This work has been featured in MSP Mag!
A lot of ink has been spilled pondering the post-pandemic future of downtown Minneapolis. But I think that in the talk about when things will return back to another ‘normal’, it shouldn’t be forgotten that downtown Minneapolis’ pre-pandemic ‘normal’ was not especially great!
That’s not to say it was bad, it just wasn’t especially great. It’s hard to come up with a firm metric, but you know it when you see it. Neither lifeless nor lively, it has come a long way in the past decade and still has a long way to go.
I feel fortunate to have seen so much of this transformative period up close. When I was in school, I took a black-and-white photography class and was inevitably drawn to photograph some of downtown Minneapolis’ most back-and-white streetscapes. I vividly remember the loneliness of the Nicollet Mall Station, which was partially bordered by a surface parking lot. Not only is that gone now, so too is the awful parking ramp beyond it, and half of the surface lot beyond that as well. The North Loop is totally different now. Downtown East is unrecognizable. Downtown Minneapolis may not meet the goal set for it around that time of doubling its residential population by 2025. But this is one of those goals where setting it is the most important thing. It will come close.
I also feel frustrated by the scale of the work that still remains. What Minneapolitans did to their own city in the middle of the last century was a monstrous act of civic vandalism. The city is still picking up the pieces. Why does so much of downtown Minneapolis feel so desolate? Why are the streets so wide and uninviting? Why is it so hard to buy some M&Ms after 7 p.m.? Relative to where it was, downtown Minneapolis has come far. Relative to any objective standard of urbanism, it falls well short.
I wanted to get a sense of the health of downtown Minneapolis by mapping its streetscapes. Great urban areas are experienced as a pedestrian, surrounded by the activity of other pedestrians. For that, you need people, you need jobs, and you need attractions. When you have these, you end up with active, interesting, and attractive spaces. If you look for these outputs, you can intuit the presence of the inputs.
Looking at downtown Minneapolis with a spatial lens also matters because continuity matters. People cluster in neighborhoods, businesses cluster in districts, and commercial activity clusters in corridors. A fragmented and divided downtown is less than the sum of its parts. For downtown Minneapolis to become a great urban core, it needs to offer a continuous and cohesive experience. In any great city, you can walk and walk, turning whenever something catches your eye, and never get bored.
Mapping The Streetscapes
My method was to evaluate every streetscape (full map at the end) in three neighborhoods; Downtown East, Downtown West, and the North Loop/Warehouse District. I gave each streetscape one of five grades based on activity and interest of the ground floor:
Bad (Surface Parking): Entirely or predominantly a surface parking lot.
Bad (Inactive): A blank wall, opaque windows, vacant lot, or a fence.
Fine (Semi-Active): A building with transparent windows, a non-retail use, or nice landscaping.
Good (Active): A building with a retail use and doors to access it, or sidewalk dining.
Good (Park or Plaza): Entirely or predominantly a publicly-usable green space or plaza.
A couple of notes here. I didn’t make a distinction between retail spaces that were or weren’t occupied, because that is always changing. I did include streetscapes of projects that are not yet open, but are well underway, like the Gateway Tower, 270 Hennepin, and the North Loop Park.
Also keep in mind that these categories aren’t detailed enough to perfectly fit with every possible situation. There are some instances where rich old materials added more interest to blank walls or murals added more interest to surface parking lots. Conversely, there are some instances where poorly kept businesses detracted from active sidewalks. But in general, these situations are rare and throughout I stuck with a consistent method of evaluation.
The Best and the Worst Of Downtown
When comparing like streetscapes, clear spatial patterns emerge. Let’s start with the best streetscapes in downtown Minneapolis:
Nicollet Mall stands out right away. For all of the complaints about the street’s recent redesign, it is unmistakably the most active and interesting corridor in downtown Minneapolis.
The area of the Warehouse District between the railroad tracks and Hennepin stands out, while the area of the North Loop beyond the railroad tracks doesn’t.
Washington Avenue in the Mill District is a burgeoning retail corridor, but it is totally disconnected from the rest of downtown.
