Why does one corner of Longfellow take four years to land a single tenant and get it right, while a storefront a few blocks away has seen three coffee shop concepts come to a close?
That question isn't rhetorical this week. On East Lake Street, the newly reopened Coliseum Building just seated its first diners at Square Roots, an Afro-Creole restaurant six years in the making since the building itself went up in flames. Meanwhile at 46th and Minnehaha, Arya Cafe closed its doors, the third coffee shop concept to close in that same space. Both corners sit inside the same recovering commercial corridor. Neither is following the same clock.
Four Years of Deliberate Vacancy
The Coliseum Building has stood at East Lake Street and 27th Avenue since 1917, when it opened as Freeman's Department Store and, for decades after, hosted dances and community gatherings on its third floor. During the unrest that followed George Floyd's murder in late May 2020, the building was set on fire over several days and every tenant vacated. The scorched brick facade stayed standing, but the interior didn't reopen to a single business for four years.
That gap wasn't drift. The nonprofit developer Redesign Inc. purchased the property in 2021, and the building earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in March 2022 before its restoration was even finished. The redevelopment ran to somewhere between 26 and 28 million dollars in public and private money, and ownership landed with four partners: Redesign, architect Alicia Belton of Urban Design Perspectives, consultant Janice Downing of CommonSense Consulting@Work, and entrepreneur Shanelle Montana, who used part of the space to open Du Nord Cocktail Room and a New Orleans-inspired restaurant called Lagniappe. The building officially reopened to the public on June 19, 2024, timed to Soul of the Southside's Juneteenth celebration along Lake Street.
The ownership group has said openly they wanted established operators first, businesses with the networks and staying power to anchor the building before newer entrepreneurs joined in. That preference shows up in what just moved into the old Lagniappe space.
What Finally Filled the DuNord Space
Square Roots is run by Jared Brewington, who's been building a name in Twin Cities food for years. He ran Funky Grits, a soul food restaurant at 38th and Chicago, and sold a heavy volume of shrimp and grits fritters at the State Fair back in 2019. His broasted chicken concept, Official Fried Chicken, has since franchised into three suburban locations in Edina, Inver Grove Heights, and Woodbury.
Square Roots is a different kind of bet. It operates as a 501(c)(3) social enterprise, pairing an Afro-Creole Southern menu with a paid hospitality residency for young adults ages 18 to 24. Thirteen residents work three days a week at 18 dollars an hour for a six-month stretch, twice a year, earning ServSafe and Certified Food Protection Manager credentials while working under a mentorship structure Brewington calls the Guest Chef Collective. The program is built to end in tracked placement into a regional hospitality network, not just a certificate.
Chef Tony Brown runs the kitchen, Xavier Hayden manages the front of house, and the early menu leans into corn cakes served under redfish with maque choux, a Creole Caesar with fried green tomatoes standing in for croutons, and a version of shrimp and grits built from heritage grains and andouille sausage. Brewington has said he's raised roughly 180,000 dollars so far, including grants from the Minneapolis Tourism Improvement District, and assembled an advisory board that includes chefs Mateo Mackbee, Gavin Kaysen, and Andrew Zimmern, along with a board of directors that includes former Minneapolis Downtown Council CEO Steve Kramer. The restaurant opened with a nonalcoholic drink list and plans to add a full liquor program later.
None of that happens quickly. A four-year vacancy, an eight-figure restoration budget, a co-ownership structure designed around long-term BIPOC business ownership, and a six-figure fundraising push before the doors even opened. That's what it took to land one restaurant in this particular building.
Three Blocks South, a Different Clock
The 46th and Minnehaha storefront sits on a different timeline. Arya Cafe closed earlier this month, the third abrupt ending for the coffee shop space at that corner, according to the neighborhood newsletter Longfellow Whatever.
That contrast is the point. Longfellow's post-2020 commercial recovery isn't one story moving at one pace. It's dozens of individual addresses, each recovering on the terms of whoever owns or leases them. The Coliseum took the slowest, most heavily capitalized path available and it's now delivering a restaurant with a built-in workforce program and a chef advisory board that includes some of the most recognized names in Twin Cities dining. A small storefront a few blocks south has seen three coffee shop concepts come to a close in the same space.
Neither pace is wrong. They're just not the same story, even though both corners sit inside what gets talked about as one neighborhood's comeback.
The Same Week, a Different Kind of Disruption
Longfellow's fall isn't only about which storefronts are filling. A four-month construction project at 46th and Hiawatha started on September 8, cutting that intersection down to one lane in each direction through December. That's a stretch of road that normally carries more than 30,000 cars a day, and the bottleneck is unrelated to any of the retail turnover happening a few blocks away.
Further north, the corner at 35th and Hiawatha, where the old Nokomis Mill sits, is a slower story of its own. Financing is reportedly coming together for a redevelopment there, but the corner is expected to stay in its current dilapidated state for at least another year. Three very different timelines, three very different corners, all inside the same set of neighborhood boundaries.
None of that stopped the LOLA Art Crawl from running its usual weekend on September 19 and 20, sending visitors through galleries and studios across the neighborhood the same weekend Square Roots was finding its footing a few blocks away. Longfellow in September 2026 is a neighborhood running several separate clocks at once, not one recovery narrative with a single finish line.
What This Looks Like on a Walk Down Lake Street
Walk east on Lake Street this fall and the Coliseum Building looks like what its owners spent four years trying to build: a restored anchor with a restaurant, a cocktail room, and a co-working space called S.H.A.K.E. run by Downing and Belton, all under one roof that used to be a burned-out shell. Keep walking south toward Minnehaha and the picture changes. A storefront that has hosted three coffee shop concepts is between tenants again.
Both are true descriptions of the same neighborhood in the same month. The mistake is assuming they're both examples of the same recovery, moving at the same speed, for the same reasons. They're not. Some corners in Longfellow got patient capital and a mission-driven operator. Others are still waiting for either one.
Claire Johnston at MinnCenturyMod keeps track of which Longfellow storefronts are landing and which ones are still cycling through tenants, the kind of block-by-block detail that matters whether you're deciding where to eat this week or you already call this corridor home.
