Ten months ago, Dinkytown was at one of those unmistakable crossroads
of change rife with both crisis and opportunity. The businesses in
Dinkytown are survivors of change, so this was nothing new, but this
time, a perfect storm of factors came close together. On the plus side,
the City of Minneapolis and Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association were
taking much more notice of Dinkytown. But at the beginning of 2014,
Skott Johnson, the longtime leader of the Dinkytown Business
Association, known as DBA, closed his business at 1300 4th St. S.E.,
Autographics, and left the Twin Cities. The old Marshall High building,
UTech, had been demolished and the House of Hanson would follow close on
its heels. And local developer Kelly Doran was proposing to build a
hotel on 4th Street, which would entail taking out yet more old low-rise
buildings housing small shops and restaurants. It’s no exaggeration to
say the future of Dinkytown’s identity was up for grabs.
Despite being an off-and-on president, Skott Johnson was the
full-time powerhouse behind the DBA. He was both effective and beloved;
people still miss him and speak of him fondly. When he left, the
organization began to flounder, mostly because Johnson held a lot of the
institutional knowledge in his head. And, the other positions within
the DBA were informal; the structure was loosely defined.
When the
DBA tried to regroup to fight the hotel plans and other battles, they
found that their paperwork was not in order and their legitimacy as
representatives of the businesses was open to question. Since a new
organization had to be established anyway, it just made sense to start
from scratch. So the DBA was dissolved and a new DBA, now named
Dinkytown Business Alliance, was formed, with a new charter and an
elected and committed board. The new DBA has a built-in relationship
with the city and with Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association. And the
new name points to its new direction—connecting and inclusive, rather
than the closed and passive sounding “association.”
An
organizational development consultant was hired: Cara Letofsky, highly
respected and with deep connections at City Hall and elsewhere. The City
Council denied Doran’s permit to build the hotel. The development that
went in mid-2014 on the old House of Hanson corner looks to be a
success, as an upscale housing development also housing the first
“boutique” Target Express, which provides some grocery shopping and some
jobs for area students and residents. And by the early fall of 2014,
the new DBA was off and running. Mike Mulrooney, owner of Blarney, was
elected president. The organization, collaborating with neighborhood
associations, won a Great Streets Grant from the city, with three
development goals: 1) to grow the DBA organizationally (Letofsky’s main
task as consultant); 2) to develop and implement a marketing plan for
Dinkytown; and 3) recruitment and retention of businesses.
Besides
Mulrooney, the other officers or unofficial leaders and strong
participants in the DBA (not an exhaustive list) include Randall Gast of
Qdoba, Jason McLean of Loring Pasta Bar, Georgia, Jim and Antigone
Sander of Kafe 421, Liz Johnson of Magus, Greg Pillsbury of Burrito
Loco, and the one person I talked to the most, Kristen Eide-Tollefson of
the Book House, now relocated on the second floor across the street
from its former home in the House of Hanson. Kristen has long been
active in Dinkytown and is the remaining original Book House owner out
of two couples who started it in 1976. Her position on the DBA board
currently is communications, editing the newsletter and other functions.
She says that Dinkytown has always been a business incubator, a place
where businesses start and try out new innovations. She points to the
tiny Target as another example of that, even if it is backed by a big
corporation. Another surprise—the trendy clothing shop Gina and Wills is
actually a consignment shop run by Goodwill Industries.
With the
first of their three goals underway, the attention is now on the
second—marketing. A request for proposal process recently closed and the
DBA is soon to choose a marketing director to implement a chosen plan.
Dinkytown’s identity is the issue, along with overcoming some perhaps
false conceptions about the area. Several of those I talked to spoke of
making Dinkytown a “destination” for people all over the Twin Cities and
over many demographics. Dinkytown is not just a student neighborhood,
nor just a nostalgia trip for old Bohemians. The Book House, for
instance, is legendary in the book world, and definitely worth the trip.
Another challenge to overcome is transportation; drivers assume there
is no parking, but although some surface lots have been lost to
development, there is actually a lot more parking than in other similar
business districts. Dinkytown offers a mix of bars and coffee shops;
Blarney is popular all over the city, especially on game days, and the
venerable Espresso Royale hosts a satellite book shop from the Book
House. Dinkytown offers interesting and sophisticated shopping venues,
five churches, a library, and live music at the Varsity theatre. It has a
huge array of dining options, from Shuang Cheng’s highly reputed
Chinese fare, to quick Japanese at Sushi One Two Three, to traditional
Italian-American at Vescio’s, to international fine dining at Kafe 421
and the Loring Pasta Bar. With so much going for it, Dinkytown looks to
be finally gaining the respect it deserves.
