Nicollet Mall is one of Minneapolis' most signature public spaces. A nexus for new urban neighborhoods growing nearby, from the North Loop to the Mill District, Nicollet Mall is arguably the heart of downtown. James Corner, who re-imagined New York City's wildly popular urban destination, the High Line, is the latest to re-envision Nicollet Mall's potential as a vital, urban public space. This article, which takes at look at the Mall's past, present, and future, originally appeared in the March/April 2014 issue of Architecture Minnesota and has been reprinted with permission.

When Minneapolis tried to wipe out its Depression-era skid row in the Gateway District, planners thought of downtown as the Central Business District—a serious place where men did business, women shopped at the elegant Dayton’s and Young-Quinlan Department Store, and virtually no one lived at all. During this time in the 1960s, we rebuilt Nicollet Avenue as Nicollet Mall to compete with Southdale Mall, another Minnesota invention.

For many years, the car-free Nicollet succeeded as a retail destination. But when its luster faded in the 1980s, it was so completely revamped that most of its character-defining modern details by renowned landscape architect Lawrence Halprin disappeared without a trace. In the hands of BRW Architects, Halprin’s winding mall grew dense with public art and granite pavers, pine trees for Minnesota winters, and a lot of teal.

Now, a third-generation vision, led by James Corner Field Operations, is reconsidering Nicollet as a place to “live, work, and play.” The winning proposal from the summer 2013 design competition divides the street into three segments: the north end flavored by housing, the center section by office towers, and the south end by sidewalk cafes and cultural activities.

The details of the redesign will emerge later this year, after James Corner Field Operations and collaborators Coen + Partners, Snow Kreilich Architects, and SRF Consulting Group complete below-grade utility assessments and schematic concepts for such streetscape basics as paving, planting, and lighting.

In the meantime, we should ask a few important questions: With Nicollet getting its third makeover in less than 50 years, what qualities of the street as an urban corridor should be preserved for centuries? And should we expect the James Corner update to last for more than three decades?

What to save?

Urban design, city planning, urban landscape architecture—whatever we choose to call it—entails more than ground-level streetscapes. It embraces space. It creates great outdoor rooms, visual connections, and pathways where urban life can unfold.

Some large-scale urban interventions, such as the urban renewal of Minneapolis’ Gateway District in the 1960s, which stemmed from fear of visible poverty and distaste for out-of-fashion buildings, can have adverse lasting effects. With Nicollet, we should be most wary of changing street walls, corridors, and three-dimensional patterns. The leading preservation concern in the recent fight against the proposed renovation of Peavey Plaza, for example, was that the new scheme changed the plaza’s character-defining spatial patterns—the sunken waterfalls and ground plane—beyond recognition and the possibility of future restoration.

Peavey Plaza, like Nicollet Mall, is about much more than paving patterns and plantings. Trees can come and go, streetlights can be altered. But urban spatial patterns and topography, once cleared or filled in, are hard to reestablish. Nicollet’s core spatial characteristic is the consistent frame created by the building walls, evident in postcards dating back to the 1890s.

Of course, those trees and smaller plantings still merit careful consideration. As we’ve seen elsewhere downtown, swamp white oaks and other trees that retain their leaves in winter can provide much-needed color and texture. Permeable paving systems like the one installed on Marquette Avenue and Second Avenue South can absorb stormwater. But given our harsh winters we should probably expect to need to update such surface treatments every 10 years or so—a period akin to how often my mother tried to redecorate our dining and living rooms in the 1960s and 70s, casting out family heirlooms with each redo.

There are not many heirlooms left from Halprin’s highly customized mid-1960s design besides the iconic clock that now stands in its 1980s relocation at Peavey Plaza. How can we choose what is best to save this time? We should discuss how some of the public art assembled by BRW’s team might be saved. Also worth discussion are the rough-faced granite planters with healthy serviceberry trees and Brad Goldberg’s massive granite Continuum installation in front of the US Bank headquarters on the 800 block. These are durable, well-crafted works that express regional stone, are tactile, and even offer seating. Why remove them?

Civic motion

Yet it’s not just quality public artworks that give a designed landscape meaning. It is also, as Japanese garden designers have long understood, the space between them, the negative space that becomes a positive realm of meaning—or, as Halprin understood, space for movement that could be “scored” like a dance.

In contrast to the permanence of street walls, what can be more ephemeral than the civic motion within them? Permanence and change work together on Nicollet, in the interplay between the soaring, unmovable towers and the rippling pedestrian currents on the street. Especially on busy farmers market days, when Nicollet has the look and feel of a European market, the mall is like the stream described by Heraclitus: You can never step into the same flow twice.

It’s here that James Corner’s idea of Nicollet as a walk can help to bring back the character-defining scale and rhythm in Halprin’s design. It was exciting to walk Halprin’s mall with baroque sonatas streaming from the copper-roofed bus shelters and, in winter, steam rising up from the heated sidewalks. Everything changed as you moved: the sounds, the people, the atmosphere.

This is the multi-sensory character of a coherent design. Great streets are, in the end, far more than an arrangement of artworks—or programmed attractions such as the fire pit shown in an early James Corner Field Operations concept for the mall’s lower end. As for the proposed “crystal stair” idea—a wide staircase connecting the mall to the IDS Center’s skyway level—all I can say is, “Don’t mess with IDS.” That kind of form-altering feature might be a good idea for an average building, but not for one of the world’s great modern skyscrapers.

Long before cities began updating or theming their destination areas, great cities had clearly framed civic paths, views, and gathering spots that tended to adapt well to new uses over time. Consider Central Park or the lasting green infrastructure of the Grand Rounds park system in Minneapolis. Is this the chance we now have with Nicollet? Building on such precedents as Halprin’s original design and the IDS Center, can we make a street that works for now and, with sensitive updates every so often, stands the test of time and change?

Frank Edgerton Martin has been a writer and contributing editor for Landscape Architecture for 20 years. He’s an adjunct professor in communications design at the University of Baltimore.