Northfield Downtown Development Corporation

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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Prashanti Austvold has a guest column in Saturday’s Northfield News (10/8/05) that anyone who is interested in the economic vitality of Downtown, or Northfield in general, should read.

I met Shanti at the most recent Block Head Gathering and then talked with her more as I tried to track down used copies of books for my oldest daughter’s literature class at the High School. You see, Shanti recently started working at her Mother-In-Law’s bookstore, Bookfellows.

Shanti used to be a commuter. She married a Northfielder (good move) but worked in The Cities. As she says in her column, “My only contact with the downtown was the rare evening I got to spend with my husband’s few leftover friends still in town. As the days grew warmer, I got to explore around the town a little bit but often passed by the downtown on my way to Cub Foods or Target. Working in The Cities, I could rarely make it to downtown during hours I could enjoy the gifts the town has to offer. I felt like the downtown was always closed when I was home…”

She goes on to talk about discovering all that the downtown and the community has to offer. “I did not know that there was more in the town than the two colleges. Knowledge of this town had been a mystery to me since any news of it did not come across me by chance. I did not have a reason to seek it out. I never saw it advertised, or events published to come to, when I was in the Twin Cities area and Northfield is so close… The town is a pretty “well-kept secret” as I have heard visitors to our store say who have come upon it by chance”.

For those of us interested in economic vitality, we should listen to Shanti. We need to work harder to make the downtown known and available to new residents. We also need to let folks throughout the region know about this “well-kept” secret. Apparently we’re sitting on a gold mine, we just need to get the word out so that we can get a little help from new residents and regional visitors getting it into the bank.