Stop me if you’ve heard this before: big changes are coming to Nicollet Mall. Unlike the expensive reconstruction eight years ago, which wielded an influential architecture firm toward largely cosmetic designs, this time there might be a more fundamental transformation to downtown Minneapolis’ main street. It might be time to rethink a decision that was made 55 years ago and take buses off of the city’s odd “transit mall.”
A new new vision for Nicollet Mall was released this week in a report by the city’s Department of Community Planning and Economic Development. Dubbed the Vibrant Downtown Storefronts Workgroup Report, it packaged the results of a monthslong study aiming to (as they put it) “reanimate” Downtown Minneapolis. The goal is to bring street life, storefronts, and people back into the heart of the office district.
It’s a massive and important undertaking, as Downtown Minneapolis serves as a tax base cash cow for the entire region. As in every American city, the COVID pandemic upended long-held assumptions about how downtown should function. As I’ve written before, without tens of thousands of daily office workers, downtown’s economic foundation is on shaky ground. Lacking a critical mass of people, everyday life on Nicollet feels uncanny and much of the bustle is gone.
The irony here is that many key recommendations fly in the face of long-standing practices by Minneapolis leaders. The Downtown Council, perhaps the most powerful lobby in the city, has since its inception been dedicated to removing working-class street life from the downtown core. Most downtown planning tactics — traditional office space, the obliteration of older buildings and small businesses, and the segregation of the skyway system — make the core into an inflexible place.
The central business district’s built environment is the legacy of those decisions, and it poses huge challenges to the new Vibrant Downtown vision. But at least these are some good ideas, and it seems like some downtown leaders are now asking the right questions.
The history of Nicollet Mall
The report’s most notable suggestion, championed this week by Mayor Jacob Frey, is to remove transit from Nicollet Mall. It’s a good idea, and would immediately make Nicollet’s sidewalks a more pleasant place to spend time.
Transit malls have always been an odd concept in the United States: they’re pedestrian shopping streets that center on transit, which often means buses. Having recently visited Denver’s eerily similar 16th Street Mall (currently being remodeled), I’m not sure it works very well without a lot of already-existing density and vitality.
But downtown leaders have to try something different, and going “all in” on sidewalks seems like a good idea. After all, the most vibrant part of the mall is the block that boasts sidewalk cafés, in front of stalwart restaurants The Local and Barrio. Trust me, tacos taste much better without diesel buses idling a few feet away.
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke[/image_credit][image_caption]More cafés please. Let a thousand movable chairs bloom.[/image_caption]
Return of Gateway Park
The report itself is unashamedly packed with jargon. It even includes a handy table of “New Buzz Phrasing” in its appendix, trendy stuff like “experiential entertainment” and “cultural rehab.” Sentences like “we must return to activating the inner search for community and individuality as the basis of the human experience” are devoid of meaning. It’s hard to read about lost “Minneapolis flair” without reminiscing about the former Block E Applebee’s.
Still, these ideas are headed in the right direction. I’m old enough to remember when riding a bicycle was banned on Nicollet Mall, and this new plan takes the exact opposite approach. Focusing on north end of the street, a Frey suggested in an interview this week, is a good spot to start.
“The Cancer Survivor’s Park, and the plaza at the Four Seasons Hotel and RBC, if you were to connect those two, suddenly you’ve got this beautiful open park space,” Frey said. “A roller rink, ice skating, there’s tons of stuff you could have going on.”
Proposing a park at this exact spot marks a return of the repressed for downtown Minneapolis. It’s almost the exact site of the Gateway Park, the namesake for city’s mammoth mid-century urban renewal effort. It was bulldozed off the map 60 years ago, replaced with grassy modernism and surface parking, but the loss of the intersection left an emptiness in what should be downtown’s central square. Bringing some public space back would at least be poetic.
Obstacles to downtown dynamism
“There are a lot of incredibly world-class pedestrian malls in major cities throughout the country where, when you walk down them, it’s a whole different vibe,” Frey told WCCO. “I think Minneapolis could have a pedestrian mall that is the best winter street in the whole world.”
It’s certainly true that pedestrian malls can be successful, but bringing street life to Nicollet Mall faces significant structural obstacles. Pedestrian streets rely on density and diversity, lots of different people coexisting in the same place. That requires an abundance of active doorways, actual windows, and different types of destinations concentrated in one place.
