What's Up With Uptown?

Like a boreal forest regenerating after a fire, Calhoun Square was born in flames. On June 26, 1975, the Thirty O Five Building at 3005 Hennepin burned to the ground. After the fire, Martha Head, who represented the Junior League of Minneapolis—one of the building’s tenants—on the newly formed Hennepin–Lake Business Association, got the association’s consultant, Ray Harris, to help find the League a new home. Shortly afterward, the Minneapolis Public Schools closed Calhoun School, which also occupied the block. Recalls Harris, “When the school board decided to sell the school, Martha and I said, ‘Why not make a proposal [to develop the corner]?’ ”

It took five years to run the gauntlet of neighborhood opposition—the corner drugstore hung DUMP UPDALE signs in its windows, a jab at the “mallification” of the mom-and-pop urban corner—but by its 1984 opening, Calhoun Square had literally absorbed its opponents. The mall may appear to be a single building; but it actually incorporates three original structures: the old drugstore, which now houses Figlio and The Independent; a bowling alley, which became Odegaard Books and later Borders; and a third building, in which Kitchen Window is now located.

Today, Calhoun Square’s top product is butcher paper, since so much of it covers up once-thriving storefronts. The low point may have been last Christmas, when a liquidator vended piles of $5 pajamas and sweats where Borders once stood. Two decades after the controversy, irony abounds: Neighborhood activists wish for nothing more than the mall’s good health in the wake of a bizarre skein of ownership changes that left the place rudderless and increasingly without tenants. They even lament the loss of reviled chains such as Borders.

In April, the Star Tribune twisted the knife, arguing that the Calhoun Square contagion was spreading throughout Uptown, noting the exit of longtime draws The Gap, reliable franchises Panera Bread and Cold Stone Creamery, and local originals Josi Wert, Gabriella’s, and Tibet’s Corner. As reporter Chris Serres artfully observed, Calhoun Square was once so hip Prince wrote a song about it (“It don’t matter clothes U’re wearin’/Or your hair/If U’re freaky, they don’t care . . . Meet me there/If U dare/Calhoun Square”). Another line: “Don’t be shocked 2 see your mother,” gives a nod to the indisputable fact that two generations have honed their funkiness in Uptown. There’s a little Uptown in most of us, but Uptown seems to be at a crossroads. What will it take to make it great again?

When seventeen-year-old Billy Rae Deshawn Johnson gunned down twenty-five-year-old grad student Michael Zebuhr a half-block south of Calhoun Square in March 2006, the tragedy also became one of Minneapolis’s costliest murders. Ross Lewis, owner of The Great Frame Up next to Calhoun Square, says of his business, “Everything, all of a sudden, dropped 50 percent.” Neighbors told him their sales were off 20 to 30 percent. Phil Roberts, Parasole chairman and CEO, whose holdings include Figlio and Chino Latino, says the murder resulted in “about a 7 percent hit that lasted well into the year.” A month after the slaying, Borders—Calhoun Square’s biggest draw—was gone. Next to depart was longtime tobacconist Golden Leaf, Ltd.

It was a huge comedown from just two years earlier, when Harris and Martha Head and her husband, Douglas, put Calhoun Square up for sale (Harris owns 50 percent; the Heads own 50). The mall had its struggles—second-floor space had long gone begging—but the trio received twelve bids and reaped $28.1 million, according to county records. Harris says local bidders came close, but he thought Cincinnati-based North American Properties would do a good job “managing and maintaining the excitement level of Uptown.”

Harris says he was shocked when, just a few months after the sale, North American divested its Minnesota properties. Jay Scott, North American’s local representative, stayed with the project and formed his own company, financed by giant Des Moines–based insurer Principal Financial. Scott then went on a buying spree. According to the county, Principal paid $15.5 million for a hodgepodge of other parcels on Calhoun Square’s block, including the former Music Go Round site at Lake and Girard and the buildings housing The Lotus and Orr Books fronting Hennepin. Stuart Ackerberg, Uptown’s largest property owner and a losing Calhoun Square bidder, says the purchase price was “top dollar—beyond top dollar.”

Principal had upped the ante, and took a big gamble to pay it off. The bet: condos, 108 of them, priced from $200,000 to $700,000. The timing stunk: As the project wound its way through neighborhood meetings and city approvals, the condo boom busted. Bay Street Shoes & Accessories owner Darrel Besikof, an original Calhoun Square tenant, said condos became a fatal problem because Scott (who didn’t return calls for this story) never had a real plan. “They got the city to sign off on the project, then they told us the preliminary costs came in high, so they had to rethink it,” says Besikof. To buy time, Scott put existing mall businesses on month-to-month leases—which, according to Besikof, resulted in too much uncertainty for merchants who must order their inventory months in advance.

Borders “wanted a two-level bookstore, which would have really helped solve the second-floor problem, but they got tired of waiting,” he notes. Besikof believes Scott “wanted to chase out tenants, to have a clean slate.” Lewis’s ten-year-old frame shop became collateral damage; it closed this spring. “We had eight good years and two lousy ones,” he says. “I attribute most of that to the mismanagement of the management company.”