A few more final pics from Minneapolis:

Skyscrapers! I’m personally conflicted on DC’s height limit, as it does some great things for urbanism, but also has some negative impacts.  I also really like tall buildings, but they’re certainly not the be-all and end-all.

The skyline, as seen from the campus of the University of Minnesota:

Minneapolis’ IDS Center, reflecting the Wells Fargo Center.

The third of Minneapolis’ big three skyscrapers is 225 South Sixth, seen here with a couple of Minneapolis’ infamous skyways in the foreground:

Skyways: They are perhaps the single most identifiable thing about downtown Minneapolis.  The city boasts of the largest such network in the US.

St. Thomas University (which has business and law programs downtown) has a nice map of the skyway system, showing what a rats nest it can become as you navigate the 2nd floor of these buildings:

Minneapolitans love their skyways.  Growing up, they were just a fact of life.  It was only until I really got to visit other cities without them that I realized their detrimental impact on streetlife and the urban streetscape of downtown.  Minneapolis, however, almost seems to embrace it:

Seem a little quiet on the street? Minneapolis and Saint Paul are both home to a unique system of glass “tunnels” located one story above ground. We call them skyways–you can just call them convenient. Downtown Minneapolis’ 8-mile system and downtown Saint Paul’s 5-mile system will get you almost anywhere in climate-controlled bliss.

Ditch the coat in the hotel room and go exploring in this lively thoroughfare filled with specialty shops, restaurants, services, and, yes, even an annual golf tournament

“Where are all the people?” you ask. Look up. You may be missing something.

“Climate-controlled bliss” might be overselling it a bit.  The skyways are all located on private property.  This isn’t an issue on weekdays when things are busy, but on weekends, some all-office buildings will close up shop and skyway walkers will suddenly encounter a dead end.  Furthermore, as the Minneapolis booster piece indicates, there’s lots of service oriented retail on the skyway level – sandwich shops, dry cleaners, bank branches, etc – all sorts of things you’ll find in downtown DC, as well.  Except that they’re largely inaccessible outside of the normal working hours.

Worst of all, opportunities to connect between the street and the skyway level are few and far between, and most of them are in building lobbies which are subject to private control.  The result is a confusing network that only the experienced can navigate well.  The comparison to habitrails isn’t all that far off base – being back in the system for the first time in a few years, I felt like a lab rat running through a scientist’s maze looking for a bit of cheese.

Ascending into the system in the lobby of one of Target’s many downtown buildings shows some of the limits to the system.  During my last trip to Minneapolis, I tried to enter the skyway system at this same point – but since it was a weekend, the door was locked.  No dice.

On the second level, you’ll find all sorts of retail options.  Here, as you traverse along the perimeter of a building’s second floor, you can also do all your banking at the same time:

It’s carpeted and climate controlled.  The newer buildings downtown, built after the system took root, actively design for them.  They can be very mall like, where building lobbies help provide vertical circulation between levels.  This still doesn’t solve programmatic issues such as the locked doors on weekends (as that Target building is only a few years old), but it helps.  Older buildings have carved corridors out of second floor space, lack retail options, and can be extremely confusing to navigate:

Somewhere in here I encoutered a dead end where my only option was to enter the parking garage and take a staircase down to the sidewalk level.  Likewise, there are plenty of areas where your directionality is challenged – to go north, you actually have to head east and then north.  It’s a system that favors the experienced.

Skyways can be a touchy subject for Minneapolitans.  Any time an outsider criticizes the system, they usually get lambasted as ignorant of the peculiarities of urbanism in northern climes.  One local critic is Steve Berg, a longtime writer and critic in the Twin Cities.  Berg compiled opinions of various urbanists on the skyway system, and the results weren’t exactly complimentary:

When two of the world’s top urban designers drop in for a visit and come away with the impression that your city — in this case Minneapolis — is a relic of the 1970s, ill-equipped to thrive and compete in a new century, and that its only hope is to tear down its skyways, well, that gets your attention.

“I feel sorry for Minneapolis,” said Jan Gehl, the celebrated Danish architect whose work around the world has linked the rising importance of good public spaces to a city’s success.

Thirty years ago, Minneapolis was thought to be a leader among winter cities. But taking people off the streets and putting them upstairs, “under glass,” hasn’t worked in Minneapolis or anywhere else, Gehl said, to the point that Minneapolis is no longer “up to the beat of the world-class cities of the 21st century.”

