Development News

The Minneapolis Farmers' Market on the outskirts of downtown is already a seasonal sensation, a place where the chance to jostle with other shoppers past 240 stalls of flowers and food is guaranteed most summer mornings.
 
Now the adjoining Farmers' Market Annex, where crowds spill over to shop at 160 more vendor stalls, has turned a little-used parking lot and storage area into a showplace for home landscape and garden services called Urban Garden.
 
Owner Scott Barriball compares Urban Garden to a permanent home and garden show in a farmers' market setting--a sort of outdoor version of the nearby International Market Square design showplace. The offerings range from pergolas, fire pits, and bubbling boulders to handmade willow furniture, birdhouses, and tomato trellises.
 
Barriball says the equivalent of close to $1 million in labor and materials went into the creation of Urban Garden, transforming a site he says used to be "an underutilized mess." Vendors and contractors tore out blacktop and built landscaping attractions that include three outdoor kitchens, two waterfalls, and a rain garden.
 
Barriball's Annex is a for-profit counterpart to the nonprofit Farmers' Market operated by the Central Minnesota Vegetable Growers Association. Together they lay claim to having the largest selection of any market in the Upper Midwest, with an atmosphere like a European bazaar, drawing as many as 25,000 people daily.
 
Source: Scott Barriball, Minneapolis Farmers Market Annex
Writer: Chris Steller
 

Every city worth its salt has at least a few water tanks rusting atop century-old buildings. The lucky ones might score a paint job during a rehab or get depicted in a cityscape hanging on a coffeeshop wall. But few are brought to life like Rusty, the water tank overlooking the Minnesota Twins' new Target Field in Minneapolis' Warehouse District.

Every night since the Twins' home opener, projected images have animated the water tank's visage � most notably, "Rusty," a googly-eyed face that is already an unofficial team mascot and neighborhood icon. From his perch on the roof of the Wyman Partridge Building, Rusty winks, whirls and ogles at the action below, on and off the field (see video).

With a tank-head standing on support legs, "the water tower looks like it could be a person anyway," says Rusty's creator, Brock Davis, an artist who works by day at Carmichael Lynch, an ad agency in the same building.

The company asked Davis to do something creative with the tank in anticipation of its new prominence above the ballpark. Davis had admired European light-show projection work; that simple idea won out over more elaborate and expensive options.

In the future, the automated projections may key off of baseball results or use images that people submit via the Web. But Rusty's industrial-age roots will keep him a nostalgic, even primal presence. "It feels very retro to me," Davis says. "You look out into the darkness and there's something looking back at you."

Source: Brock Davis, Carmichael Lynch
Writer: Chris Steller

The web of dedicated paths for biking and walking in St. Paul will soon add an important strand. The city is getting ready to build its first proper bicycle boulevard, on Jefferson Avenue across the southwestern part of the city.

As it passes through St. Paul, the river twists northward, then south again. Due to that geographical quirk, the straight-line, east-west Jefferson Bikeway will meet (or nearly meet) the Mississippi River at both ends: at Mississippi River Boulevard and again at W. Seventh Street/Shepard Road.

Anyone biking the nearly four-mile length of the route will experience three different levels of accommodation: bike lanes from W. Seventh Street to Lexington Parkway; shared lanes (or "sharrows") from Lexington to Snelling Avenue; and bike-boulevard modifications from Snelling to Mississippi River Boulevard.

It's that last stretch where bicyclists will really feel like kings of the road, with a variety of traffic tricks intended to give preference to people pushing pedals. At Cleveland Avenue, a new island will divert cars and give refuge to bikers.

"The city's transportation plan calls for bike facilities every half-mile to mile," explains traffic engineer Paul St. Martin. Jefferson is typical of the kind of street St. Paul is adding to its biking network: located in a current gap in the system, with low traffic volumes, and already stocked with traffic signals. St. Martin said the city will test a similar route on Charles Avenue, another east-west street, which runs just north of University Avenue.

Source: Paul St. Martin, City of St. Paul
Writer: Chris Steller

Calvin Littlejohn had had enough of running his small construction business out of a spare bedroom.

Since founding Tri-Construction, Inc., in 2001, Littlejohn and business partner Lester Royal had made the move from residential to commercial construction. But they were still "Mickey Mouse-in' it," as Littlejohn puts it.

That's why he likes their new office at 1200 W. Broadway, a building developed by Catalyst Community Partners.

"We can have clients come over to the office, use the conference room. It adds another layer," he says. "That much more professionalism."

Catalyst is a developer with a mission: reviving business along commercial avenues in the most troubled urban areas, particularly along West Broadway on Minneapolis' north side. That's where Catalyst lays claim to more redevelopment (in partnership with board member Stuart Ackerberg's The Ackerberg Group) than any other developer.