The whole southern quadrant of downtown, even where there are nice old buildings, is almost a desert of activity.
Downtown Minneapolis’ parks and retail areas rarely occupy the same spaces. In particular, Downtown Minneapolis has a lot of small isolated parks which don’t really add a lot to their surroundings.
Now let’s look at the worst streetscapes in Downtown Minneapolis:
Right away you can see that they outnumber the good streetscapes. A huge swath of downtown, right in the center, is absolutely dead. I think you can identify three main dead zones.
The first is the gateway-adjacent district, primarily between Marquette and Third Avenues. This is where the long-lost Metropolitan Building once stood and where some real clunkers currently sit.
The second is the area at the southwest end of S 2nd and 3rd Avenues, where the malign influence of the Convention Center and the ramps for I-35W create a black hole. The Sleep Number HQ building is a special blight on this area.
The third is the area around HCMC. I understand that it’s hard to make a hospital area pedestrian friendly, but even among hospitals, HCMC stands out as one of the most deadening. The slight exception is the newest building on the campus, which is at least has an interesting design and is surrounded by some nice landscaping.
Both of these maps tell a similar story. Downtown Minneapolis has three key retail areas: Nicollet Mall, the Warehouse District, and the Mill District. The past decade has seen the first two districts mostly connected, with the almost-complete Gateway Tower as the keystone.
But there is still a massive divide between this area and the city’s booming Mill District, which is mostly the legacy of benighted midcentury urban thinking. Further, there is no strong retail area in a huge section of downtown south of Marquette Avenue and S 5th Street. Addressing these two deficiencies should be the goal of the next decade of downtown Minneapolis redevelopment.
Short Term: What’s Changing And What Needs To Change
The good news is that there’s still quite a bit of momentum from the past decade, as residents, employers, businesses, developers, and banks continue to bet on downtown Minneapolis. Here are eight major projects that are already in the works and seem likely to happen soon or get started in the coming few years:
Four projects are either approved or about to be approved by the Minneapolis Planning Commission.
Sherman’s multi-building redevelopment of the 240 Portland block is already building a replacement firehouse so that the current one can be torn down. Once complete, it will replace a key surface parking lot with housing and extend the Mill District’s retail corridor further along Washington.
CA Ventures’ tower at 17 N Washington could start soon, beginning with demolition of the Dolphin Staffing Building. Along with their nearly complete tower on the Hennepin Avenue side of this block, these developments will add a ton of retail and activity to the hinge between the Nicollet Mall and Warehouse District retail areas.
Hines’ North Loop Green development will not affect a lot of existing street frontage. Instead, it will create new frontage under the North Loop viaducts, and will connect multiple levels of space in the vicinity of the North Loop railroad trench.
CEDARst’s three-building redevelopment of the Duffey Paper blocks has been submitted to the City. If constructed, it would eliminate a surface parking lot and breathe life into two currently unoccupied warehouse buildings. The North Loop area is rapidly-developing, but lacks street-facing retail and this development will fill a big hole.
Four projects have been widely discussed but their final form is not yet known. They are likely to include a lot of housing and hopefully some retail. These might come to fruition in the next development cycle.
AECOM was the latest winner of an RFP from the City of Minneapolis to developed a cursed parcel of land adjacent to the Guthrie Theater’s parking ramp. (Full disclosure, I work for AECOM. It’s a huge company and I have nothing to do with this project). The project has gone through several iterations of condo development.
The City put out an RFP for three quarters of a block currently occupied by city office buildings. The RFP was won by John Buck Co., an experienced developer with a portfolio that includes many high rise towers.
Local developer OPUS has yet to break ground on a massive residential project proposed for the second half of the ‘Ritz Hotel block’ opposite Nicollet Mall from the county library.
St. Olaf Church is spearheading a project to build hundreds of units of affordable housing on their mostly-underutilized block (including one of those little-used pocket parks) next to the Campbell Mithun Tower.
