Positively Fourth Street

The man behind the Loring Pasta Bar, Jason McLean, became locally famous for opening the “bohemian” Loring Café and Bar in Minneapolis, which in the 1980s played a major role in building up Loring Park. McLean’s concept combined an eclectic theater company with a scene-creating bar and restaurant. A year before he was forced to close in Loring Park in 2002, McLean opened the Loring Pasta Bar in Dinkytown—a familiar area to him, since he’d attended Marshall-University High School. Since 2005, McLean has also controlled the nearby Varsity Theater, the former Dinkytown movie palace that he’s now using to stage independent music concerts, live theater performances, and catered events. It’s drawing people from other parts of the city to Dinkytown.

“Great area, great crossroads, a spectacularly large, ever-renewing source of new blood at the U of M, new customer traffic that changes over every four years,” McLean says of the location. “You’ve got a new customer base, so to speak.” McLean adds that the students are just part of that base: “I adhere to further development of the original Loring Café philosophy that you want to make a setting that will bring people from all walks of life together.”

McLean believes that Dinkytown has a ways to go to realize its potential. He’d like to see more independent retailers and fewer franchises, as well as fewer bars that cater to the “drink till you drop” student crowd—an “awful” phenomenon, he says.

Not far away from the Loring Pasta Bar, another newcomer is making his presence felt. Commercial developer Kelly Doran, founder and chief manager of Bloomington-based Doran Companies, is taking another famous Dinkytown structure, the “Dinkydome,” and renovating it as part of a $40 million redevelopment plan that will also include a 14-story apartment building and 14,000 square feet of new retail space. The Dinkydome building, opened in 1918 as the Minnesota Bible College, has been home to an eclectic and ever-changing variety of businesses and restaurants for four decades. Its dome is a neighborhood landmark.

Doran’s proposed move into Dinkytown (construction is to begin this fall after a legal challenge slowed the project down) is only the second by a major developer since the 1960s. 1301 University, a 92-unit apartment building designed by Minneapolis-based UrbanWorks Architecture that houses the Purple Onion Café. opened in 2004. Together they point to another new direction for Dinkytown: upscale student housing. Doran’s project, if built, could join other new U of M–area student housing projects, including one by Opus Northwest in the Stadium Village neighborhood and another by developer Bob Lux on the West Bank.