That's also where Littlejohn went looking for office space so he could move Tri-Construction out of his home. "We wanted to stay in North Minneapolis," he says, but suitable space was hard to find on West Broadway. "I don't think there was anything."

Tri-Construction has also won contracts with Catalyst. The firm's minority-owned status brings opportunity, he says, but not business, which requires performing better than everyone.

"The thing I like about what Catalyst does is, they see a need within the community, development that needs to take place," Littlejohn says. "They are coming in, putting their money where their mouth is. Put [buildings] in, allow commerce to do the rest."

Source: Calvin Littlejohn, Tri-Construction, Inc.
Writer: Chris Steller

RiverCentre and the Xcel Energy Center share a campus and a problem. It's a problem familiar to hosts the world over � cleaning up after the party.

Last year the two city-owned, privately-managed facilities were recycling just 15 percent of the stuff that guests left behind after events. And they must pay combined state and local taxes of 75 percent on what gets hauled away as waste.

Enter the husband-and-wife team of Patrick and Christina Reeves, who moved from Washington State to help the X and RiverCentre tackle their trash problem. The Reeves' small business, Progressive Associates, Inc., gets big buildings on track to operate more sustainably. (Another nearby client is the Science Museum of Minnesota.)

Touting the pursuit of achievable and measurable goals as the way to go, the Reeves set to work assessing the facilities' situations and systems. Twin aims emerged: recycle 50 percent of the waste annually, and reduce waste by 50 percent.

They're already close. In the first quarter of 2010, the recycling rate hit 45 percent, with an all-time high in February of 53 percent. "April looks like it's going to be the best month yet," Patrick Reeves says.

So far, he figures the recycling campaign has diverted 900,000 pounds of trash from the waste stream, and it's saving $17,000 on monthly bills from trash haulers.

While the two 50-percent goals could be reached within the first three years of the effort, the sustainability work is really just getting started. Next up: carbon-footprint reduction.

Source: Patrick Reeves, Progressive Associates, Inc.
Writer: Chris Steller

The Onion once ran a story about a Minneapolis architect's design for a house in which every room was a foyer. Orchestra Hall in downtown Minneapolis has had the opposite problem since its construction: not enough lobby space.

When it was built in 1974, funds were lavished on an acoustically excellent performance space but a more miserly approach was taken toward the public lobby and backstage areas.

The performance hall can hold 2,450 people but the lobby is meant to hold only 800. That leaves packed patrons with a choice at intermission, according to orchestra spokesperson Gwen Pappas: "Either to go to the restroom or to get a beverage. In 20 minutes, you certainly couldn't do both."

A design by KPMB Architects of Toronto was unveiled last month for a $38 million renovation to correct the imbalance, to be completed by 2013.

The square footage of lobby space afforded each patron will double. People in wheelchairs will come and go more easily; currently stairs are scattered throughout the lobby, remnants of the era before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

KPMB plans to raise the entire main lobby floor, now sunken, to street level, improving people-watching both into and out of the hall. New windows will also provide wider city views now blocked by huge blue tubes along the 11th Street exterior.

The biggest opportunity for intermission elbow-room comes with a lobby bump-out onto orchestra-owned land adjoining the Peavey Plaza public park, where sliding panels will encourage mingling among patrons and parkgoers, Pappas says.

Source: Gwen Pappas, Minnesota Orchestra
Writer: Chris Steller

A group of designers who call themselves the What!Worx Collaboration have won a design competition for artist housing on Minneapolis' North Side by taking a collage approach -- both to the design and to how they worked.

That's appropriate, because the Bearden Place townhouses are meant to honor 20th-century artist Romare Bearden, who used collage to depict and comment on contemporary life, particularly for African-Americans.

The competition, sponsored by the City of Minneapolis and the Builders Association of the Twin Cities, was also a way to stir up ideas for regenerating neighborhoods hit hard by the foreclosure crisis (pdf).

The site, at Sheridan and Plymouth avenues, is in the Willard-Hay neighborhood, one of two in Minneapolis still seeing foreclosures in double digits each month. Citywide, the foreclosure rate fell in 2009 but has been creeping up again this year. City government has been battling back on a number of fronts � including the Bearden Place design competition.

Ira A. Keer, an interior architect, started What!Worx in 2007 with other design professionals from major firms who found themselves on their own as the recession took hold in their industries. "Our combined portfolios opened doors," Keer says. The group's ad-hoc business structure could respond flexibly as opportunities arose.

What!Worx's Tim Heitman, a graphic and environmental designer, said the team's 1,600-square-foot live/work spaces (pdf) were among the most generous of the 38 submitted designs. The exteriors, Heitman says, have a color collage's "sense of articulation and individuality."

Negotiations to build the project are underway.

Source: Ira A. Keer, Tim Heitman, What!Worx Collaborative Design
Writer: Chris Steller