For better or for worse, Minneapolis’ skyway system brings the opposite of that kind of dynamism to downtown, dooming the sidewalks to be vacant, especially in the winter. Thanks to those skyways, most downtown buildings swapped out active street fronts for internal second-story stores, leaving many of the Nicollet sidewalks barren.
But there are ideas that might work. Frey’s own brainstorming includes skating rinks and/or “obnoxious” levels of holiday lights. Why not re-center skateboarding in downtown Minneapolis, as they did during the X Games? Steal David Brauer’s idea of demolishing the worst building to build a downtown park space. (The godawfully ugly City Center gets my vote.) Park food trucks in the middle of the street. Bring back the farmer’s market that was axed this year. Subsidize bicycle taxis.
For any of this to happen, lots of things need to change in Downtown Minneapolis. But it’s good to dream, and Downtown needs all the dreams it can get. At the very least, removing buses from Nicollet Mall might get the police department to stop parking empty SUVs on the sidewalks.
Cut the artery that leads to downtown MPLS? No , keep buses, albeit electric, on Nicollet.
YES YES YES – keep mass transit and make it zero emissions. Everybody wins.
Except the guy getting run over by the bus.
It really is unfortunate that the Downtown Business Council has so much influence. Not that they shouldn’t have a voice, but they aren’t the “visionaries” they think they are… despite their innovation workshops. One guy on the council thinks they should be bring traffic and street parking BACK to the mall… oy.
It was also the Council I believe that killed the Holidazzle parade and moved the show to Loring Park. Bring it back to the Mall… duh.
I think in the short term, music festivals would be the easiest way to get life into the mall. You don’t need big names, we have plenty of locals who could entertain people without costing an arm and a leg. Just think Bourbon Street in Narlins, no big name national groups, just locals banging away night after night.
When I worked downtown about 10 years ago, lunchers at the plaza by Orchestra Hall had different musical groups performing daily for about a month each summer. We all took the time once or twice a week to meet and socialize over food truck lunch and a variety of tunes. Life was different in those days, i.e. it was better.
Interesting point. Years ago I recall exiting Brit’s to find live music at Peavey Plaza. We had a blast.
Bill, how would moving busses off Nicollet boost travel times? Are the traffic lights timed differently? It seems that putting busses into mixed traffic could further slow them down rather than speed them up.
Despite that observation, I do like the idea of punting them off Nicollet…
The details would be up to Metro Transit but I’m confident either Hennepin or Marquette/2nd would be much, much faster. Both have (or should have) dedicated bus lanes.
I rode the bus down the mall for over 20 years to get to my job downtown and the primary thing that slowed travel time in my experience was drivers on the cross street “Blocking the box”, particularly on 3rd and 7th in the evenings. Sometimes during rush hour you could sit through multiple light cycles as new batches of inconsiderate drivers completely halted progress and caused the busses to back up for blocks. Sometimes the police would station traffic control officers on the worst streets to direct traffic and stop this from happening, and then it was generally much better, but after they disbanded the traffic control division that didn’t happen much. For whatever reason the drivers seemed much more reluctant to pull the same inconsiderate move on Hennepin, (at least not often) so traffic flowed much better despite the crowding.
Personally I would have liked to have seen police ticketing those drivers, but I understand that pulling cars over and issuing tickets would have slowed traffic even more. I used to dream of a setup where the traffic control division was both funded and allowed to issue tickets via mail. Officer photographs the car blocking the intersection, photographs the driver through the windshield, photographs the license plate, waves to the driver and moves to the next car. Everyone gets their ticket in the mail with photo proof that they were driving and committed the offense. I suspect it wouldn’t take too long before people started paying attention and stopping before the line when they saw there wasn’t enough room for them to clear the intersection.
I wrote a whole column on this few years ago, before the pandemic: https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2019/08/is-there-a-solution-for-the-buses-vs-blockers-bottleneck-in-downtown-minneapolis/
It was a real problem! Now, not so sure there’s enough traffic for it to matter…
As I commented yesterday, turning Nicollet Mall into a purely pedestrian thoroughfare seems illusory–a step to be taken after conditions improve, not a step to make conditions improve. At present, a lot of folks think downtown is unsafe.
All my life (around 60 years) the “city” i.e. MPLS has been perceived as more dangerous, this was one of the reasons for white flight back in the 50’s and 60’s. So the perception of danger in the city in really nothing new, yet downtown has managed to be a busy and popular place for decades.
