After months of construction and renovation, the Northstar Center in Downtown Minneapolis is back in business, complete with food, a convenience store, offices, a hotel and apartments. It’s already drawing rave reviews for its “retro-style” too.
"A lot of people have came up to me and actually told me how nice they think it is," one person told WCCO Thursday.
"We've only been open one day. This is our second day, but so far it's been great," said one of the workers.
It is beautiful and much-needed.
"Glad to see us back and we need more places like this downtown. We need to get people back," Jerry says.
It has an old school feel.
"It brings back a homage to kind of like the 1960's era," says Toni.
Perhaps most importantly for the downtown lunch crowd, the Walking Dog has returned. And yes, it's as delicious as ever. The former Walking Dog was a destination for Chicago-style hot dogs before the COVID pandemic and then renovations forced its closure. The original owner, Dave Magnuson, is not back but will serve as a consultant.
It was originally opened in 1963 as a mixture of office spaces and a hotel and they're labeling it similarly as they did those six decades ago: "A city within a city."
While it is modern, it has an old school feel to it.
"If you saw the little set up over there, this little cute little décor thing, yeah, it's very much retro themed, trying to bring back the memories of the Northstar Center when it was first built in the sixties," says Zoe.
Among other things, the 17-story building offers a food court called the Northstar Cafeteria, the Krona Café serving up coffee tea and pastries, a general store, revamped skyway access, more office spaces, and new apartments.
That goes along with the Hotel Indigo and the Star Bistro restaurant which opened in the last year.
Part of the refresh of the building which takes up an entire city block is the transition of old office space into apartments. The Groove Loft Apartments are now open and leasing.
It's part of the city's new commitment to repurposing old office buildings into residential spaces, something Mayor Jacob Frey has said is key to downtown's future.
"How people use this city, how people use our downtowns, will significantly change," says Frey. "This is no longer going to just be a place where people come in to work at 8:00 a.m. and leave at 5:00 p.m. We're going to have a beautiful, diversity of use and people.
