Loring Park’s neighborhood loyalists are turning the lights back on

The 19 Bar, the popular, windowless gay dive of Loring Park, reopened this past week, making its comeback from a freak accident last year, when a garbage truck plowed into a power pole and set the bar ablaze.

The fire closed what had been a trusty space for the hyper-dense neighborhood’s renters. After a year of reconstruction, rainbow lights now line the 19’s roof, a flashy addition to what had always been a dark and understated façade.

Owner Gary Hallberg could have cut his losses, torn down the 19 and sold it to a developer, said longtime employee Eric Franson, because in recent years much of the neighborhood’s aging commercial stock has gone that way to builders of high-rises.

Everyone’s grateful “he didn’t sell us out,” said Franson. The single-minded focus for the past year had been to “get the old girl back to where she was for the neighbors and the community.”

For many in the storied “gayborhood'' on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, the 19 Bar’s reopening has been a much needed win, said City Council Member Katie Cashman. Such causes for celebration have been elusive in recent years, she acknowledged, as business closures and violent crime dampened local spirits. Recovery, some say, has been complicated by the neighborhood’s high hospitality taxes for an unequal share of public safety services. Still, some things are starting to look up.

Across the namesake park – the site of Minneapolis’ original Pride protest half a century ago – the nonprofit Twin Cities Pride has planted its flag after opening an LGBTQ arts and cultural center on Harmon Place this month, thanks to the city partly subsidizing the rent. TC Pride also brought its Rainbow Wardrobe, offering free clothing for LGBTQ people, into Loring Park with the promise of year-round career fairs, art shows and classes.

Executive Director Andi Otto said TC Pride wanted to offer constant resources, not just one celebration in June, to the neighborhood that remains the center of Minneapolis’ LGBTQ heritage at a time when LGBTQ rights nationally are under attack.

TC Pride wanted to be part of the change in Loring Park, said Otto, because it still serves as the first stop for many transplants nostalgic for bigger, more urbane cities, as well as those seeking refuge from less tolerant states.

“We wanted to make sure that we held on to our history and reclaim our LGBTQ roots in Loring Park,” Otto said. “And quite honestly, I don’t want it to have the reputation that it does. I want it to have a reputation of beauty.”

It was hard to tell how neighbors fared during the pandemic, sheltering in Loring Park’s “locked, vertical communities,” said Jana Metge, executive director of Citizens for a Loring Park Community. Also unclear: Whether the residential population has recovered from the work-from-home change, when people ranged out from the urban core.

On Oak Grove Street and Spruce Place, a large apartment building was condemned, boarded up and repeatedly caught fire as its reclusive owner retreated from public life, allowing squatters to take over.

Half a block away, a beloved Oak Grove Grocery shop clerk was killed with a golf club by a neighbor who has since been civilly committed.

A lot of people in Loring Park point to the murder of that clerk, Robert Skafte, as a major psychological blow and a “big turning point for the neighborhood,” said resident Taylor Dahlin.

Both the Oak Hill Apartments and Oak Grove Grocery, which had been a community gathering place in its own right, are indefinitely closed.

The longtime Speedway at 101 W. Grant St. is also closed, but as a hub of low-level drug dealing, that brought more relief than grief. At a Zoom meeting in September, neighbors overwhelmingly expressed consternation that the corporate landlord intended to lease it for a tobacco shop rather than a grocery or other desirable use.

City staff explained that the city could only control so much of what Speedway did with its property. The most they could do was impose a strict list of conditions on the incoming High Five Tobacco.

Resident Brandon McCollam said his aging apartment almost never is heated properly in the winter. Still, it looks out over Loring Park, which he thinks is one of the prettiest in Minneapolis, landscaped by an army of volunteer gardeners, with the tennis courts recently refurbished and canoeing on the pond throughout summer.

“There is so much to appreciate about Loring, to be hopeful for,” McCollam said. “We’ve got everything we need to make a really great community here, and Stevens Square and Loring Heights too, but it’s tough. I feel like the city just doesn’t care about these neighborhoods.”

