Walk the stretch of Grand Avenue past Macalester Street this week and the pavement is smooth again, the new signal at Snelling cycles the way it's supposed to, and the bump-outs the city added at each corner make the crosswalk feel less like a dash and more like a stroll. That part is done. The storefront directly across from where the Victoria Crossing East mall used to sit, though, is still a fenced lot. That contrast, a finished street next to an unfinished corner, is the more honest way to describe where Grand Avenue actually stands this fall than any version of "it's back."
One Reopening, Not the Last One
The intersection work that wrapped in late August was never the whole project. It was the second phase of something that started back in 2023, when voters approved a citywide 1% sales tax to fund street reconstruction, and the first stretch built with that money ran from Fairview Avenue to Snelling in 2025, a six-month, $6.7 million rebuild of the roadbed, sidewalks, and utilities under that half mile of Grand. That project reopened to traffic in October 2025. What finished this past August 27 was a narrower follow-up: new signals and pedestrian bump-outs at the Grand and Snelling intersection itself, a Minnesota Department of Transportation collaboration that had been penciled in for "later" back when the first phase was still under construction.
The city's own public works director put the scale of what's still ahead in plain terms when the first stretch reopened last fall, noting the completed section was half a mile against 43 and a half more miles still on the list under the same funding program. Grand Avenue's rebuild isn't a single event with a ribbon-cutting at the end. It's a rolling schedule, and this August's reopening is one entry on it, not the last one. If a different stretch of Grand goes under construction again in a year or two, that won't be a surprise so much as the pattern continuing.
The Corner That Isn't Coming Back the Same Way
The more visible change this year isn't the street surface. It's the corner at Grand and Victoria, where the Victoria Crossing East mall stood for decades and where Billy's on Grand used to operate next door. Both are gone now. The mall building came down in the first week of August, and on August 6 the developer, Afton Park Development, broke ground on its replacement: a six-story building called The Grand Victoria, with 90 apartments over more than 13,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community signed on as lead investor earlier in the summer, and the project has a target opening of early 2028.
What's worth sitting with is what this replaces, and what doesn't come back. Pottery Barn, J. Crew, Anthropologie, and Restoration Hardware all closed their Grand Avenue locations in recent years, part of a broader retreat of national chains from the corridor. The Grand Victoria isn't rebuilding that version of Grand Avenue. Juut Salonspa, a longtime tenant, is set to return to the ground floor once the building opens, but the retail roster otherwise hasn't been finalized, and the groundbreaking coverage makes clear additional tenants are still being lined up. For now, that corner is trading a shopping destination for housing with retail underneath it, which is a different kind of anchor for the avenue than the one that stood there for forty years.
One block over, the shift is already visible. Evereve, the boutique that closed its own nearby storefront in March, is set to move into the vacated Pottery Barn space later this year, kitty-corner from the demolition site. It's a smaller kind of turnover than a 90-unit apartment building, but it's the same underlying story: the avenue's retail footprint is being redrawn in real time, not restored to what it was.
Who Made It, Who Didn't
The businesses that sat through the 2025 construction season didn't all come out the same way. Wet Paint, the art supply store, held on in part because it's a destination in its own right, people drive there specifically, construction or not, according to co-owner Scott Fares. Sencha Tea Bar used the slower summer months, when Macalester's students are away, to retile its kitchen while the street outside was torn up anyway. A few blocks down on St. Clair, the Groveland Tap, the neighborhood's longtime beer and burger spot, still points to its own refreshed look and rain-or-shine patio as reasons to stop in.
Others didn't make it through. Baking Betty's, run by Emily Osterberg, described customers unsure where to park or how to reach the store as the road, then the sidewalks, came up in sequence. Roseline's Place, a business that had opened between Macalester and Cambridge streets in January 2024, closed that September after its owner said the construction cut foot traffic to the point the shop couldn't sustain itself, the only closure directly tied to that stretch of work. St. Paul Meat Shop owner Benjamin Roberts summed up the mood most other business owners along the avenue shared when the first phase reopened last fall: parking and access had been hard for months, and getting the vibrancy back to the doorstep was the whole point of finishing the job.
That's the piece easy to skip past in a roundup of ribbon-cuttings. A finished street is good news for the businesses still standing. It came at a cost to at least one that isn't there anymore, and it's worth knowing that going in rather than assuming every storefront made it through unscathed.
The Calendar Is Filling Back In
With the intersection work behind it, the Grand Avenue Business Association has its fall calendar running again. PAWS on Grand, the dog-friendly event that partners with area pet rescue organizations for adoptions, drew people out on September 13. Live music evenings near Macalester College are on the calendar for Tuesday, September 29, and again October 6, timed to the stretch of fall when the college is back in session and foot traffic on the avenue climbs with it. Further out, the association has a December 5 holiday event penciled in, with shopping along Grand and a visit from Santa for the families who make it a yearly stop.
None of that erases the fact that a fenced lot still sits where a mall used to be, or that the next phase of streetwork is somewhere on a list rather than off the books entirely. It does mean the avenue's rhythm, the events, the evening walks past lit storefronts, the reason people come down to Grand Avenue on a Tuesday for no particular purpose, is functioning again after a stretch where it wasn't.
Grand Avenue this fall is two things at once: a street that's finished, and a corridor that's still being decided. The pavement's done. What fills in around it, whether that's Evereve settling into its new space, additional retail tenants signing on at The Grand Victoria, or a different block going under construction next, is the part still being written.
Team Edelstein pays attention to those details because we live and work in this neighborhood too, corner by corner, phase by phase. Work With Us.
