Minneapolis Undergoing Widespread City Refurbishment
<B>Minneapolis Undergoing Widespread City Refurbishment</B>
By Amanda Young
While the Mississippi River remains a constant, the surrounding cityscape of Minneapolis is undergoing major changes and redevelopment, ushering in top-flight entertainment, and hotel and restaurant tenants that for many years were difficult to attract.
Two recently approved projects focus on riverfront revitalization. Development in a portion of the city's warehouse district, called Block E, has the potential to fill an important gap between the historical and upscale entertainment ends of Hennepin Avenue. Secondly, the Milwaukee Depot project will support a complex of several restaurants, two hotels, a public skating rink and a railroad museum featuring an indoor water park, just a block from the riverfront.
But all this urban transformation isn't what will help capture more corporate meetings business in Minneapolis, according to Greg Ortale, president and CEO of the Greater Minneapolis Convention and Visitors Association. It will be a combination of the right accommodations, transportation and facilities--with an emphasis on facilities, he said. "The convention center expansion will likely bring in more meeting business," Ortale said. "The Milwaukee Railroad project, too, will be a major attraction, but you also need the availability of facilities. It all plays together."
For the past five years, the CVA has had to turn away convention business because it couldn't meet the space requirements. The three-year expansion project will nearly double square footage of the convention center, making it one of the 20 largest in the country.
Highlights of the Minneapolis Convention Center expansion include a new 45,000-sq.-ft. plenary hall that can be used as a 3,400-ft. industrial style auditorium. It also will have the ability to function as a learning center that can be divided into one section of 2,000 seats or three sections of 450-seat lecture halls. Each seat will have data and power ports. A second addition is a 100,000-sq.-ft. ballroom and exhibit hall in the lower level that can be converted into banquet space for up to 4,000 people. When all is said and done, a total of 695,000 square feet will be added to the convention center by completion in January 2002.
Minneapolis has increased its hotel space as well. On the riverfront, the Milwaukee Depot project will host two properties--a 124-room Residence Inn and a 260-room Courtyard by Marriott, both slated to open in 2003--to complement the upscale retail and entertainment segment.
A Marriott Renaissance on Block E will become the city's first all-luxury, four star hotel--a market which Ortale said doesn't particularly need to be filled. "The property we need most is a large, convention center hotel," he said. So far, no plans of such have been mentioned.
The closest hotels to the Minneapolis Convention Center are connected by skyway. (The popular skyway system connects 52 blocks, or five miles, downtown, making it possible to work, shop and eat without going outside.) The Regal Minneapolis Hotel and the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, both high-end options, typically accommodate convention goers. The city's largest hotel is a four-diamond, 821-room Hilton Minneapolis, which provides the largest meeting space second to the convention center.
Although the downtown area can claim a number of luxury hotels, the city's newest properties will tap into the limited service market. The Residence Inn and the Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites, Downtown Minneapolis Convention Center--both small, extended-stay hotels--cater to business travelers and easily compete with the luxury market as these hotels have begun to offer many of the same amenities.
"Meeting planners will appreciate our ability to handle a diversity of entertainment, retail and hotels," said Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton. "Minneapolis is one of seven '24-hour downtowns,' which means literally there are things going on 24 hours a day."
In the past couple of years, the city has opened the door to $2 billion in private investments downtown. The $100 million development of Block E will fulfill the missing link on Hennepin Avenue.
"Hennepin is really an eclectic street," Sayles Belton said. "It's like the entertainment spine. At one end you'll find historic theaters, then as you move on you'll find new restaurants that range from funky to really upscale establishments. At the other end is a very popular nightclub. Block E is the spoke in the wheel of activity."
Proposed tenants for the project include a Disney-owned ESPN Zone Café (mirrored by those popping up in Times Square in New York City, Chicago and Baltimore), a 17-screen Crown movie theater and a mega bookstore and café.
It's an opportunity that Mayor Sayles Belton said Minneapolis should feel good about: "We like to dispel the myth that we're just a tiny town on the Midwestern prairie.