This month, Council Members Cashman and Jamal Osman held a joint meeting in Stevens Square. The impetus was the closure of two essential businesses that served that neighborhood and Loring Park — the Frattalone’s Hardware and CVS Pharmacy — in quick succession.

Commercial landlord Mike Finkelstein told the Minnesota Star Tribune that people had been afraid to go to 19th and Nicollet Avenue because of the drug dealing and gunfights that left the windows of businesses riddled with bullet holes. He has no faith that things will improve.

“The higher ups really don’t want it to move, because if it moves, it means it moves somewhere else,” Finkelstein said. “We don’t have a major employer. We’re not downtown. We don’t have US Bank. We don’t have Wells Fargo. We don’t have the employers putting pressure on the mayor.”

The Minneapolis police budget grew 25% from 2020 to 2024, but the department is still struggling to recruit.

The Fifth Precinct, which serves Loring Park, would be “lucky” to get four squad cars covering its 20 neighborhoods on any given shift, Inspector Christie Nelson said at the meeting.

When it comes to safety beyond policing, Loring Park doesn’t have violence interrupters either, with a recent assessment of the Neighborhood Safety Department calling the lack of coverage a “notable gap.” The Downtown Improvement District doesn’t extend to Loring Park, but has sent some of its safety ambassadors down LaSalle during the summer.

Cashman proposes creating a new Nicollet Avenue Cultural Corridor sometime this year, capitalizing on Eat Street’s many immigrant-owned restaurants to vault parts of Loring Park, Stevens Square and Whittier into an official tourist destination. That could tap Meet Minneapolis marketing and draw city grants for murals and façade improvements.

More investment in return for high taxes would help, agreed Glenn Oslin, co-founder of Brühaven Craft Co. The brewery and coffee shop’s arrival last spring to anchor the corner of 14th and LaSalle after Lakes and Legends' departure helped avoid what could have been a problematic vacancy. But the going hasn’t been easy, not when Loring Park’s bars and restaurants get taxed at downtown rates of 3% — higher even than the ascending North Loop neighborhood.

A plan to reduce both taxes to 2.5% while expanding the downtown taxing boundary to the North Loop to better reflect shifting neighborhood dynamics has failed to gain approval at the Legislature.

When some residents at the community meeting expressed frustration at how long official initiatives would take — the cultural district process requires planning commission review — Metge urged grace.

“There were so many emotions and politics that were happening on top of COVID, on top of everything that happened around the murder of George Floyd, that it just took some time for people to settle out and want to work together again,” she said. “In Loring Park, we’re trying to just have gatherings, in churches, in parking lots, in cafes, just for people who disagree … to get some common balance. We look to the electeds to solve our problems, but it’s all of us.”

What Loring Park has in the meantime are neighborhood loyalists in it for the long haul.

Owners of its hottest Asian restaurants, Lotus and Gai Noi, now sit on the Meet Minneapolis board. Norman Kulba, who owns 300 Clifton Bed and Breakfast in a restored mansion, has launched a series of Minneapolis Trolley Tours — covering ghosts, true crime and Prince — to draw people downtown. Next door to Gai Noi, the startup Fawkes Alley Coffee is a nonprofit created by youth futsal coaches to hire predominantly Somali teens. Many of Fawkes' athlete-employees now attend Minneapolis College down the block and hang out at the shop after class, breathing new life into a commercial island that has suffered protracted vacancies.

Alex Heller, who runs the building housing Fawkes Alley, said it’s been difficult to watch Loring Park seemingly undergo the entire peak, death and rebirth of a city’s life cycle in the span of a few years.

“But you know, bright lights in a park and police on the street don’t necessarily make a neighborhood safe,” he said. “What makes an area safe is these eyes on the streets … the shop that opens up at 6 a.m., the restaurant that doesn’t close till midnight, those people who are working and breathing and on the streets. There’s so many people who are in this community in Loring Park that just care so much.”