Northfield Downtown Development Corporation

NDDC Vice President Joe Grundhoefer (J. Grundy’s Rueb-N-Stein) is pictured here welcoming the couple of dozen building and business owners that enjoyed the coffee, doughnuts and conversation at this morning’s Block Head Gathering.

The topics included the proposed outside dining ordinances, the pedestrian crossing sign program and downtown crime reduction initiatives. The doughnuts included raised glazed and chocolate covered cake.
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The next quarterly gathering of the downtown Block Heads will be held this Wednesday, August 9th, 8 am at J. Grundy’s Rueb-N-Stein.

The Block Heads are an informal group of downtown building and business owners who meet to strategize and implement ideas for strengthening downtown Northfield.

This Wednesday the topics will be:

1) Proposed Outside Dining Ordinances
2) Street Crossing Sign Program
3) New Crime Reduction Initiatives

Guests from the City of Northfield and the Northfield Police Department will be on hand to participate in the discussions.

Coffee and doughnuts will be served.

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress of the still somewhat conceptual United States of America unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration opened with these too-infrequently quoted words:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The world has never been the same since. Once a year, we remember this event and celebrate the decision of our Founding Fathers to create a new form of government, one that was based on the belief that all people are born with the ability to participate in their own governance.

The NDDC Block Heads, downtown building and business owners, are gathering tomorrow morning to discuss: Construction Projects and Downtown Traffic Flow.
Specifically the topics and presenters will be: 1. Library Plaza with Howard Merriam, 2. Bridge Square Condos with John Mathern, and 3. Highway 3 Intersections with Heidi Hamilton.

The Gathering will be held: Wednesday, April 26th, 8 am, at J. Grundy’s Rueb-N-Stein.

Coffee and Doughnuts will be served.

Last year I was one of a group of two dozen Northfielders sent off to the frozen tundra to receive Blandin Leadership Training.

One of the things that we were taught was called Asset Based Community Development. To perhaps oversimplify, this concept involves looking at your towns existing strengths as basic building blocks and creating an economic development strategy around those assumed competitive advantages.

To apply this concept on a modest scale, one could focus on the downtown district. An informal inventory of the downtown office users indicates that we have attracted a number of what I call creative industries: arts and design, architecture and engineering, graphics and words. A stroll along Division, Water and Washington Streets reveals that our pedestrian-friendly shopping district is rich in the offerings of design and decoration: art stores, craft cottages and design studios. Even our purveyors of burgers, games and shoes have a regional reputation for the quality of craft.

Going even deeper than our collection of 19th Century commercial buildings, downtown Northfield has developed character. With the wide variety of arts-related shops and specialized craft studios, we have an increasingly distinctive business district.

This lesson on community assets informed my reading (in the January issue of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street News) about the 16:62 Design Zone, located in a funky old neighborhood of Pittsburgh. They had some cool historic buildings in need of a little investment and a community that wanted a certain kind of economic development

The business leaders believed that this combination of assets had real potential. They decided to promote the area to a specific market niche - businesses that focused on arts and design. The business owners got together to look at branding the district through a shared vision and to promote the neighborhood’s assets to attract similar businesses and, ultimately, bring more customers to the area for everyone.
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