Walk north from Franklin Avenue toward Douglas this September and the pavement under your feet is the newest thing on the block. Wider sidewalks. A protected bike lane with its own painted buffer. No orange barrels, no plywood, no detour signs pointing you toward Lyndale. The two-year rebuild of Hennepin Avenue South is, structurally, finished.
Cross to 2112 Hennepin and the story changes. The windows are dark. A leasing sign has been up for months. This was The Lowry, open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week for fifteen years, and as of this writing the storefront is still sitting empty, marketed to a new tenant as a turnkey restaurant space with the old kitchen equipment still bolted in place.
That gap between the finished street and the empty storefront is the actual story on Hennepin Avenue this fall. The city closed the book on construction. The neighborhood hasn't closed the book on recovery.
What $34 to $36 Million Actually Bought
The project ran in two phases. Phase one, from West Lake Street to 26th Street, reopened in November 2024. Phase two, the stretch from 26th Street to Douglas Avenue, wrapped with a ribbon-cutting on Halloween, October 31, 2025, according to Minneapolis city officials. Local coverage of the total cost varies between $34 million and $36 million depending on the outlet, and estimates of how long it had been since the street last saw a major rebuild range from a bit over fifty years to more than sixty five, depending on which city official is doing the counting. Either way, nobody currently living in Lowry Hill had seen this street torn up before.
| Phase | Segment | Reopened |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | W. Lake St. to 26th St. | November 2024 |
| 2 | 26th St. to Douglas Ave. | October 31, 2025 |
What came out of the ground was more than repaved asphalt. Crews replaced aging water and sewer lines, added dedicated turn lanes, and built in space for the future METRO E Line bus rapid transit stations. CBS Minnesota's coverage of the reopening noted that some sewer lining work continued into that fall, but the roadway itself was open to two way traffic, with bike lanes and sidewalks fully usable. Mayor Jacob Frey stood at the ribbon-cutting and told the crowd Uptown was "coming back."
He wasn't wrong about the road. He was early about everything else.
Then the Diner Didn't Make It
The Lowry closed for good on April 26, 2026, six months after the corridor it sat on reopened. In its closing statement, the restaurant's parent company, Blue Plate Restaurant Co., cited a mix of factors: shifting consumer habits, city mandates, broader economics, and, specifically, the "prolonged and disruptive Hennepin Avenue construction," according to reporting from the Star Tribune. The restaurant had been part of the neighborhood since roughly 2011, run by a company that also operates Longfellow Grill, The Freehouse, Groveland Tap in St. Paul, and the Blue Barn stand at the State Fair.
It was not an isolated closure. Blue Plate had shuttered Edina Grill just months earlier, in September 2025, after 26 years at 50th and France. Nearly 50 employees at The Lowry were offered positions at the company's other locations. Bring Me The News' account of the closure makes clear the timing wasn't coincidental. The eighteen months of closed lanes and torn-up sidewalks in front of the restaurant had already cost it customers well before the reopening, and a few months of restored traffic wasn't enough to reverse that.
Two blocks over, the same road now carries more cars a day than it did before the two-year rebuild began. The empty diner sits on it anyway.
What the Traffic Count Actually Says
Before construction started, the city's own 2022 count put daily traffic on this stretch of Hennepin between 22,000 and 25,000 vehicles, plus more than 6,600 transit riders and up to 280 cyclists, figures reported by the Star Tribune ahead of the phase two reopening. The commercial listing now marketing The Lowry's old space cites current daily traffic at 26,591 vehicles, above that pre-construction range.
Read that against the closure and the picture sharpens. The corridor's cars came back, and by at least one measure came back stronger than before. What didn't come back on schedule was the customer base for a specific mid-priced, all-day diner that had spent two years training regulars to go elsewhere for breakfast. Traffic recovery and tenant recovery are not the same clock, and Hennepin Avenue is currently running two different ones side by side.
Not every longtime business on the corridor lost that race. Isles Bun & Coffee, run by Jeff Veigel for nearly three decades, stayed open through the entire project. Its Christmas light display at 28th and Hennepin passed the 30 year mark last winter and is expected back again this season. Elsewhere on the strip, Spectacle Shoppe manager Sarah Rust described the return of two way traffic as simply letting customers find the store again. The businesses built around habitual, repeat customers seem to have absorbed the disruption differently than a diner competing for one-time foot traffic on a torn-up sidewalk.
The Neighborhood Bet Bigger On Itself This Year
The clearest evidence that Lowry Hill doesn't consider the recovery finished is what it's spending on convincing people to come back. In November 2025, a volunteer group calling itself the Hennepin Joint Committee, made up of residents, neighborhood associations, and local businesses, launched the first season of Holidays on Hennepin, a month-long calendar of markets, live music, and a shop-and-stamp passport program running from Black Friday through New Year's Eve. The Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association received a $30,000 city grant to help stage that first season, explicitly framed as a push to reestablish the corridor as a commercial hub after two years of construction.
The organizers didn't scale it back the second time around. In May 2026, the same group announced it had won a $40,000 city grant, a third larger than the year before, to run a second season. The grant now funds a paid project coordinator, printed event passports, and dedicated marketing, according to the Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association's own announcement. Five neighborhood associations are now formal partners: East Bde Maka Ska, East Isles, Kenwood, Lowry Hill East, and Lowry Hill.
An organizer doesn't ask for a bigger budget on a project that's already working. The increase reads less like a victory lap and more like a group that watched a fifteen-year restaurant close six months after the ribbon-cutting and decided one holiday season wasn't going to undo two years of habit-breaking on its own.
What This Actually Looks Like If You Live Here
If you're walking or biking this stretch of Hennepin between now and January, here's what's actually changed and what hasn't:
- The physical street is done. Bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and new stoplights from the phase two rebuild have been in place since October 2025.
- 2112 Hennepin, formerly The Lowry, is still vacant and being marketed as a move-in-ready restaurant space. Watch that storefront specifically. Whoever leases it next will tell you more about the corridor's recovery than the road ever did.
- Holidays on Hennepin returns Black Friday through New Year's Eve with a bigger budget and a five-neighborhood partnership behind it, plus the passport and prize program from last year.
- Isles Bun & Coffee's Christmas lights at 28th and Hennepin passed the 30 year mark last winter and are expected back again, one of the few traditions on the corridor that never paused.
- The Uptown Farmers Market shifted two blocks north to Lagoon and Girard Plaza this year because of nearby construction, running Thursdays through September 24, a reminder the corridor's disruption tally hasn't quite hit zero even with the main project closed out.
- The Uptown Art Fair, which relocated to Bachman's parking lot as the SoMi Art Fair during construction, returned to its original Uptown footprint this August, one of the clearer signs that some pre-construction rhythms are fully back.
The finished road told half the story. The other half is being written storefront by storefront, and it's still open.
If you've watched this corridor's ups and downs from a front porch or a rental on one of the side streets and you're curious what any of it means for your own next move, whether that's now or down the road, Massad Real Estate keeps close tabs on exactly this kind of block-by-block change across Lowry Hill and the rest of Minneapolis. Request a free home valuation and we'll walk you through what's actually happening on your street, not just what the ribbon-cutting announced.