Obviously recent events have magnified perceptions and physically damaged parts of the city, but this isn’t necessarily a permanent feature of downtown.
Beyond that, it’s simply fact that in any city of sufficient size, relative safety and danger can be found more or less depending on neighborhoods. It is not uncommon for “dangerous” and “safe” areas to be separated by a mere block or street one way or the other. The Mall can be perfectly safe while a block away no so much. I’ve seen this all over the world from San Francisco to Paris or Brussels. In San Francisco my wife and I were staying at boutique hotel a block from the cable car line. If you walked out the front door and turned to your left… you good to go with no worries. If you walked out the door and turned to the right, within 30 feet you were in a bad part of town that you shouldn’t be in. Such is the nature of urbanism that is rarely discussed around here.
Social media and new outlets magnify fear and anxiety, all you hear about is crime and danger and people generalize… they hear about a car jacking in South MPLS and they think the ENTIRE city is rife with car jackers. Right now, the environment on the light rail is probably doing more to scare people away from the city than crime reports, but what do I know. At any rate, the mall and getting to the mall can be made “safe”, and that safety can be promoted, which might be an appropriate role the Downtown Business Council eh?
Denver has a busy nice mix on their mall- `16th street I believe. It has buses that rotate on the mall for shoppers with two hubs on either end. One hub is the Union Station and other is a transit hub. It is a free bus every 10-15 minutes. It works. But then again Denver has a dynamic Union Station with maybe 6 restaurants in it alone and a light rail system that is the envy of the Twin Cities.
Denver’s having a lot of problems downtown that, knock on wood, we’re not experiencing in Minneapolis.
I understand Mr. Lindeke gives lectures and writes books, but there is a hazardous lack of rational process in this MinnPost piece promoting a dubious notion that might be nothing more than a political gesture and little more than a throwing away of money.
Issues of downtown need to be realistically considered.
Unfortunately, recent policy decisions to liberate society by increasing addictions and drugs use will be a far bigger negative factor to downtown than one could possibly hope second-hand sidewalk cafes down the middle of Nicolett might improve things.
Portland, San Francisco, and Denver are not the models to follow, but the fantacists have steered Minnesota in that direction. Downtown Minneapolis is set become more like those cities’ downtowns, such policy outcomes will only exacerbate already consequential factors.
Denver’s 16 Street Mall’s buses are an efficient means to get to bus and train hubs at either end of downtown. Those buses move faster than very fast walking, 90% of time, often considerably.
Without those buses, commuters would not densely congregate onto 16th Street twice-a-day. Commuters familiarity with what the retail and restaurant options are feeds lunch-break decisions, or commute pit-stops.
Right when the City is planning to increase BRT or streetcars on Nicolett (Line E, which I think is a bad choice for Hennepin), which would make Nicolett more like Denver’s 16th Street, Lindeke and Frey want to split the density across a three-block zone going through downtown.
Anyone familiar with the 16th Street buses would tell you that streetcars would be a much nicer ride, but when you have chronic public incidents, the buses are crucial to be able to get around the blockage by going into the incoming lane, whereas a streetcar line would be entirely stuck in its tracks.
By the way, it is a very important reality check for Minnesotans to realize that the train system Mr. Ratliff says should be envied (Denver) has dismal ridership figures. The current blue and green lines in the Twin Cities have/had much better fare-revenue-against-cost performance, but even Minnesota’s LRT is seen by most of the developed world as wildly wasteful by the fare-revenue sustainability figures.
Does anyone remember when the Askov-Finlayson outerwear retailer led a rabble to kill the skyways and send people into the streets for the sake of creating a New-York-like street environment (and to buy outerwear)?
First of all, the most distinguishing feature on New York streets is garbage and “pizza rat.” Yes, Jane Jacobs et alia saved comfortable Village streets, but diverting the buses will not make downtown Minneapolis into the Village. You want to make a Village-like area? Maybe look to NE.
The bigger issue is that logic-involved approaches look at the fact-parameters that are the reality of Minnesota.
We have beautiful outdoor environments in the State, but climate-controlled skyways, which are safer, more-accesibility friendly, lower maintenance, more environmentally sustainable, life-saving, lowering-of-liability-costs just make sense. Calgary has similar parameters and the second largest system.
