🛍️ Exploring that strip mall on Hiawatha

Imagine a cluster of commercial buildings on an idyllic neighborhood intersection. On one corner, a tailor and a sandwich shop. On another, a pet store and Thai restaurant. A few doors down, a venue to buy and play board games, a dry cleaner, and a doctor’s office. Across the way, a daycare and cheap takeout pizza. 

You could imagine this being cherished as one of the neighborhood’s most vibrant retail nodes. Nearby real estate listings might gush that their house is just steps from shopping and food. Perhaps the intersection would even end up with a catchy nickname, splashed on banners that hang from the light poles. 

And yet, even though this combo of businesses does exist, wedged between Minnehaha Park and 46th Street above Hiawatha Avenue, it’s decidedly not a celebrated commercial district. It doesn’t have a discernible name and hardly even registers as part of the neighborhood. It instead registers, accurately enough, as a strip mall on the side of a highway. Hidden in plain sight, somewhere you only go on purpose, easy to forget about even from close range.

Setting aside our biases against strip malls for a moment, let’s take a stroll down this 12-shop corridor, and shake out the cobwebs of what all is even there. 

Background 

For almost half of the 20th century, Hiawatha Avenue was stuck in limbo as opposing parties debated what to do with the slow two-lane road that had developed alongside the mills and railroad tracks.

During the freeway-happy 1950s and 60s, the state decided to go big: An eight-lane interstate connecting downtown to the airport. It acquired and razed a freeway-sized strip of land around the roadway, including hundreds of homes, in preparation. But intense opposition from the neighborhood and anti-freeway activists, armed with the learnings from their lost battles against I-35W and I-94, succeeded in stifling those plans. For years it sat slowly deteriorating, awaiting a plan forward, a narrow street surrounded by expansive nothingness on both sides.