Days after looting and arson rocked St. Paul’s University Avenue business corridor, the Midway Target reopened its doors to banner foot traffic.
While Target sales were buoyed by stay-at-home workers and the shopping trends of the pandemic era, it would take months longer for the owners of Bole Ethiopian Cuisine to regain their footing after their University Avenue restaurant was burnt to embers.
Bole, which held its official “grand reopening” ribbon-cutting on Thursday, is now situated outside the neighborhood, closer to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. After losing its lease in the Midway Shopping Center, Peking Garden reopened this month for dine-in service off Western Avenue. Other commercial tenants of damaged Midway buildings have never returned. Business advocates say an immigrant-heavy business corridor remains pockmarked by too many empty buildings.
Among them, some 19 shops in the strip mall surrounding Allianz Field — a $250 million, city-owned soccer stadium — remain vacant and shuttered, several bearing telltale black singe marks left over from the riots that engulfed the Midway a year ago in the days after the death of George Floyd. Others seem on the verge of collapse. The city recently ordered the 19 stores demolished by mid-June.
A SLOW RETURN
At the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce, B Kyle avoids words like “rebirth” when describing the gradual, uneven return to normalcy for the city’s business community since the events of May 28, 2020.
Despite an outpouring of donations and philanthropic support, of the 270 businesses across St. Paul known to have been touched by some level of vandalism during the riots, at least 35 remain closed. The pandemic hasn’t helped matters, and neither the state of Minnesota nor the Federal Emergency Management Agency have stepped in with direct financial assistance.
St. Paul, it seems, is on its own.
“It’s still too raw,” said Kyle, president and chief executive officer of the chamber.
The chamber has helped raise $1.35 million for impacted business owners, hand in hand with the Midway Chamber, the Asian Economic Development Association, the Minnesota Hmong Chamber, African Economic Development Solutions and others.
“The work’s not done,” said Kathleen Lohmar-Exel, vice president of community advancement and director of the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce Foundation. “I asked (grant recipients), ‘Do you still need more help?’ And all of them except one said yes. If you drive the corridor, there’s a liquor store in front of Allianz Field that’s still fenced off and boarded up.”
RIOTING CAUSED ESTIMATED $700 MILLION IN DAMAGES
A year ago, Minnesota suffered an estimated $700 million in riot damage, roughly $500 million of it concentrated in the immigrant-heavy business corridors along the St. Paul Midway, Lake Street in Minneapolis and West Broadway in Minneapolis.
It was the worst urban destruction the nation had seen since the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Yet the absence of state support has been glaring to Twin Cities business advocates. The needs far outweigh the small grants issued to date by business associations.
“A shockingly large amount was not covered by insurance,” said former Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, president of the Minneapolis Foundation, in a recent interview. “The state government is noticeable for its absence.”
When the riots hit St. Paul, “we had just sent literally every penny we could muster out the door” to small businesses through COVID-relief grants, said St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter on Thursday. “The magnitude of damages, in my mind, really justify state assistance. … It’s frustrating to see that help tied up at the state Legislature over partisan issues.”
80 GRANTS DISTRIBUTED, MANY UNDER-INSURED
The 80 “We Love the Midway” and “We Love St. Paul” grants distributed to date by the St. Paul Area Chamber and the Midway Chamber of Commerce range from $2,500 to $50,000, enough in some cases to complete an insurance deductible or cover salaries while business owners regroup.
Construction and development companies like Golden Valley-based Mortenson contributed some glass repair and construction consulting services pro bono, and the Minneapolis Foundation has begun a $20 million fundraising campaign of its own to help businesses affected by the riots get back on their feet.
“There was complete destruction, so (funds went toward) everything from having to clear debris to replace inventory,” Lohmar-Exel said. During closures, “nobody got paid. Insurance doesn’t cover salaries, payment of employers, suppliers, food that had been delivered that week, rent due. Insurance covered property.”
Kyle said three things have become abundantly clear over the past year. On top of damages, small businesses and micro-businesses were further challenged by being under-insured, lacking legal guidance and needing help with their accounting, which is key to unlocking insurance benefits. The St. Paul Area Chamber is taking a hard look at what it can do to help the small-business community in each area.
“Of those businesses that have reported back in, they’re still open,” Lohmar-Exel said. “They’re still in St. Paul. The money that we gave them helped, and they still need help. And they still need people to come back and frequent their business. It wasn’t just the Midway corridor, but that’s where it was the most evident, and you saw the fires burning. Gas stations, pharmacies, anywhere there could be damage, there was damage, it seemed.”
WHAT IT TAKES TO REOPEN
Peking Garden, which like most of its neighbors lost its lease in the Midway Shopping Center immediately after the riots, only just reopened for indoor dining on May 1 in the old Mai Village space at Western and University avenues.
“Much of the equipment didn’t get damaged,” said Mary Lau, whose parents opened the restaurant in the early 1990s and relocated it to St. Paul in 2006. “But the kitchen hood, air conditioning and anything attached to the building, those we could not take with us, and those are the most expensive things.”
