Best of the Northern Suburbs

Return to Best of the ‘Burbs home

Trail Mix
The northern suburbs are home to two of the metro’s finest bike routes. The Rice Creek Regional Trail begins at Rice Creek Chain of Lakes Regional Park Reserve in Lino Lakes and follows a mostly wooded corridor fourteen miles southwest to Fridley. The Mississippi River Regional Trail runs from Minneapolis, past the small, serene Islands of Peace Regional Park to the Coon Rapids Dam. The trails intersect near Locke Lake in Fridley if you’d like to cover a few miles on each. Maps are available at Anoka and Ramsey County websites. Little Transport Press’s suburb-friendly Twin Cities Bike Map is available at most metro bike shops.  [top]

Inn Gallery
The gallery at the quaint, picturesque Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts hosts surprisingly progressive, engaging exhibits. At a recent group show, the walls of the historic Fridley inn displayed the requisite watercolor landscapes alongside vibrant rock ’n’ roll photography and psychedelic digital prints. Neighboring Manomin Park is a great place to picnic or stroll after a pleasant art-filled afternoon. 6666 East River Rd., Fridley, 763-574-1850. [top]

CoHei Cool
This is no bland, homogenous strip punctuated by one T.G.I. Friday’s after another. CoHei—Columbia Heights’ stretch of Central Avenue—boasts close to a dozen ethnic cafés and leaves few cultures unrepresented. Whether you’re after veggie curry, halal meats, taquitos, or chow mein, there’s a restaurant to please your palate. Think of it as a stretched-out version of Minneapolis’s Eat Street, but with more mattress outlets and auto repair shops. [top]

Best for Cranes and Friends
Home to one of only fifteen species of crane alive today, the Sandhill Crane Natural Area—a pristine sand plain unusual for its proximity to a metro—features wetlands and uplands that are important habitats for some of Minnesota’s other threatened species, including the lance-leaf violet and Blanding’s turtle. Hiking through the 533-acre area in East Bethel is allowed, but access is a bit challenging; low-impact trails will be established in the next couple of years. Access at Hwy. 65 and 207th Ave. NE or 209th Ave. NE. By the standards of Anoka County’s impressive park system, Albert A. Kordiak County Park in Columbia Heights is a tiny, spartan outpost. Devout walkers who would rather dodge wayward waterfowl than iPod-toting Rollerbladers will appreciate the wooded, half-mile pathway around serene Highland Lake—and the great blue herons preening in the shallows. 1845 49th Ave. NE, 763-757-3920, anokacountyparks.com [top]

Must-Play Courses
A number of the metro’s best and most popular public golf courses are in the northern burbs. A-mong the must-play links are Maple Grove’s Rush Creek Golf Club (7801 Co. Rd. 101, 763-494-0400), host of several LPGA events and the 2004 U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship; Ham Lake’s Majestic Oaks Golf Club (701 Bunker Lake Rd., 763-755-2140), which has a nine-hole course, two eighteen-hole courses, 7,500 yards, and is the largest public course in the state; Brooklyn Park’s Robert Trent Jones II–designed Edinburgh USA (8700 Edinburgh Crossing, 763-315-8550, edinburghusa. com), which landed on Golf Magazine’s list of top public courses in the United States; and Bunker Hills Golf Course in Coon Rapids, the course of choice for the Minnesota State Open. 12800 Bunker Prairie Dr., 763-755-4141 [top]

Best Place to Get Furious
What began as Omar Ansari’s hobby has grown into Surly Brewing Company. Deciding where to base SBC was easy: space had opened up in Ansari’s immigrant parents’ factory, Spark Abrasives in Brooklyn Center. Ansari and business partner, former Summit and Rock Bottom brewmaster Todd Haug, sold their first keg in February and currently have three beers—Furious, Bender, and Cynic Ale—now available in more than fifty metro bars and restaurants. 4811 Dusharme Dr., Brooklyn Center, 763-535-3330. [top]

Best Strip Mall
Fridley’s Moore Lake Plaza has amassed a collection of stores so unexpected we had to stop. Browse through consignment racks, hit King’s for sushi, visit Ax-Man Surplus Store, or roll out the Pilates mat at Northwest Athletic Club before grabbing provisions at Seoul Foods grocery. The funky shops would totally fit the scene at Lake and Lyndale. Hwy. 65 at Moore Lake Dr. E. [top]

See Spot Sprawl
Brooklyn Park hits a bull’s-eye with Target.
In the future, a single, powerful corporation will become the center of civic life around which housing, employment, shopping, and recreation will all revolve. The scenario isn’t sci-fi, it’s suburban—and Brooklyn Park officials find nothing dystopian about it.

