What Expansion Includes

The current expansion focuses on restoring the building’s role as a business and retail presence along West Broadway, while preparing it to support long-term tenancy and community use.

Planned improvements include:

• Preserving the building’s historic character while modernizing interior systems

• Enhancing storefronts and façades to strengthen West Broadway’s commercial presence

• Expanding space for retail, wellness, and service-based enterprises

• Activating outdoor areas to support gathering and events

• Integrating green space, art, and placemaking elements

• Preparing the building for long-term growth and shared use

These upgrades are designed to strengthen the building as a durable economic engine, not a temporary project.

West Broadway: A Corridor Interrupted, Not Absent

In the early 1900s, West Broadway was one of Minneapolis’ most active commercial corridors, with hundreds of businesses serving a dense residential and commercial community. At that time, the corridor functioned much like what the North Loop represents today—a place of business activity, social life, and opportunity.

Over time, that trajectory was interrupted.

Following decades of racial discrimination in housing, lending, and business ownership—and periods of civil unrest during the civil rights era—West Broadway experienced systemic disinvestment. Many businesses closed or left, ownership patterns shifted, and the corridor lost much of its commercial density.

What remained was a landscape dominated by non residential businesses, faith & social service, and cultural organizations, often filling gaps left by the loss of economic infrastructure. While these institutions played vital roles, the corridor was no longer supported by the business ownership and wealth-building engines that sustain long-term prosperity.

From Disinvestment to Determination

The story of North Minneapolis is not one of absence—it is one of interruption. Despite generations of disinvestment, Northside residents continued to live, organize, raise families, and fight for opportunity. Today, a new wave of Black-led entrepreneurs and developers—many of whom grew up on the Northside—are taking the work further by owning and redeveloping the spaces themselves. We are not newcomers to this corridor.

We are people who:

• Played on these blocks as children

• Attended Northside schools

• Watched businesses disappear

• Experienced the consequences of disinvestment firsthand

Now, as owners and developers, we are committed to rebuilding from the inside out.

The ZaRah