Downtown — where all the lights are bright — and getting brighter in our south-river cities
As I write this, it’s Friday afternoon, and I’m thinking about the efforts being made in Dakota County to create and revitalize downtowns.
Friday has no particular significance to you, perhaps, but as I try to tap into the source of my warm feelings about small-town downtowns, I think of Friday afternoons when I was a child. And I want those kind of Friday afternoons for those of you who live in such places as Burnsville, Rosemount, Eagan, Farmington, Apple Valley and Lakeville. I want the opportunity for mothers to take their children to places where there’s shopping,foodand, most important, a town center where our neighbors have gathered for the same reasons.
Back to the source of my downtown feelings: I was raised in aMichigancity that was then about the size Lakeville is now. My mother didn’t drive, but she had to do the weekly shopping while my father worked at the trucking company near our downtown. So Mom would catch the bus near our home with those of us who were too young to bein school, which was alsonear downtown. We would follow Mom through Bay City Cash or Knepp’s– two classic dry goods stores that no longer exist — and then tothe dime-store for notions and staples thatfamiliesof eight needed. And if we were lucky, we got to spend a dime or two on a toy soldier or other treat before getting something to drink atWoolworth’s soda fountain.
To conclude theFriday afternoon adventure with Mom, we’d walk over to the A&P, the downtown grocery store, where we’d meet my father and my school-age siblings, who had walked from school to thesupermarket. We’d follow Mom and Dad through thestore as they filled the basket with groceries and then pile into the Chevy for the ride home.
My wife, Ann,recalls similarafternoons when her parents took her and her five siblings to downtown Lakeville forshopping that concluded at the Enggren’s Market, which lasted longer than the A&P in Bay City, Mich. Enggren’s closed a few years ago after 100 years in business, but in its place isthe Hockey Development Center, which is beginning to draw families to Lakeville’s downtown again.In Burnsville, a $20 million Performing Arts Center is rising near the intersection of Burnsville Parkway and Nicollet as the centerpiece of the community’s new downtown, called Heart of the City. AndRosemount is voting on a bond issue that couldeventually lead toan arts center and other amenities in a downtown that has seen the better days my wife and I remember from our downtown pasts.
After years of calling 42 and Cedar adowntown, Apple Valleyofficialsare nowcreating awalkable town center on an old pumpkin patch off Galaxie Ave. And Eaganhopes theland where the old Cedarvale Mall once stood will be the kind of placeeven classic suburbs such as Eagan would like to have for working, playing and shopping within walking distance.
This past week,the Dakota County Community Development Agency provided community-revitalization grants to several cities in our county. Five of those grants — to Burnsville, Hastings, Lakeville and Rosemount — wereaimed at furthering the downtown movement. Lakeville, for example, got $200,000 to help finance the city’s first public parking lot in the historic downtown. That parking lot will be part of a new town square called Market Park. Market Park will provide a permanent home for the summer farmers’ market and a place for neighbors to enjoy neighbors. You can read more about it in a story by Derrick Williams, our Lakeville editor.
Hastings is getting $250,000 for infrastructure improvements on the Downtown Riverfront Redevelopment. Burnsville will get $250,000 for the correction of soil problems in Heart of the City, and Rosemount is getting $65,000 to demolish old houses in the downtown area that is being revitalized with public and private funds.
Some say such spending is foolish and that the historic downtownis a romantic notion that was rendered obsoleteby the invention of malls and strip centers. Walkable downtowns might make sense in warmer places, but not in Minnesota, say others.
So call me a romantic. But I don’t want to live withouta stroll down Holyoke Avenue in downtown Lakeville with stops at Patty’s sweet shop, Scott’s Ben Franklin,Amy’s flower shop or Mainstreet Coffee Cafe, where Tracy will serve up her opinion of my wardrobe as she makesmy latte. That doesn’t mean I won’t drive to Target or the Burnsville Center for shopping. But if Ann and I couldn’t have lunch at Mainstreet Coffee on Saturday afternoon and hear Tracy, Rose or Susie call us by name, our lives would be less rich, in the same way my childhood would have been poorer if I hadn’t been blessedby those trips with Mom to that magical placesinger Petula Clark immortalized with the song titled “Downtown:”
The lights are much brighter there/ You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares/So go downtown, things’ll be great when you’re
downtown…no finer place, for sure /downtown…everything’s waiting for you.
I’m all for walkable downtown areas, I just don’t want to see them littered with expensive pet projects like Burnsville’s Heart of the City. I also don’t appreciate the idea of having big box stores and smaller national and/or local chain stores taking up retail and restaurant frontage when the local city government should be offering tax breaks and other incentives to the small business owners instead.
As you may have read, I am quite disappointed in Burnsville for their Heart of the City and its sub-projects like the Performing Arts Center because they blatantly ignored the requests of their citizenry to put it up for a public vote before choosing to ignore the apparent majority of voters’ wishes to not continue forward with a project that is expected to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first five years alone after losing millions more in local and Dakota County funding.
Times and views have changed and the majority of residents in Lakeville and Apple Valley do not want to see walkable anything. They want to happily chug along to their closest SuperTarget eyesore in their overpriced and oversized vehicles to load up and drive their groceries the requisite two miles to their overpriced and oversized homes on undersized lots. While saying how nice it was to see that there are sidewalks and cute facades on chain stores that give us little identity differences than the rest of the surrounding suburbs.
Bill: There is certainly some disagreement about the value of investing public money in the new downtowns or revitalizing the old ones. And I’m not saying there hasn’t been some overspending on particular projects. But I really do sense a hunger on the part of people in our communities for public spaces that downtowns were traditionally. As a Lakeville resident, I wouldn’t have spent much time in Burnsville, except to make a trip to the mall. But as an arts lover, I’ll certainly attend events at the PAC when it’s built, without having to deal with the arguments you and others have made about whether it’s worth the public investment. I consider myself a people person, and Heart of the City is more of a people place than the big-box developments.
Larry,
As a Lakeville resident and taxpayer I suggest that you opt to fill some of the empty seats that seem to prevail at the Lakeville Arts Center instead of trekking up to Burnsville to help fund their massive tax burden rather than your own.
Bill