City leaders have inked a deal with Target Corporation welcoming a ten- to fifteen-year expansion project that will transform the company’s current modest Brooklyn Park facilities into an expansive, $1.75 billion mixed-use corporate campus. The development, eventually occupying nearly 350 acres, will include up to 8 million square feet of office space for Target and other businesses, a SuperTarget anchoring up to 2 million square feet of retail, and as many as 3,000 rental and owner-occupied housing units. Proposed amenities include several on-site hotels, a library, public parks, a water tower, and a police station. In essence, an entire city center, brought to you by the same folks who gave us the $7.99 Michael Graves plastic bag dispenser.

The Target expansion is a massive feather in the cap for Brooklyn Park, perhaps best known for its Tater Daze festival or its former mayor-turned-governor Jesse Ventura. A corporate campus on this scale is exceptional nationwide, and city officials haven’t played down the significance. The estimated value of the proposed campus is almost double that of the city’s entire existing industrial and commercial property.

If you’re envisioning row upon row of red-dotted lampposts or Isaac Mizrahi–designed bungalows, you’re probably veering a bit toward the Disneyian. It’s too early to say how pervasively the development’s noncorporate elements will feature Target’s trademark design savvy, but company spokeswoman Lena Michaud concedes, “the residential development part of it wouldn’t be our core strength.”

What the expansion means for Target’s Nicollet Mall headquarters is only partially clear. The company has vowed to maintain its presence in downtown Minneapolis, but has neglected to comment on which corporate divisions will head north, leaving room for speculation as to whether Target’s “company town” might not also become its new HQ.  —Brian Kevin  [top]

Best New Community Center
When it comes to community centers, you can’t beat the suburbs. Andover’s new YMCA Community Center is one of the best. That it stands in the shadow of the city’s water tower, just a short sprint from the public works building and city hall, is no accident: City leaders view it as an integral part of Andover’s emerging city center. The YMCA runs a fitness center and two pools (one with water slides); the city manages the ice arena, field house, and meeting space. The center’s metal-and-glass exterior and bold central hall earned an award from the Minnesota chapter of the American Institute of Architects. 15200 Hanson Blvd., 763-230-9622, 763-767-5100 [top]

Theater with the Mostest
The eighty-year-old Heights Theatre in Columbia Heights has a lot going for it: It’s architecturally gorgeous, with antique chandeliers, handsome woodwork, and vaudeville-style curtains. It shows first-run, general-release movies, as well as obscure indie flicks, foreign films, and early cinema classics. Nobody stops you if you take in your Blizzard from the Dairy Queen next door. And it’s got dapper Harvey Gustafson. Make sure to get inside fifteen minutes early on Saturday nights to hear him play the theater’s vintage Wurlitzer pipe organ. 3951 Central Ave. NE, 763-788-9079 [top]

The Big Mo
Blaine goes from sod farms to sports mecca.
The sixteen-year-old National Sports Center is on a roll. The pride of Blaine already boasts—among other things—the world’s largest soccer complex, a world-class velodrome, an innovative youth golf course, and more than 3 million visitors a year. By the end of 2006, an addition to the center’s Schwan Super Rink will make it the world’s largest ice complex, and the center will break ground in 2007 on a $40 million “sports mall.” Soccer moms and hockey dads who come for the nationally recognized youth sporting events contribute more than $25 million annually to the local economy.

Equally impressive is the effect the NSC has had on Blaine’s self-image as a sporting hub—and, in turn, on the city’s rapid development. “This place did not look like this in 1990,” recalls Barclay Kruse, associate director of the Minnesota Amateur Sports Commission, which oversees NSC development/operations. “There was nothing here except sod farms.”