Gehl and Gil Penalosa continue:

The problem, Gehl explained, is that skyways violate the first law of successful city-building: keeping people together in a critical mass. Minneapolis’ skyways — as with similar pedestrian bridge or tunnel systems in Calgary, Toronto and elsewhere — disperse people over different levels at different times. On weekdays, skyways bustle and shops flourish for a few hours a day. But at night and on weekends, people are thrown out onto barren and neglected public sidewalks. A social hierarchy develops: the wealthier classes in private spaces on weekdays; poorer people out in public spaces at all hours. That’s not a winning formula, Gehl said. It’s bad for retail business, bad for culture, bad for civic life.

The impression given, said Penalosa, is of a fearful city crouching inward against a hostile climate and a hostile world. That’s not the kind of optimistic city that most people — especially young people — are looking for, he said. Repeating the phrases of economist Richard Florida, Penalosa said that if a city doesn’t present itself as vital at street level, then talented people won’t choose to live there, especially when they can live in Chicago or Seattle or anywhere they like. And if talent isn’t attracted or drifts away, then the quality of a city suffers.

What’s remarkable to me about Minneapolis isn’t that the skyways are bland, but that the city is as successful as it is in spite of the extensive skyway network.  The elements are all there, but they haven’t quite been tied together in the way that makes urban areas great places.  Indeed, some of Minneapolis’ best public urban spaces are places the skyways bypassed – the Warehouse District, Uptown, and others.  Still, the challenges that these skyways present to Minneapolis now, as it sits on the cusp of providing an even better urban experience, should be fair warning to other cities about the road not to take.

Building off the previous posts on warehouses and their districts, I have some more pictures from my most recent (and a few older ones as well) trip to Minneapolis, focusing on the Warehouse District.

Two main streets define the Warehouse District – Washington Avenue and 1st Avenue.  These streets run perpendicular to each other.  Washington runs (kinda) East-West (Minneapolis’ street grid downtown is skewed off axis, orienting towards the Mississippi River) and 1st runs North-South.

First Avenue is closer to the core of downtown, and the warehouses there are more ornate and quicker to redevelop.  At the southern end of 1st Ave is Minneapolis’ arena, the Target Center, as well as the legendary music venue, First Avenue:

You can almost hear Prince doing a soundcheck inside.

Washington Avenue is revitalizing as the new North Loop neighborhood, but it’s still a raw place:

There’s been plenty of new investment in the area, both in renovations and new construction:

New developments are adding retail to the area, complementing some older establishments:

And all this time, industry rolls on in the area:

And there are plenty of vestiges from past industries – Creamette, International Harvester,

And a little outside of the Warehouse District proper – the old Grain Belt Brewery:

Some more photos from my trip to Minneapolis.  My light rail ride into downtown ended at the Nicollet Mall station.  Once arriving in downtown, the Light Rail line runs through the city on 5th St.  Because of the dedicated right of way (even though there is substantial cross traffic), 5th street is more or less a de-facto transit mall.  However, Minneapolis has a more prominent transit/pedestrian mall – the Nicollet Mall.

Nicollet Mall encompasses the bulk of Nicollet Avenue as it runs through downtown.  The Mall was created in 1968, like many of its counterparts, as a response to downtowns losing retail market share to suburban shopping malls.  At that time, Minneapolis bulldozed their most prominent retail street and re-built it as a pedestrian and transit mall.  It was one of the first, and remains one of the most ‘successful’ malls – along with the 16th Street Mall in Denver, State Street in Madison, and a handful of others.  There have been far more failures than successes here, I’m afraid.

Nevertheless, the Mall worked here.  At least, it didn’t completely fail.  Downtown continued to lose retail in the grand scheme, and Minneapolis’ skyway network proved to be a Faustian bargain – keeping many offices downtown by offering the same kind of climate control you’d find in suburban office buildings with nice connections to their parking garages, but at the expense of any sort of street level retail or streetscapes.  For better or for worse, the skyways are part of Minneapolis’ heritage.

Perhaps that kind of heritage stacks the deck for something like the Nicollet Mall to succeed.  It’s the one street in downtown where the sidewalks are generous, as is street-level retail frontage.  Arriving from the Hiawatha Line, you enter the Mall on the northern end, at the intersection of 5th and Nicollet:

As the light rail trains continue down 5th street, most pedestrians hang a left onto Nicollet.  Once there, they’re greeted with the one downtown street with nice trees and wide sidewalks:

The fact that no other streets downtown have good street trees is a bit puzzling, since Minneapolis as a whole has some of the best urban forests and tree canopies of any American city.  But not downtown.

