Northfield Downtown Development Corporation

During the 2005 Community Day of Service, NDDC President Dan Bergeson and Executive Director Ross Currier spent the morning picking up trash in downtown.

They were pleasantly surprised to find downtown to be fairly clean…at least of trash on the sidewalks.

Unfortunately, there were some shocking discoveries made that morning…

…BUTTS, hundreds, if not thousands of them, cigarette BUTTS, mostly in the grates and rocks around the trees.

Dan and Ross made a valiant attempt to pick them up…BUT, it soon became apparent that it was too big a job for that method.

Fortunately, at that very moment of their growing despair, Arnie Nelson appeared…

…Arnie went down to Lansing’s Hardware Store and rented an industrial vacuum cleaner to pick up the BUTTS.

It raises a couple of interesting points. First, it would be great if smokers would not throw their BUTTS on the ground…(of course, there would need to be some BUTT buckets for their disposal)…and, Second, would it be worthwhile to have a regular, systematic clean-up of such offensive bits downtown?

It wouldn’t be free, Arnie footed the bill this time, BUT perhaps if the cost were cooperatively addressed it would be both affordable and well worth it for downtown folks.

All photographs courtesy of Stone Cottage Photography.

Mendota Homes, owner of the former Kump Property, will join the Block Head Gathering for a Riverfront Redevelopment Design Discussion on

Wednesday, May 18th
8 am
at the Rueb-N-Stein.

The Block Heads are an informal group of building and business owners that meet several times a year to discuss issues that are of interest to downtown stakeholders.

The is email was received last week at the NDDC office. In the interest of fostering broad communication, we are posting it here:

Dear Northfield Civic Leaders:

The conversation about developing Northfield as an Arts Town and, in particular, about the arts as an agent in economic development, is about to enter an exciting new phase. In preparation for action on this topic, we are widening the conversation to include not just the arts organizations in town, but the two colleges, the schools, the City of Northfield and local businesses. The point of this is to initiate a series of actions that will strengthen Northfield’s identity as an Arts Town and strengthen the Northfield economy in the process. You are invited to a discussion forum to kick this off on Tuesday, May 10, 7PM on the second floor of the Rubenstein.

We will hear about other arts towns regionally and nationally, discuss our arts and economic development aspirations and strategies, and make plans for a forum to gather broad community input on these topics. We then plan to implement the strategies identified through this process, which may include things like grant proposals for marketing and program development activities, formation of an arts council or other arts umbrella group, developing shared spaces, etc.

In the wake of the recent developments in the re-use of the old Middle School there is renewed interest in focusing and realizing our goals as an arts town.

Please join us in this new beginning,

Sam Demas and Bardwell Smith
NDDC/NAG Arts, Recreation and Culture Committee

Rebecca Bazan and Steve Meyer
Northfield Arts Guild (NAG)

Heather Robbins
ArtOrg

Sunday’s Star Tribune has a front page business section story about Artspace Projects, the Minneapolis-based developer that recently withdrew its proposal for the Historic Middle School complex in Northfield. People have started asking me, “if Artspace can do it on both coasts and many points in between, why couldn’t they do it in Northfield?”

The article in the Strib features a number of photographs of Artspace’s Washington Studios project in Duluth. I was the project manager at Artspace for that development and I thought that I might compare the financing for that project with the potential structuring for the Historic Middle School in Northfield as a basis for examining the feasibility of the potential project.
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