Lloyd’s Pharmacy, which dates back to 1918 in various locations, has for the past year operated its compounding practice out of its storage space a block from its longtime Snelling Avenue shop, which is still under construction after a complete demolition. The new two-story building harkens to the structure that stood there before it, complete with a curved second-floor cantilever window that bows out toward the neighborhood.
“Insurance played a role,” said Lloyd’s proprietor Jim Stage, who said costs exceeded $1 million. “It didn’t cover all of it.”
Still, Stage said he’s learned intimate lessons over the past year about forgiveness and gratitude.
“I think it’s important to note that what happened to us, as ugly as it is, what came out of it now is very beautiful, and something that can be a testament to the character of people, and how people supporting one another and working together, what that can look like,” he said. “It’s a testament to God and his faithfulness to us. … There were a lot of people in the community cheering us on, and my family cheering us on. All the employees, the extra hours, the hard work. It’s a building, but there’s so many people behind it.”
Chad Kulas, director of the Midway Chamber, has walked the University Avenue business corridor visiting with longtime chamber members whose storefronts were smashed or damaged by smoke, fire and water. Not every challenge in the way of reopening has been financial.
“For the big ones, who saw their sites burn down, the first thing they had to do was some soul searching — am I willing to do this again?” said Kulas on Tuesday. “There were people showing their support, offering help and financial backing, and they said, ‘I’ve got to do this again.’ Then they had to deal with the insurance issues, and it usually takes a bit of time and effort and back and forth.”
Still, “for a lot of them, I think the location question is going to be the toughest one,” Kulas said. “If you’re a restaurant, you want to go somewhere that has a kitchen ready to go. Does it have parking? Is it in a location that’s visible? Thien’s Cajun Boiling Seafood, I think he about doubled his space. Peking Garden found a good-looking space and plenty of parking. Bole, he’s got a patio now.”
A DIVE BAR ON MIDWAY
Successful reopenings. Gradual relocations. Permanent closures. The Midway has seen its share of all of the above since the riots, but few real estate investors can say they watched the looting of their own buildings unfold in real-time and still bounced back with bucket-loads of Swedish Fish.
After buying four buildings and nearly as many parking lots along University Avenue a few years ago, David Tolchiner of Tolch Properties set about to learn how to make a Jack and Coke.
“I’m a landlord, not a bartender,” said Tolchiner, who quickly became both after acquiring the Midway dive bar Christensen’s Big V’s Saloon, now known as the Midway Saloon.
State-driven bar closures in the early days of the pandemic were a challenge, but Tolchiner, ever optimistic, had refinished the bar counter and was in the midst of interviewing new help on May 28, 2020, when a commotion outside caught his attention. Crowds of people had burst into the liquor store around the corner at Snelling Avenue, some emerging with entire boxes of stolen alcohol. He locked eyes with a young looter, and the expression on her face was almost that of guilt. Almost.
“She just got caught up in it all,” he said.
Then they came for his store.
Tolchiner watched the looting and destruction unfold from the safety of his home security system, which captured a man with a crowbar slamming an ATM machine, and others ripping out the 120-year-old glass behind his elaborate whiskey displays. Over the course of 24 hours, dozens and possibly hundreds of looters and vandals tore through the Midway Saloon, rendering his best laid plans into literal rubble.
A CANDY STORE SPRINGS FROM A WHISKEY SALOON
“We got trashed,” said Tolchiner on May 21, sipping coffee at his bar counter with a small glass container of Swedish Fish gummy candies in hand.
Why Swedish Fish? Because it’s as good a symbol as any of a sweet rebirth.
Like many business and property owners in the St. Paul Midway, Tolchiner faced tough choices following the riots that consumed the Snelling-University area after the death of Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer.
And not all of those choices were financial. Should he reopen the bar? Given the palpable racial tension in the air, would his diverse clientele get along, and accept him? And what to do with the empty lot next door to his east and the vacant building next door to his west?
In the end, “we doubled down,” said Tolchiner, the proud proprietor of both the Midway Saloon and its colorful new neighbor, Midway Popcorn, Candy and Ice Cream. That’s where he aims to offer families what the saloon offers adult drinkers — a “come as you are” invite to community of all stripes. The ice cream and candy store will host its soft opening on or around Memorial Day, right next door to his whiskey saloon, which now sells 200 whiskeys and 100 spirits, far more than he ever offered before, next to the new outdoor patio stage to its east.
“This place is the pulse of the Midway,” said Tolchiner, who also plans to upgrade the Midway Saloon’s kitchen.
‘I GET CHOKED UP JUST TALKING ABOUT IT’
Why reinvest in the Midway? Tolchiner recalled visiting Menards on the day after the riots to pick up cleaning supplies, and then driving to the saloon to discover, to his surprise, 25 people, many of them complete strangers, already inside the building. Ad-hoc cleanup crews had formed almost spontaneously. They were there to help.
“God, I get choked up just talking about it,” said Tolchiner, leaning back from the bar to wipe a wet eye. “It was very sobering, no pun intended. … I can’t communicate the impact that had on my life. It was just a great statement about people.”
Just as importantly, the Midway is a good spot to make money and do some business.
“I think this is the next entertainment district of Minnesota,” Tolchiner said, with a smile. “If I’m wrong, I’ve got a lot of property on University Avenue.”
