BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE
Midtown Global Market just celebrated 10 successful years last June. We covered it a year ago, and to tell the truth there has not been a lot of change since then—which is kind of a good thing, because it means that a lot of small, local businesses are staying in business. So, instead of focusing on the market per se, we are going to widen the focus and consider the entire Midtown Exchange complex and its constituent parts’ symbiotic relationships with each other and the surrounding communities.
A few days ago, I took a long, indoor walk to a part of the Midtown Exchange I had never seen before: the hallways, stairs and skyway linking the area on the other side of the atrium from the market to the Sheraton Hotel, the Midtown Greenway, and ultimately Abbott Northwestern Hospital, Allina Health’s largest Twin Cities facility. As you no doubt know, the nurses are on strike against Allina Health; well, were on strike when I took my walk, it might be over by the time you read this. I was looking for subtle effects that the strike might leave on either the market or this in-between space, but I saw none; you wouldn’t even know it was happening from there. I was also looking for traces of Allina’s history, both in general and also with the development of the Midtown Exchange and the neighborhood it dominates now, as Honeywell and other big employers in their turn used to dominate it. Call it an exploration of a business and design ecosystem; I wanted to see how, in practice, all these parts fit together, and the effects they have upon one another.
If you like history and/or photography, the skyway walk from Allina Commons to the Abbott-Northwestern Hospital is like a free museum tour. There are maybe 20 or so extra-large format framed black-and-white photographs from 1927 through the mid-1970s documenting changes, personalities, business trends, and events at Chicago and Lake and its near environs. There are a couple of amazing photos of workers building the Sears Tower, and photos of Sears’ opening day, and a busy retail environment of the early 1930s. Advancing through the 1940s and 1950s, there are pictures of business and street scenes up and down Lake Street (all gone now) and in Powderhorn Park (a winter skating scene) and some “institutional”scenes. A nostalgic view, I would guess from the 1950s, of nurses and medics loading a patient into an Abbot-Northwestern ambulance shows prim cotton uniform dresses, sensible leather shoes (in white) and starched nurses’ caps, yards of crisp white cotton sheet draping the patient, and a drip in a glass and steel bottle held aloft by a nurse. Another scene in the garage and driveway of the fire station shows the firefighters giving a gentle shower to some kids by pointing the fire hose straight up. Kids, mostly boys in shorts, run through the shower in glee. They look, somehow, poor but happy, but maybe that’s in the eye of the beholder. Everyone in the scene seems to be white.
Another photo, of the Sears parking lot in the late 1930s, induces a weird sense of timeslip. The composition and esthetic of the photo forces you to look at it as a Very Good Thing—the triumph of the American automobile, with these cars (now, to us, lovely antiques, but at the time the height of modernity) busily crushed together, like ants around an anthill, going about their collective business as one hivemind. But then, too, the “21st-century I” cannot help but be appalled, as when one watches a jerky film of the jubilant launch of the Titanic. Sam Newberg, writing in streets.mn, a blog about urban design, finds it ironic that when the Sears Tower received its historic designation prior to being transformed into the Midtown Exchange, the parking lot was also deemed historic, therefore requiring its preservation. It is somehow at odds with the goals of walkability and lots of well-placed bike racks, and of course, if you’re a bus-rider, this sometimes busy parking lot is yet another car-centric space you have to walk through to get from your bus to where you’re going (i.e., urban design FAIL).
I was told by a friend who is a neighborhood activist that Allina Health was, at least at first, a reluctant partner in the Midtown Exchange project. In the end, though, they appear to have made a very wise choice, consolidating many small offices into one impressive space, and getting neighborhood rehab bragging rights into the bargain. There is no doubt that the course of the last 10 years would have been very different if they had chosen otherwise. The patronage of the 1,000+ Allina employees for lunch, and to a lesser extent, breakfast and coffee breaks, was surely critical to the early days of the market tenant-businesses. Nowadays the Allina contingent is said to comprise about a quarter of the lunch rush and to be a big part of why the market may soon be entirely self-supporting without subsidies.
Another part of the story is the Sheraton Hotel. This is ecologically linked with both the aforementioned surface parking lot and Allina. For the parking lot, the hotel’s casual guests are a main user segment of the short-term parking spaces, along with surrounding businesses outside of the market (since patrons of the market as well as visitors to Allina Commons can get validated parking in the Elliot Avenue ramp). As for Allina, the only reason a medium-price, corporate chain hotel of this size was thought to have a chance of survival on a corner like Lake and Chicago, as it was pre-Midtown Exchange, was that families of long-term patients at Abbott-Northwestern and Children’s Hospital had previously had nowhere to stay closer than downtown. And the hospital-related stays still do make up a segment of the hotel’s clientele, but by no means all of it. It turns out that corporate clients and even personal travelers may have reason to find the location safe and convenient enough after all. Urban design WIN.
In the same blogpost alluded to earlier, Newberg discusses the design elements of the complex as it relates to pedestrian traffic patterns, entranceways, “eyes on the street,” bikeability and walkability, and esthetics. Some things he finds better than others, and the discussion continues in the numerous comments. He says, “Out the east … across 10th Avenue is the parking ramp, and out the west … access to Elliot and Chicago Avenues, some metered surface parking and [the] bus station … The Global Market has strong frontage on Lake Street (urbanists should use this door)… Cyclists arriving from the Midtown Greenway can choose between parking on the greenway and walking up an exterior stairway on the Elliot Avenue side, or a circular ramp near 10th Avenue. Overall, regardless of whether people arrive by car, transit, bicycle or on foot, or what [sic] entrance they use, arrival at the Midtown Exchange is dignified.” As I mentioned before, I take issue with that for transit users; it may be dignified but it’s not entirely safe.
A bike user comments: “I noticed the short-sightedness about biking even at the opening. There was nowhere near enough bike parking, and as for dignified, crossing from the greenway to the stairs required wading through snow banks or mud, depending on season … Happily, they’ve built a paved connector between the stairs and the Greenway, [and] added a bit more bike parking …” The other relevant piece for bike users is that there is a Freewheel Bike Co-op location actually connecting the Midtown Exchange with the Greenway. There are also two open-air cafe patios facing the Greenway, one operated by Allina and one by the Sheraton.
Further comments section discussion got very interesting about the existence (or not) of drinking establishments. In a way, the take-away from this is that you can tell a still “blighted” neighborhood from a gentrified or always upscale one by whether bars, even dive bars, are considered a menace or an attraction. When the market first opened, I believe A La Salsa was the only place to serve alcohol to the public there. (The hotel bar doesn’t count.) Now, with the Rabbit Hole and the Eastlake Craft Brewery, the market is truly beginning to develop that European-style Cafe and Market culture that is so important to a vital urban community.
