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What did Minneapolis’ Block E used to look like?
The Hennepin Avenue commercial strip was once called “exotic, energetic, occasionally evil and full of life.”
The Minnesota Star Tribune
August 16, 2024 at 12:22PM
The neon glow of businesses on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis once beckoned visitors to a spot that this newspaper described as the city’s “center of sin.”
But the wrecking ball came for “Block E” in 1988, leveling the dense array of storefronts between 6th and 7th streets that still conjures lively memories for some Minnesotans.
The block is now home to a giant gray building called Mayo Clinic Square, which houses the practice facilities for the Minnesota Lynx and the Timberwolves, offices and a sports medicine clinic.
The streetscape is so drastically different that a reader asked Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune’s community reporting project, to share details about how this stretch of downtown looked back in the 1970s and 80s.
“When things get torn down my memories of them fade fast,” the reader wrote about Block E. (The name is a remnant from when planners assigned letters of the alphabet to downtown’s blocks.)
Block E was bookended in those decades by two Shinders, a local newsstand chain that went out of business entirely in 2007. It sold comic books, novelty cards and porn magazines.
In between was a mix of stores, bars and restaurants. Businesses included the Rifle Sport Alternative Art Gallery, Brady’s Pub, the Best Steak House, the Shubert Theatre, and the infamous watering hole Moby Dick’s. For a time, there was a McDonald’s.
A headline in the Star Tribune described Block E in 1986 as “exotic, energetic, occasionally evil and full of life.”
‘A whale of a drink’
Moby Dick’s opened in 1971, taking over the space that was once home to the 620 Club. (The old spot, which specialized in turkey dishes, had a sign on its storefront declaring it was “Where Turkey Is King.”)
Moby Dick’s owners wanted to make it a place with a “youthful, San Francisco-type atmosphere,” wrote Star Tribune columnist Will Jones at the time. The sign outside advertised a “whale of a drink.”
“Moby’s was the best place to get drunk on a budget, which was why it attracted almost every type of boozehound in the city,” wrote Bill Lindeke and Andy Sturdevant in their book “Closing Time.” “Black and white, rich and poor, office stiffs and bums, men and women, hustlers and rubes, tourists and locals, conventioneers and pool sharks, drunks and more drunks, and ‘swarms of pool players and pinheads.’”
By the 1980s, Moby’s developed a reputation as the city’s seediest bar. The police department dubbed it a “literal den of thieves,” and the “worst in Minneapolis.” The bar had a “history of strippers, drug deals and assaults,” the Star Tribune wrote in 1988. The year before, there were more than 600 police calls to the bar — a state record — and the police chief said a customer had a 1 in 4 chance of being assaulted.
After Block E was demolished, the bar’s owner said the spot wasn’t entirely to blame for the whole block’s reputation.
“Moby Dick’s was a factor on Block E, but it was by no means the cause of Block E,” Steve Gold told the Star Tribune. “It was not a white, middle- to upper-class suburban yuppie bar. It was one of the most successful integrated bars in the city, in the country.”
Leveling Block E
The Minneapolis City Council in the 1980s was eager to “add glitter to Hennepin” by leveling Block E entirely, the Star Tribune wrote.
They acknowledged it would likely push crime somewhere else, but they wanted to bring new development to this part of downtown.
“Every city has a Block E, where people congregate and hang out because they’re up to no good,” said Council Member Sandra Hilary. “You chase them away and they come back again somewhere.”
City Council President Alice Rainville floated the idea of a park, but that never took hold. One developer proposed a basketball entertainment center.
Instead, the City Council selected proposal by developer Ray Harris. Called “Pageant on Hennepin,” it included entertainment space, retail businesses, three office buildings, an apartment building, a 250-room hotel, ample parking and a gym. The whole thing would be connected to downtown’s skyways.
Harris was unable to finance the development, however. In 1988, the City Council voted 12-0 to raze the block without any plans for developing it. Instead, they decided to build a surface parking lot while they waited for a developer to secure financing.
Business owners along the street disagreed with the decision vehemently. Moby’s owner Gold said the police department was to blame for the block’s decline because they didn’t patrol enough.
In October, the city held a demolition party for Block E. They passed out cookies frosted with “Block E” crossed out, hung up a “Bye Bye Block E” sign and released balloons into the air.
All of Block E was torn down except for the historic 1910 Shubert Theater, which had been shuttered since 1983. In 1999, movers hoisted the theater up and moved it two blocks away, securing a Guinness World Record for heaviest building moved on wheels. (The Cowles Center for Dance and Performing Arts ran the building for 14 years, but shuttered it this spring.)
Hooters and Hard Rock Café
Block E was a parking lot until 2001, when developer Dan McCaffery built a multistory retail and entertainment complex that included a hotel, a Hard Rock Café and an AMC movie theater.
The urban mall wasn’t as successful as McCaffery and the City Council had hoped. By 2008, it had lost several original tenants. It would lose several more over the following years, with the Block E Hooters filing for bankruptcy in 2010. That year, a developer bought the building with plans to turn it into a casino. Instead, it sat empty for years.
The site reopened in 2015 after extensive renovations — with the new name Mayo Clinic Square.
More than three decades since the old Block E was demolished, some are nostalgic for the gritty but lively strip. The city’s vision for its downtown doesn’t always match how people experience it, said “Closing Time” author Lindeke, a University of Minnesota professor.
“The demolition of Block E in the ‘80s fits perfectly into what I see as a consistent approach to downtown by the business community and political leadership of the city. That’s not going away,” Lindeke said in an interview.
“There’s still this reluctance to let street life and diversity and working-class people be a part of downtown in a meaningful way.”
Correction: Previous versions of this story incorrectly included Joel Shinder among business owners who blamed the Minneapolis Police Department for Block E’s decline.
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