Instead of trying to sneak in the murder of the skyways on the basis of some month-long study report saying that this proposed, essentially cosmetic procedure, could be meaningful.
The real issue here is that Mayor Frey, as any politician would, wants to do something that promises a solution to concerns. Millions of dollars spent on Nicolett is chronically resorted to, in this respect. Mayor Frey has a need for a gesture that can also be an excuse, just wait until I resurrect the street life you didn’t know was the key to issues facing be downtown. Nicolett 3.0 is the answer to the downtown we want and need–no.
Skyway haters say they are too cramped in skyways. Please–it is time we improved them, yes–they should be improved; the skyways should be receiving the TLC. Now is the perfect time to work deals with landlords to raise ceilings and improve skyway spaces. Indeed, I would urge a much bolder vision than that to capitalize the real opportunity.
Yes, you can work to connect skyway environments with stairs and escalators leading up and to ground floor, but the skyways are not segregationist engineering against the working class for Lindeke to call the woke to gather for the kill or cancellation.
Downtown needs to be allowed to be a place where the multitudes of outstanding Minnesotans can work hard and support their family or lifestyle priority. That is the worker vibrancy needed, and a strong workforce-customer-basis is much better than handouts to certain for retailers.
The solution to 90% of concerns about the skyway is a better skyway. There is no reason the skyway environments cannot be impressive to world audiences before Minnesota finally gets it’s World’s Fair or Olympics.
The new Dayton’s project sees the sense of working within the rightly arranged downtown pedestrian opportunity that best suits us.
Take the grand vision of a grand piazza of urban life and frame it in some much taller and grander skyway environments. Sure, design better integration and connectivity up and down, but get on with redesigning skyway specifications for 2030 instead of carrying on size dimension largely carrying forward consumer expectations from a century ago, or 1950.
Just look at the huge missed opportunity with the skyway to US Bank Stadium from downtown. Skyway architecture and aesthetic innovations can and should be a draw for visitors–especially in this selfie age–given the tremendous photographic background and setting potential of skyway visual dramatics.
I could see Nicollet mall becoming another Las Vegas’ Frontier Street with lots of weed smoke in the air and public drunkenness.
You say that like it is a bad thing?
I grew up in CA and in Santa Monica there is the 3rd St Promenade. Pedestrian only street with street musicians and performers, cafes, bookstores and coffee shops. It’s a lovely place to spend the day… So when I moved to mpls and heard about Nicollet Mall, I assumed it was going to be similar but it wasn’t. Just lumbering, loud, smelly busses and no pedestrian activity past business hours. It’s weird to me that the rest of Minneapolis has figured out how to get people on the streets and into the parks, with music and festivals and no cars but then get stumped when they look downtown.
One positive for Mpls, at least the city and the mayor are actually THINKING about solving the problem. In St Paul it is not even on the radar. St Paul lost Taste of MN- how do you even do that?
Minneapolis has been on life support for decades and there is no way it will ever be anything but a burden on taxpayers. Let it die a quiet death or put it and us all out of our misery.
Take away taxes generated in the Minneapolis city core and you will really learn what a burden to taxpayer is..
Okay, boomer.
I have to say, the buss traffic never bothered us that much when we sat outside of Brit’s. Maybe we were just use to it but the hybrid busses were definitely quieter. I still think they should follow through with the street car plan they have. Electric street cars a quiet and clean, and they’d provide some mobility along the mall. They could also be stopped for street fests and it wouldn’t require any re-routing.
I literally created an account to respond to this so if your goal was to outrival a clown to draw in an audience, good job!
First of all, buses are essential for folks like me who are low income and *gasp* disabled! Secondly, I want to add the skyway system sucks as a wheelchair user. I can’t always confirm if an elevator will actually be working, or hidden, or if theres stairs/escalators spontaneously in the way. The only benefit they once had was that it meant not going into the snow with my tires. It used to be more manageable, and has not been kept up in the slightest.
The reason why I stopped going to Nicollet mall as often as I once did is because of all the businesses closing down, having their hours change to where they shut down ridiculously early (thanks Target), or theres cops at every single stoplight CAUSING those delays. Theres just not enough reason to spend my limited energy to GET there. The issue is that the accessibility to ALL customers is only performative with minimal effort, and that’s what you need to think about. Other people.
