skyways, limiting pedestrian street traffic.
The city also rebuilt Nicollet Mall to make it more pedestrian-friendly. And while it was a business hub in the 1970s, it began to decline despite two rebuilds in the past 40 years. The opening of the Mall of America, the pandemic, and the ongoing frenzy around crime certainly did not help the downtown Minneapolis revival.
Despite its struggles, downtown Minneapolis still has a nightlife scene that attracts people from around the state. Those people include friends of Shiloh Fang, who came up from Austin, Minn., a town 90 miles southeast of Minneapolis, to celebrate their birthdays.
“I’ve been spending time downtown since the protests [surrounding George Floyd’s murder],” said Fang shortly after her friends walked into a nightclub on Hennepin Avenue. “I personally feel safe. I see it as a city. Those who don’t come here say they don’t feel safe.”
Future plans for city core
The city has more ideas in store. The Vibrant Storefronts Working Group, convened by Mayor Jacob Frey to determine how best to bring people back downtown, recommended legalizing public drinking on Nicollet Mall. The state legislature this past session allowed the city of Anoka to experiment with something similar in their downtown. The city will report on findings from the pilot, which will continue through next year, to the legislature in the next two years.
The mayor’s committee also recommended the Downtown Council match building owners with potential businesses to occupy vacant storefronts, as well as streamline regulations.
The city also wants to permanently move the buses off Nicollet Mall. The city and the Downtown Council worked to close Nicollet Mall to buses on Thursdays to facilitate attracting crowds, which have included skateboard rides, concerts, and distributing free flowers.
Though Jasmine Mason, a downtown Minneapolis resident who relocated from Philadelphia two years ago for work, likes the activities. She believes it’s more important for the buses to be able to operate on Nicollet Mall.
“As long as they keep doing things like this—more interactive things—it will bring more people downtown,” said Mason as she received a bouquet of roses from David Kisan, who owns Sip ‘N Bloom, a small business that teaches people how to arrange flowers. “[But] there’s too many people who use [the bus]. It needs to be here [on Nicollet]. Parking is really expensive and [having the buses on Nicollet] makes it easier [for people] to be down here.”
Some people don’t think the efforts the city is making to attract people to downtown Minneapolis will help revive the area. Take Woodbury resident Jeff Gibson, who commutes to downtown Minneapolis three days a week to work. “If my only option was downtown, I would go there based on what I am looking for,” said Gibson on his bus ride home on Interstate 94. “[But] everything I need is in my neck of the woods.”
Some believe the city isn’t doing enough to support those who already come downtown. Though the committee did not address restroom access, in the past the Downtown Council has worked on making restrooms accessible downtown, which included making a map that directs people to the nearest public restroom, setting up a seasonal bathroom trailer at Peavey Plaza, and inviting pedestrians to use bathrooms in the retail mall at 6th and Nicollet, when it is open.
Meanwhile, both the city and the Downtown Council have restricted available seating by removing seats from certain locations along Nicollet Mall and fencing off access to other public benches and seating. “We have to manage [the seating] with a realistic eye…whether those chairs become…an attraction, a positive feature of Nicollet, or we’re creating challenges that are detracting from the experience of people downtown,” said Downtown Council Executive Director Steve Cramer.
Restricting access to downtown
The courts have also restricted some Minneapolis residents from stepping foot in downtown. According to data obtained from the Fourth Judicial District, which covers Hennepin County, between January 2020 and August of this year 29 people received a total of 46 orders to not step foot in downtown Minneapolis. Twenty-one of those people were Black, and just over half of all those restricted hail from South Minneapolis zip codes.
Activists have also accused the Hennepin County Library system of arbitrarily restricting residents from its libraries by issuing trespassing violations, including at Minneapolis Central Library. The county told the MSR that data on who was issued trespass violations from the library and why is considered “security data,” which is private under state law. Journalist Tony Webster is challenging the assertion by suing the county, particularly as the county turned over similar data to another investigative reporter in 2019.
All the while, residents of downtown Minneapolis and its surrounding neighborhoods—Loring Park, Elliot Park, Downtown East and North Loop—struggle for affordable services like grocery stores, retail stores, hardware stores, bike shops, and ice cream shops.
“When I have to go shopping at Mall of America, I wish it would be here,” said Elliot Park resident Yassine Grice one evening this past summer, referring to downtown Minneapolis.
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