Of these eight projects, six are along the two block corridor from Washington Avenue to 4th Street. While nothing is certain, all seem reasonably likely to get done in some form or another in the coming decade. But there are a handful of critical single-owner blocks for which nothing is currently proposed:
Hennepin County owns two full blocks adjacent to the new Commons Park that it uses to house its public safety and juvenile detention departments. Both blocks are full of fortress-like buildings that prevent the public investment in the Commons Park from fully transforming this area of Downtown East. Apart from the current debate about rethinking public safety, these two sites are now more valuable for redevelopment than for their current uses.
The single biggest barrier towards connecting the Washington Avenue and Nicollet Mall corridors is the Gateway Parking Ramp, which probably boasts the single worst street frontages in the entire downtown area. Getting rid of this monstrosity should be the single biggest priority for downtown booster groups.
Wells Fargo’s Operations Center is a low-slung full-block building with opaque glass. Note that this building, the Gateway Ramp, and the Hennepin County Public Safety building are all one block away from each other (and surrounding the District Courthouse, which is much worse than my simple scoring system could capture), forming a corridor of dire streetscapes that anyone passing through this area most cross.
Possibly the most notorious surface parking lot in the City, the three-quarter block parking lot fronting the Hennepin Ave/Warehouse District Station has inexplicably survived for over fifteen years despite being in the heart of downtown and accessible by transit.
These two maps show how, in the next decade, downtown Minneapolis could address the two short-term goals of connecting the Mill District to Nicollet Mall, and adding activity to the downtown’s southern quarter. Another ten years like the last ten will mean a downtown that has really turned the corner and is consistently active and interesting for residents and visitors alike.
Long Term: The Two Big Issues Plaguing Downtown Minneapolis
At the same time that Minneapolis is building back a better downtown parcel by parcel, there are two huge issues that will continue to hold it back. They won’t be addressed in a decade, but perhaps the groundwork towards fixing them can be laid during that time.
Skyways are what sets downtown Minneapolis’ apart from almost any other city on earth, and it’s telling that no tourist travels from any distance to go see them. By bifurcating the number of pedestrians in the downtown core, they rob every business of half of their potential clientele. I’ve never really heard a decent rebuttal to this argument; skyway proponents either plug their ears or insist that the comfort of white collar office workers should be prioritized over anything else.
The least Minneapolis can do is work to contain the skyway system and starve it of more retail, while also boosting the downtown population to the extent that even half of the whole still makes a big market. Hopefully at some point in the future a critical mass of the downtown establishment decides to stop sabotaging itself.
Highways ring downtown Minneapolis and make it an island away from the rest of the city. In any of America’s best downtowns, you can walk from the center of town and experience a seamless transition into more residential areas. Some of a city’s best commercial streets are often in this mixing zone, like U Street in DC or South Street in Philly. But in Minneapolis, that zone has been cut out. Were it not gutted by a highway, I’d bet dollars to donuts that the area between Loring Park and Franklin Avenue would be the city’s busiest and best retail district. Instead, it’s a glorified freeway interchange.
The interstate highways that strangle downtown Minneapolis won’t go away anytime soon, but perhaps initial planning could start on removing or repurposing the ramps that cut into the downtown area. In the longer term, the loop sections of I-94 could be removed, with all highways terminating in downtown and thru-traffic routed onto I-494 and I-694.
Post-Pandemic Downtown Minneapolis
In every city, neighborhood interests will always complain about the downtown getting a disproportionate share of attention. But that’s because the health of a city’s downtown is critical to the health of the city as a whole. That’s where the most taxes are generated, that’s where the most people go to work, that’s where everyone feels free to gather when something big happens like a sports championship (admittedly not something downtown Minneapolis will ever have to concern itself with). A downtown is a neighborhood that belongs to the whole city from which the whole city can take pride.
That doesn’t mean rolling over for the monied interests or flooding the zone with security theater or spending big bucks on ever-larger convention centers and stadiums. It means investing in the streets and streetfronts so that they can thrive in the most public possible way. It means weaving a civic fabric that binds the downtown together and with the rest of the city. I don’t think downtown Minneapolis represents these ideas yet, but I do think it is on the way. In the future, after the pandemic finally abates, it just might start to get there.
