Map illustration by Alex Schieferdecker
Map of downtown Minneapolis
Alex Schieferdecker’s breakdown of the good, the bad, and the ugly of downtown Minneapolis street design
On a blustery 33-degree November morning, downtown Minneapolis ambassadors bundled up in blue and neon yellow outnumber pedestrians strolling Nicollet Mall. Few people are around to appreciate the new Dayton’s Project signage or pop into a café. The extra-wide sidewalks seem superfluous.
Truly, walking around downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul can feel a bit lonely these days, even as urban designers strive for the opposite: streets bustling with people drawn in by storefronts or enjoying a break from the office in a green space—a “consistently compelling sidewalk experience,” as urban planners like to call it.
“If you bring a tourist to downtown Minneapolis, they would say, ‘Where are all the people and shops?’” says Bill Lindeke, an urban geographer and columnist for MinnPost.
Transportation planning consultant and Macalester alum Alex Schieferdecker recently quantified this with a series of maps he drew up, depicting the good and bad blocks of both downtowns.
“It was important for me to have a ranking system that was fairly objective (ex: does it have retail, yes/no; is it a blank wall, yes/no),” says Schieferdecker, who now lives in Philadelphia and who conducted the survey using Google Street View.
The results are colorful maps that confirm which blocks of both downtowns would impress a tourist. And it’s instantly obvious that avoiding the worst blocks—the dead zones dominated by long windowless concrete walls, mirrored panels, or, worst of all, surface parking lots—is nearly impossible. The only string of green (indicating either active storefronts or parks or plazas) in Minneapolis lines Nicollet Mall, though the Mill District side of Washington Avenue appears to be catching up with a six-block stretch that’s only briefly interrupted by a surface parking lot. In St. Paul, about three blocks of St. Peter Street and Wabasha Street between 4th and 7th earn green status.
That may not surprise anyone, but the maps help quantify and visualize the challenges of making our downtowns more delightful (plus, they’re beautiful in their own right, says Ben Shardlow, director of urban design for the Mpls Downtown Council and Downtown Improvement District).
“It’s like looking at a Rorschach test: First you look and see a lot of green, then you look again and see a lot of red,” Shardlow says. “It’s a useful bit of feedback for there to be an independent assessment. It’s really hard to simplify these things, and Alex is really good at it. I just wish he had done it 10 years and 20 years ago!”
THE RED ZONES
Revitalizing the dead zones is time consuming—after all, it took decades to create those areas, as city planners sought to revitalize downtowns by catering to cars. Parking lots and ramps and wide roads sought to save downtowns from the 1950s to the 21st century.
And until recently, downtown catered almost exclusively to daytime office workers. Downtown Minneapolis is home to a little more than 50,000 permanent residents and hosts over 200,000 office workers per day (or it did, pre-pandemic). While that compares favorably to peer cities, it’s far from major downtowns like Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., Schieferdecker says.
“It’s wonderful to see when parts of downtown turn into residential areas, people are actively invested in treating it like their neighborhood,” Shardlow says. And that type of residential investment is helpful in weathering the lingering effects of the start of the pandemic, when downtown offices came to a standstill.
There may be one word some urban designers utter with more contempt than they use in referring to surface parking lots: skyways. As marveled at and appreciated on cold days as they are, there’s no denying that they reduce pedestrian street traffic.
“The street levels get neglected, and you find blank walls or mirrors creating dead spaces with no doors and no shops, so that walking through most parts of downtown, you feel very alone and maybe not even safe,” Lindeke says.
As for St. Paul? “Take all of Minneapolis’s problems and multiply them, and you get St. Paul’s problems,” Schieferdecker says.
Photo courtesy of Meet Minneapolis
Stone Arch Bridge area
Where the Stone Arch Bridge meets downtown? Now that’s a pedestrian-friendly streetscape.
TURNING RED ZONES GREEN
The vision of urban planners and downtown advocates is clear: Storefronts with floor-to-ceiling windows, welcoming entryways, and inviting green spaces should entice people downtown. Zoning laws can help: It’s a requirement that building façades on Nicollet Mall maintain 40 percent of ground-floor walls with transparent windows or doors, and that display windows stay illuminated until at least 1 am. Main lobbies and elevators must be on street level.
But those laws only go so far: If business owners aren’t on board, they can block windows with shelving or ads (à la Target on Nicollet Mall) or high-backed booths (as the 801 Chophouse steak house that replaced Barnes and Noble did).
“It’s something you can’t really legislate,” Schieferdecker says. “You can design a great streetscape—you can mandate landscaping, doors, and windows—but if they don’t care, they won’t water the plants or they’ll put shelves against the windows.”
Plus, the pace of change is slow, as turning a concrete bunker of a parking ramp into compelling retail space requires a developer to invest time and money.
“It’s fair to acknowledge that downtown does get better one project at a time,” Shardlow says. “I hang my hat on that. We’re all working toward new expectations and new norms for the level of pedestrian friendliness. But the only way that ever changes is incrementally, with individual decisions made over time.”
That’s why Lindeke advocates for going all in on a couple of spaces, with the longer-term goal of knitting together all the green blocks.
“By making a couple of places 100 percent better, you can demonstrate what it can look like,” he says.
Still, in climates like ours, the bar actually needs to be higher.
“The thing about downtown Minneapolis is that I really enjoy it a lot more when the weather is nice,” Schieferdecker admits. “That tells me that it has a long way to go.”
There’s still much uncertainty, but urban planners are optimistic our downtowns will overcome the weather, the pandemic, and yes, even the skyways. One sign: a mixed-use project on a 3.4-acre site near Target Field. In late fall, developers broke ground on North Loop Green.
THE BEST AND WORST
The best Minneapolis blocks: Gold Medal Park. The Mill District contains Gold Medal Park, Schieferdecker’s favorite place to wander in downtown Minneapolis. Runner-up: Nicollet Mall
The best St. Paul block: 6th Street between Sibley and Wacouta (Lowertown). “The single place I enjoy the most [in either downtown] is Lowertown St. Paul,” Schieferdecker says. “It’s the best neighborhood in the Twin Cities in terms of real urban feel.”
The worst Minneapolis block: “If I could delete any building from downtown Minneapolis, it would be the Gateway Ramp. It’s a block-sized parking lot across from the depot that forms a triangle of death,” Schieferdecker says. Runner-up: Marquette between 1st and 2nd Streets
The worst St. Paul block: 9th and Minnesota behind the MPR building
Best street makeover: 4th Street in downtown Minneapolis used to “be like a trust fall to bike down,” plus it was a wide road with narrow sidewalks barren of trees and landscaping, Shardlow says. Now the sidewalks are wide and feature rain gardens and landscaping. And the street boasts a new protected bikeway.