This opinion is bad and comes across as “I am inconvenienced by the poor, so I want them out of the way so I dont need to think about them.”
Bill, MN already agreed to pay for an extremely wasteful train to Duluth. Can’t you just be happy with that?
Downtown is not coming back, not anytime soon. Frey and other dreamers are going to have to accept that at some point, though like most things they’ll throw good money after bad trying to change the inevitable.
Office occupancy is 2/3 of what it was pre-pandemic and I don’t see that going up any time in the near future. Outside of a sports game or show, there’s not much of a reason to come downtown. It’s $20 for a burger, plus 11, soon to be 12% tax on that burger, a 5% service fee and then tip. That’s almost $30. Add in a beer at $10 and that’s enough money to feed my family for two days, not to mention parking or transit costs.
When people worked here all the time, there were more places open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, because you could make your money 5 days a week. You aren’t going to get those numbers of people back and that level of spend just by remaking Nicollet Mall, again. You can hope to remodel buildings to become residential, but it’s very expensive and not practical at all.
Oh and to heck with the City and Downtown council pushing companies to force workers back into the office more. That’s pretty underhanded.
Seems everyone who sees no hope for downtown Minneapolis doesn’t go there now and never did and never will. They’re not sure civilized life even exists South of 694.
I do, and getting the busses off should be priority 1.
Priority 2: I’m think adding open air, walk up Hurricane stands, lots of balconies, folks throwing beads down to street level partiers and a few marching bands. Might work…
I’m there multiple times a week. If I didn’t have to work in downtown, I would never go. My spouse and I don’t usually eat out because it’s exorbitantly expensive as it is and we actually feel the need to pay our bills and debt, but everything is 15% more expensive in downtown, not including transportation and or parking, so that’s definitely a no go.
Outside of those who are willing to pay for a sports event, or show, what does downtown offer? There is no shopping anymore. No Dayton’s/Macy’s. You can find just as good of restaurants in the suburbs. If you’re 21 and want to go bar hopping and don’t mind paying $10 a drink, I guess maybe that’s a reason.
The fact of the matter is restaurants and businesses cannot, for the most part, sustain themselves on weekend traffic. Before the pandemic you had tens of thousands of workers who came downtown 5 days a week and that is gone and never coming back.
I don’t know what the answer is, but for the foreseeable future and maybe forever, daily traffic in downtown is going to be 30-40% less than pre-covid and I don’t know how you compensate for that.
You compensate for it by building in more housing. You are correct when you state that office staffing downtown is never going to be what it was pre-pandemic. The solution to get more people downtown is converting unused office spaces into apartments. That will encourage businesses like Target to go back to normal hours. That will encourage more restaurants. That will encourage retail. It will also revive our skyway system.
I wrote a whole column on this a few months ago, Mike! You’re 100% right about office-to-residential. https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/12/more-housing-is-the-only-way-to-fix-our-downtowns/
Bill, I remember reading this article. Very spot on. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic had not happened, Minneapolis would have only been a few years out from a WFH exodus. COVID just pushed it along. Yes, we want corporate and office employees downtown during the day, but going forward there have to be multiple approaches to create (or recreate) the thriving downtown core.
Not too long ago Minneapolitans main problem with Nicollet mall was that too many people were walking around. Just the wrong people. We fixed that. Like how we fixed Block E, and the Gateway District before that. Now that the downtown core is a ghost town our various metro committees, corporate landlords and urbanist columnists are brainstorming again. What shall we do to fix things this time? Meanwhile, everyone else has moved on. Young folks are going to buy some snacks at Trader Joes and hang out in a hammock by the lake. Older folks can pick up some 10 dollar potato salad at Byerly’s and argue online. Good luck with urban renewal 5.0 in Downtown Minneapolis, certainly this time it will work!
I really don’t get it. Won’t moving the buses off Nicollet push more pedestrians onto Marquette & 2nd or Hennepin and decrease the amount of legitimate street activity on Nicollet? Isn’t using hybrid and/or electric buses a better and easier solution to creating a more inviting pedestrian environment?
Where will all the foot traffic on Nicollet originate without any transit there? Couldn’t such a move actually benefit the other streets by bringing them more traffic while reducing numbers on Nicollet? If Nicollet was already bustling, I could see contemplating this move.
Will people want to ride the bus to 2nd Avenue in order to walk two blocks over to an empty Nicollet Mall?