The NSC’s success in the 1990s as the Midwest’s top sports destination helped woo investors to Blaine’s second sports cathedral: the $20 million Tournament  Players Club golf course, which hosts an annual PGA Tour tournament and anchors an upscale residential community. If Vikings stadium boosters can get back on the horse next year, the city may roll itself right into a billion-dollar, mixed-use monument to the state’s largest sports franchise. Not bad for a town built on youth soccer. NSC, 1700 105th Ave. NE, 763-785-5600; TPC, 11444 Tournament Players Pkwy., 763-795-0800. —B. K. [top]

Four Reasons to Love the River City
Anoka was visited in 1680 by Father Hennepin, the first recorded European to see the area, but it took another 150 years before logging was under way and settlers began building permanent homes there.

1. Charming Peninsula Point Two Rivers Historical Park is Anoka’s most notable homage to its past. The park is located on an 8.3-acre spit of land at the confluence of the Rum and Mississippi Rivers—a sacred Native American site. Nearby there once was a fur trading post, a sawmill, Fourth of July gatherings, and, sadly, a sewage treatment facility in the 1950s. The park, designed by Geoff Martin, ASLA, opened in 1995 and received an award from the Minnesota Society of Landscape Architects.

2.Intersected by the Rum River, Anoka’s Main Street is quaint if quiet. Lyric Arts Main Street Stage (lyricarts.org) is the show in town for arts. Step a few blocks off Main Street to see some of Anoka’s grande dames, including the turreted Jackson Hotel, the Greek Revivals Woodbury and De Graff Houses, and the Italian-style Green House.

3. The Rices, the Woodburys, and the Washburns were among Anoka’s power brokers, but Garrison Keillor is the favorite son. His paternal grandpa arrived to Anoka in 1880 from New Brunswick and sixty-two years later the creator of A Prairie Home Companion was born. Keillor attended Anoka High School but grew up in Brooklyn Park along the West River Road in a house his father built, when the place was surrounded by farms.

4. Boarman Kroos Vogel Group’s David Kroos and a team of architects eschewed a conventional box structure when they designed Rum River Library. Instead, their floor plan opens up like a fan from the atrium entrance to take advantage of the views of the wooded nature area behind the 30,000-square-foot building. Indigenous limestone, exposed timbers, and natural light all helped to create this perfect spot for reading. 4201 6th Ave., 763-576-4695  —Claire Joubert [top]

Best Wild Life
At 185,000 square feet, the Cabela’s in Rogers is the largest in the state and fourth-largest in the country. So, what do you get for all that space? At the heart of the store is Conservation Mountain, a huge diorama with serious museum-quality wildlife mounts—elk, elephants, grizzlies, polar bears . . . . And the place also has a deli, trout stream, bait shop, gun library, horse corral, dump station, semi and RV parking, dog kennels, and an indoor archery range, to say nothing of the fishing, hunting, and camping gear. What more could an outdoorsman/woman want? 20200 Rogers Dr., 763-493-8600. [top]

Awesome Chapel
The wavelike wood panels and geometrical stone façade of New Brighton’s United Theological Seminary’s Bigelow Chapel might be the coolest examples of architectural verve north of the Guthrie. The chapel has been recognized nationally by the American Institute of Architects, and its creative use of shape and light are awe-inspiring. Wander the chapel on your own or call about guided architectural tours. 3000 NW 5th St., 651-633-4311 [top]

Dining Bests
Best Indian
Udupi Cafe and its eponym—the town of Udupi on Karnataka in southern India—are both deservedly famous for their vegetarian southern Indian food. The café’s menu is large, the buffet at lunch is generous, and the mango lassi is my drink of choice. Grab a dosa at lunch, or come with friends for dinner and dive into a tasty array of appetizers, soups, curries, breads, and sweets. Don’t skip the palak paneer (spinach with fresh cheese) or the bagara baingen (a curried stuffed eggplant). Udupi is the best Indian restaurant in the metro. 4920 Central Ave. NE, Columbia Heights, 763-574-1113

Winging It
Maverick’s roadside tavern in Champlin is everything a joint should be.  The bar is retro-hip, with a pool table, strong drinks, and a vibe that reminds me of all the great small-town taverns I frequented as a young troublemaker. The perfectly designed supper club dining room is cool and the patio is great. Mav’s wings alone are worth the drive from just about anywhere. (Get ’em jerk-style.) 11328 West River Rd., 763-576-8150

