Minneapolis suburb turns ‘main drag’ into ‘Main Street’

St. Louis Park, a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis, is two-thirds of the way through constructing a town center — a pedestrian-scale gathering place that the 45,000-person community has wanted for more than a decade. Where strip commercial buildings and 17 single-family houses stood until the late 1990s, Told Development Co. is building “Excelsior & Grand,” a contemporary-style, mixed-use center that will have 660 apartments and condominium units, most of them on top of stores, restaurants, and other businesses. Bob Cunningham, principal in Told Development Co. of Plymouth, Minnesota, says his company had never built a mixed-use center before breaking ground for the $130 million project in October 2001. “It’s a project type whose time has come,” he says. Most of the 16-acre complex consists of three stories of residential over ground-floor commercial uses. Completion is expected in June 2007. “People said it wouldn’t go, but it’s filled up fast,” observes Thomas Fisher, dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota. St. Louis Park developed primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, and Excelsior Boulevard became a main artery, carrying 25,000 to 30,000 cars a day, according to City Manager Tom Harmening. “It was our main drag, but not a Main Street,” he says. “You really didn’t walk down it.” The impetus for Excelsior & Grand came from residents of the 10-square-mile municipality. “We did a community visioning process in 1994 and 1995, and people said they wanted some kind of community focal point,” Harmening explains. six-year process “It took quite a bit of time to move from the community vision to workshops and design — six years or so,” says Harmening, who was community development director while the project was under way. The city paid $18 million to acquire properties, clear the land, carry out some environmental cleanup, and relocate residents and businesses. The first developer that the city selected, the national firm Avalon Bay Communities, failed to get the project started. Part of the reason for the subsequent success is that Told is a smaller company based in the Twin Cities, Cunningham believes. “We went through about 45 proformas and 20 site plans to get the right balance between parking and retail and park space and housing,” he says. The project was designed by ESG Architects of Minneapolis, which has cultivated a specialization in mixed-use communities. Excelsior & Grand will have about 87,000 square feet of commercial space along with a “town green,” on-street parking, inconspicuous mid-block parking garages, and a police substation. Of the police substation, Cunningham says, “This just gives people the notion that it’s secure, a notion of well-being.” Told Development has brought in a mix of local and national retailers, including the first Panera Bread restaurant and the first Trader Joe’s market in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Lobbies of the parking garages will provide indoor areas where people can wait for buses. Much of the housing wraps around shared courtyards in the centers of the blocks. Cunningham says the condos have been bought by two groups — empty nesters and young couples — whereas the apartments attract people of all ages. To varying degrees, suburban centers like Excelsior & Grand compete against older city neighborhoods. The marketing strategy of Excelsior & Grand, devised by Jorg Pierach of the marketing company Fast Horse, portrayed the development as “the best of city living, without the hassles of the city,” according to the December 2004 issue of the magazine Upsize Minnesota. For example, the magazine reported, “In preparation for the first snow emergency of the year, Pierach, Cunningham, and some colleagues had 500 ice scrapers printed with the message, ‘Tired of moving your car? Move to Excelsior & Grand’ and then put them under the windshield wipers of cars through Uptown [a Minneapolis neighborhood].” Excelsior & Grand offers its residents secure parking in below-grade portions of the garages; upper portions are for public use. Adjacent to the town green is a 30-acre local park, Wolfe Park, which the municipality improved, adding to Excelsior & Grand’s appeal. Harmening says St. Louis Park officials are “very pleased” with the project. The municipality “went out and bought $10 million or so of real estate before we even had a developer,” he notes. “That’s how certain the Council was that we were doing the right thing.” The effort, he says, “was well worth it.” u