Grand Avenue review

When the pantry and the fridge get so empty that even the resident mice start leaving fewer pellets on my floor, I get two distinct urges: to go grocery shopping, and to get some ice cream.

I was already dropping off rent at my landlord’s office on Grand this afternoon and decided on a side trip to Grand Ole Creamery on the way home. With a Mexican chocolate shake in hand, I decided to eschew the bus and hike it back.

Grand Ole Creamery is a substantial ways east of where I live, very close to Dale Street. If you think in terms of stoplights (which can happen if you’re a bus maniac), that means a line drive through Victoria, Lexington, Hamline and finally to Snelling. It’s roughly a mile between each major street, so the walk is a long one, but the weather turned slightly cooler and lovely and besides, I had to burn off ice cream.

I could not believe my eyes. Perhaps Detroit really has done on a number on me, but this was the first time I really noticed that there were entire blocks of nothing but businesses, services and retail. And of course the eerie thing about Grand is that most of this commercial activity is in houses, which you come to expect over time would have people living in them—but these houses don’t. Look carefully and you’ll see a sign in the window, on the door, or a banner high up, advertising a salon (fuck there are a lot of them), a spa, a boutique, a fashion designer, a restaurant, a chocolatier, a dentist’s office, a daycare center, a realtor, a pet food store, a place to get stogies. The vast majority of them are independent local businesses, which makes this form of gentrification somewhat difficult to demonize. I’ve complained to my friend and co-worker Taryn at length about the insidious boutiques and cafes sprouting where I live at the corner of Snelling and Selby, fearing what it portends, but she pounces back, “If local businesses had that much success on a corner in North Minneapolis, I would welcome it, and so would the communities there.” True this.

And the situation is not rosy on Grand, really. The last time I made the stroll, back in the winter, there were businesses closing up shop, holding clearance sales, seeking out a better location where the rent isn’t so high, or giving up temporarily on entrepreneurship in an unsettling recession. This time around, it seems like the number of closings and moves has only increased. It makes one wonder. What does it mean when you have to close the small business you always dreamed of having, and what’s more, what the hell are you going to do with all these prom dresses that no one wants or needs?

The climate of the Ave is this, then: chic and style and quirk and grace, interlaced with this detectable dread—the knowledge that this isn’t working. Of course, the ‘it’ that isn’t working is up to interpretation. Is it selling in Peoria? Is it bringing people together? Is it keeping the brown people out? Is it the next hotspot? Whatever the vision is (or was) for Grand Ave, it could stand to be revisited—or better, scrapped for the more imaginative realms that come with uncertainty.

In the meantime, I walk west down the Ave and see a few people entering or leaving these places, several joggers or people walking dogs, an occasional bus rider waiting at a stop. I see no one out on porches or chatting with neighbors. I see an entrepreneur’s heaven and a deflated community. Y’all do us a favor and take the stroll yourself, see what you have in front of you. It may seem fine and painless, that Ave. And maybe that’s what’s wrong.

“Some people look at you like you’ve farted when you try to tell them the truth.” –James Baldwin