If Wine’s Your Thing
At Canyon Grille in Coon Rapids, meat and fish are seared over a hardwood grill, there’s a four-season patio, and food is prepared from scratch. The owners’ passion for wine shows—in the climate-controlled glass-walled showcase holding 1,500 bottles and in the four Awards of Excellence from Wine Specator in four years. 3490 Northdale Blvd., Coon Rapids, 763-323-9100

Buzz Worthy
From the folks who gave the cities Bellanotte, a huge restaurant/club offering an Italian-inspired menu and late-night dining. Bella has the buzz. 10950 Club West Pkwy., Blaine, 763-746-9990  —Andrew Zimmern

Best Korean and Karaoke
King’s offerings are as good as Korean gets in these parts, and expats from around the metro make their way here in droves for the kimchi, bulgogi, and bi bim bop. If you want to see how the real experts do karaoke—in Japanese, Korean, you name it—this is the place. 1051 Moore Lake Dr. E., Fridley, 763-571-7256  —J. M. H. [top]

Retail Bests
The Maple Grove Lifestyle
If Edina brought us the first mall, Bloomington the biggest mall, we have Maple Grove to thank for the newest type of mall—the “lifestyle center” (which is different than a mall, thank you very much).

Shoppes at Arbor Lakes delivers a non-enclosed layout that allows shoppers to stroll through the open-air central paved courtyard dotted with benches, greenery, and fountains en route to a mix of upmarket tenants (Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, Smith & Hawken, Anthropologie . . .).

The “main street” approach is also attractive to independent retailers such as local suburban success stories Goodthings, Hot Mama, Grand Central Stationery, and Let’s Dish!—which all are at  Arbor Lakes. Strip mall access, no anchors (that’s right, no department stores), and the sit-down restaurants have proven to be a winner.

This October, The Fountains at Arbor Lakes will join Arbor Lakes Mainstreet, Maple Grove Crossings, and The Shoppes at Arbor Lakes to service the five-mile population of more than 63,000 people with an average household income of $104,000. The development will include Costco, Lowes, Marshall’s, PetsMart, and several “junior” anchors as well as two hotels, a water park, six to eight restaurants, space for   smaller retail shops, and office space.

Unexpected Treasure:
We think it’s pretty safe to assume that nearly every DIY project that’s been created locally for HGTV—and requires fabric—has sourced something from S.R. Harris Fabric Outlet. The large warehouse, located in an industrial park in Brooklyn Park, is filled to the ceiling with bolt upon bolt of velvets, silks, leathers, suedes, wools, cottons, lace, cashmere, upholstery, plus trims and tassel and a whole lot more. The serve-yourself layout and mind-boggling assortment is not for everyone. But the prices are worth the sweat you’ll generate from lifting and sorting to find the perfect print. 8865 Zealand Ave. N., 763-424-3500

A Store We Adore:
There are a handful of boutiques in town that are the vision of local interior designers. One of the standouts is Wiggles N Giggles—run by mother-daughter team Cynthia Swenson and Kelly Thyen. You’ll find children’s furniture, décor, and clothing, plus services for decorative painting and custom bedding and draperies. The nursery vignettes are a delight. 4355 Pheasant Ridge Dr., Blaine, 763-783-0250

Trendsetter:
Though he sold his beloved Aveda to Estée Lauder years ago, Horst Rechelbacher moved his multimillion-dollar operation from the city core to Blaine back in 1991 and took the hip quotient of this suburb up a few notches. Currently 500 employees work at the world headquarters in Blaine, where 80 percent of the highly successful Aveda products are manufactured.  [top]

Fun Facts
Gretchen Carlson, Fox News anchor and 1989 Miss America, was valedictorian at Anoka High School. Medtronic, Fortune 500's #235, is headquarted in Fridely. In Bethel, 7.4 percent of the population claim Italian descent. Hilltop, surrounded entirely by Columbia Heights, is only .1 sqaure mile, but its crime index rating was more than twice the national average in 2000. New Hope's ice rink served as the backdrop for the championship game in The Mighty Ducks (1992).

[top]