The transitway itself does not shoot straight down the center of the right of way.  Instead, it weaves back and forth, like a wave.

The weaving is an homage to Minneapolis’ aquatic history and connections.  The City of Lakes takes water seriously – as it provides some of the greatest amenities today, yet was also the sole economic reason for the city existing at all.  Functionally, however, the weaving of the traffic lanes allows for a minimum sidewalk width along both sides of the street, while also providing adequate space on the wider portions for street art, bus shelters, fountains, benches, etc.

Nicollet Mall also hosts a weekend farmer’s market, numerous civic parades and festivities, and all sorts of other hullaballoo.  These events usually happen on evenings and weekends, however – where buses are re-routed to adjacent side streets.

A great deal of Minneapolis’ north-south bus routes through downtown utilize the Mall. From the photos, you’ll notice that those buses are the only vehicles using it.  Taxicabs are allowed after the evening rush, and bicycles are similarly restricted from riding on the Mall, much to the dismay of sign vandals:

The lack of regular facilities for cyclists brings to mind the debates over the configuration of the K Street transitway, and the role bike lanes should have in it.  It raises the question if it’s possible or desirable to have all streets downtown serve all modes, or if prioritizing one mode on a few streets over others is sufficient.

Minneapolis’ problem is that all of the other streets in downtown have cars as the top priority.  Though bike lanes have been added in recent years, the overall pattern is unmistakable:

Hennepin Avenue, above, has the potential to be a great urban street – but storefronts are spotty, sidewalks narrow in relation to the traffic lanes, and the urban fabric is a bit disconnected in spots by surface parking lots.  There are many great old theaters in the area that would be a tremendous asset to the city, but the streetscape isn’t quite there yet.

Other streets, particularly many cross-streets running east-west, are even worse:

Almost all of them are one-way pairs.  I don’t have any information on Minneapolis’ downtown traffic, but I don’t ever recall the area’s small and compact grid being unable to handle traffic – removing one of those lanes and widening sidewalks a bit, adding trees, bike lanes, and the like would be a tremendous improvement.  Street frontage along those sidewalks would instantly become more inviting.

In some respects, however, the issues of streetlife and vibrabcy are a chicken and the egg problem.  Sure, there are design issues – but you need a base of customers and residents to support those retail spaces.  Nicollet Mall does an excellent job of concetrating that retail energy in one place that can achieve critical mass, but even that shows the weaknesses of Minneapolis’ current downtown demographics:

Closed on Sundays?  A big chain like Chipotle is the kind of place you’d expect to lead the charge to be open on Sundays.  I’ve seen longer lines during the weekends at the Gallery Place Chipotle than I see during the normal lunch rush.

This particular Chipotle is located in the base on the Target world headquarters building, fronting on Nicollet Mall.  The retail spaces along the Mall are all occupied, and Target’s two-block complex includes this Chipotle, the Dakota jazz club, the News Room bar, a 2-story urban Target, and other retail as well.

That urban Target Store (at the base of Target’s world headquarters) did not come easily.  This may seem like a common tale to anyone who’s followed the DC USA development:

There have been plenty of criticisms during this election year. The three top challengers in the Minneapolis mayoral primary railed against Sayles Belton’s support of the project, portraying it as a gift to Target and developer Ryan Construction at the expense of small business and affordable housing. Remaining challenger R.T. Rybak continues to hold it up as the quintessential example of so-called corporate welfare.

At the same time, there are different versions of how much the city paid. The Minneapolis Community Development Agency, the office that shepherded the deal, puts the public cost close to $60 million. MCDA project coordinator Phil Handy says $35.5 million of that goes for what’s called site assembly – buying the land, paying legal and regulatory costs, and cleaning up any lingering pollution – things that would need to be done no matter who developed it. Handy says much of the rest, nearly $18 million, paid for construction of the underground parking ramp that the city now owns and operates. Handy says this money shouldn’t be viewed as a subsidy.

It’s worth noting that R.T. Rybak is now the Mayor of Minneapolis, though this was hardly the sole reason for his election.

One other requirement the city put out for Target’s development of the area, however, was that each of their buildings would have retail spaces fronting the street on all sides.  However, except for the Nicollet Mall facade, those storefronts remain empty and have never been filled.  Target, as a landlord, isn’t actively seeking tenants.

Minneapolis has made great strides as a city since I grew up there, but it’s still got a ways to go before becoming a full time big-city downtown.

After the move, it’s vacation time.  I’m off next week to head back to my hometown of Minneapolis.

I’ll be back next week.