Many longtime Twin Cities residents still wax nostalgic about the days of Dayton’s and Donaldson’s and Jackson Graves, when downtown Minneapolis was the shopping destination for the Upper Midwest. “People came to shop here one, two, and three times a year,” says Jim McComb, a veteran retail consultant based in Minneapolis (and not a nostalgist). “That group of people represented 40 percent of the sales in downtown Minneapolis.”
Those halcyon days ended in the 1990s. In 1992, the Mall of America opened in Bloomington with 2.4 million square feet of retail space, more than what’s now available in the downtown core. And since the megamall opened, the Twin Cities metro has developed an additional 5 million square feet of retail space. Numerous suburban centers, including the Galleria in Edina and St. Louis Park’s Shops at West End, have become top retail destinations in the metro area in the past decade.
During that time, downtown Minneapolis has lost many national-name retailers, most recently in 2007, when Borders, Crate & Barrel, Polo Ralph Lauren, and Williams-Sonoma announced that they were closing their stores in Minneapolis’s central business district.
Yet amidst such a gloomy scene, smaller retail operations are sprouting up. The tallest shoot is Druskin, whose flagship Len Druskin store, which offers men’s and women’s clothing, has been located in Edina for three decades. Druskin opened his first urban store, catering to men, in Gaviidae Common in 2007. Since opening Len Druskin Man, he has added a women’s store, a men’s and women’s fast-fashion shop, and an outlet that opened in March. All downtown.
“We found we had a large customer base for our men’s area from that part of the city as well as a lot of customers that work downtown,” Druskin says. “We felt it was important to offer those customers the ability to shop on their way to or from work—or if they lived downtown, not necessarily always have to drive to the suburbs.”
Other locally owned stores that have opened in recent years include baby boutique Pacifier in Gaviidae Common, menswear store Elsworth in LaSalle Plaza, and hip clothier Bahu Boutique on 10th Street between Nicollet and Marquette.
