Northfield Downtown Development Corporation

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.

Twenty one building and business owners met on Tuesday morning at the Rueb-N-Stein, enjoying the fine hospitality, as well as the delicious doughnuts, of Joe and Jody Grundhoefer. Oh yeah, we talked about some stuff too.

The first topic concerned recent NDDC Retail Initiatives. There was the Welcome Students campaign that was launched at the end of August to recognize first-year college students at both St. Olaf and Carleton Colleges. We followed that with a Family Weekend project that will be initiated at the end of September. For the Parents and families of St. Olaf and Carleton students, we’re planning to present them with a bag of goodies to entice them to visit the many fine establishments in downtown. Downtown retailers are encouraged to get goodies to the NDDC for bagging by Wednesday, September 28th.

We then heard from New Division Development on their plans for the Lansing Hardware property. Partners Randy Lutz and Beth Closner presented new details on design and, perhaps most exciting, a rumor that the Northfield Liquor Store might relocate to this developement. As usual, many of the building and business owners expressed their desire that the city might do more for parking in downtown. I suggested that they might follow Red Wing’s example and build a modest parking structure underneath the development to support this economic expansion. The slope of site makes a lower level of parking possible.
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Block Head Gathering
Tuesday, July 12th
8 am
J. Grundy’s Rueb-N-Stein