Walk Grand Avenue this month and you will pass two active construction zones within about six blocks of each other. One of them just hit a milestone and is mostly done. The other one only recently got its funding locked in, and it will not open until 2028. If you have been lumping all of this together under one mental heading, "Grand Avenue is torn up," this is the week to split it into two separate calendars. Confusing them means either writing off a street that is genuinely close to normal again, or expecting a corner to look finished long before it possibly can.
The Intersection That's Almost Behind Us
The Grand Avenue and Snelling Avenue intersection has been under reconstruction since mid to late June, part of a project the city of Saint Paul says it expects to wrap by the end of August. Traffic has been detoured through Hamline, St. Clair, and Fairview avenues while crews rebuilt the crossing, added pedestrian bumpouts on all four corners, and did sewer lining work underneath.
Here is the part that matters if you are planning a September errand run. The intersection itself reopened to through traffic on August 5, after crews finished the concrete paving. But the block of Grand between Macalester Street and Snelling Avenue is scheduled to stay closed through mid-September while crews finish both the east and west sides of the intersection. So the city's own "end of August" target is really a soft deadline for the bulk of the work, not a hard date for the whole stretch. If your routine runs through that specific block, plan for detours into the third week of September, not the last week of August.
The Corner That Just Started a Two-Year Clock
A few blocks away, at Grand and Victoria, a different kind of construction is only beginning. The site is the old Victoria Crossing East Mall, the longtime home of Billy's on Grand, and Afton Park Development has been planning to replace it with a six-story building called the Grand Victoria since submitting site plans back in March 2025. Demolition was slated for this summer, so depending on the week you read this, you may already be seeing equipment where the mall used to stand, or you may still be looking at an intact, empty building waiting its turn.
What changed recently is the scale and the money behind it. When Afton Park first announced the project, it was pitched as a $40 million, 87-unit building. By the time the Saint Paul City Council accepted a state redevelopment grant in May, the numbers had climbed to $44 million and 90 units, with roughly 12,800 square feet of ground-floor commercial space. When the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community signed on as lead investor in early June, the announcement described that same retail footprint as "more than 13,000 square feet," a reminder that even the official numbers on a project this size shift slightly depending on who's counting and when. SMSC Chairman Cole Miller framed the investment in long-term terms: "we prioritize investments that align with our Dakota values of planning for the next seven generations."
That is the opposite pattern from the Snelling intersection, where the scope has held roughly steady since the project was announced. The Grand Victoria has been getting bigger as more capital joins it, which is one reason its finish line sits two years out instead of two weeks out. The plan also calls for 121 underground parking spaces, split between residents and retail customers, and for salvaging the mall's iconic Chinese dragon sculpture to reinstall over the new building's entrance. Longtime tenant Juut Salonspa is expected to return once the building opens.
| Grand & Snelling Intersection | Grand & Victoria Corner | |
|---|---|---|
| What's happening | Intersection rebuild, bumpouts, sewer lining | Demolition and new mixed-use construction |
| Closure area | Grand between Macalester St. and Snelling Ave. | Grand Ave. frontage at Victoria St. |
| Target completion | Late August for the bulk of work, mid-September for both sides of the intersection | Early 2028 |
| Scope since announcement | Held steady | Grew from 87 to 90 units, $40M to $44M |
The Storefronts That Didn't Wait
While both of those projects have been moving, a separate wave of new businesses opened on Grand Avenue this spring, unrelated to either construction zone and running on their own timeline entirely. A string of ribbon cuttings in April and May put several new names on the avenue at once:
- OG Zaza, a New Haven-style pizzeria from Twin Cities chef Josh Hedquist, opened in March in the space that once housed Grand Pizzeria and, more recently, Justin Sutherland's Big E egg sandwich concept.
- Mor, a boutique, held its ribbon cutting on April 29.
- Way Cool Cooking School opened its new Grand Avenue location on May 1, bringing communal cooking classes to the corridor.
- Catzen Coffee celebrated a new patio on May 8, featuring a mural by artist Ara Elizabeth.
- New bike corrals went in outside Dunn Brothers Coffee and Kowalski's Market the same week, part of a city pilot converting a handful of street parking spaces into bicycle parking.
None of that happened because of the construction. It happened alongside it, which is worth sitting with for a second. A corridor that is simultaneously mid-intersection-rebuild and mid-demolition is not a corridor businesses are avoiding.
What Doesn't Pause for Any of This
The neighborhood's summer programming has kept its own schedule too, independent of either construction timeline. Music on the Lawn @ Macalester has run free Tuesday evening concerts at the Macalester College Campus Center Patio all summer, with Laura MacKenzie taking the stage on August 18, following earlier sets from the Riff Rangers, Joanne Parker, Scottie Miller, and Pat Donohue.
Looking past August, the Macalester-Groveland Community Council has set Mac-Grove Fest for September 12, running 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the council's long-running Alley Garden Award, which recognizes the neighborhood's best-tended alley gardens, is currently in its judging season for 2026.
Reading the Next Six Weeks
If you live in Mac-Groveland, the practical takeaway is less about any single project and more about not treating the whole avenue as one undifferentiated headache:
- If your route runs through the Macalester-to-Snelling block specifically, plan around mid-September, not the city's general end-of-August target.
- If your route only crosses the wider intersection, you likely already noticed things loosened up after August 5.
- If you have been avoiding the corner at Grand and Victoria hoping it settles down, it won't for a while. That is a two-year project, not a two-month one.
- If you have not walked the middle stretch of the avenue lately, the new spots are already open and worth the trip, construction or not.
- If you want one more reason to be out there before fall, the next Music on the Lawn concert lands August 18 and Mac-Grove Fest is about a month out.
Grand Avenue is not a single story right now. It is at least three, running on three different clocks, and the version of the neighborhood you get depends on which one you're paying attention to.
If you're the kind of person who tracks this stuff because you love the block, or because you're weighing what a corner like Grand and Victoria might mean for property values down the line, that is exactly the kind of local read MinnCenturyMod keeps close watch on. Curious what any of this means for a specific address in Mac-Groveland? Get your instant home valuation and we'll talk through what's actually happening on your block, not just the headline version.
