After the Ribbon-Cutting, Uptown Businesses Wait for Customers to Return

The reopening of Hennepin Avenue on Oct. 31 brought relief to business owners who had endured 18 months of construction, but a finished street has not settled the question that matters most to them: whether the customers who drifted away come back.

The roughly $36 million rebuild gave the corridor protected bike lanes, wider sidewalks, part-time bus lanes and stations for the METRO E Line, which opened Dec. 6. Mayor Jacob Frey called the moment "a renaissance" for Uptown and told business owners, "Uptown is coming back and you all are going to be a part of it".

Owners were less unanimous. Stan Pryor, who owns Autopia auto repair on the corridor, said the construction cut his business by 60% and that the damage was largely done. "It will bring the traffic flow through, but again, most of the damage is done," he said. Mumtaz Osman, who has run Osman Cleaners on Hennepin for 35 years, said the lost parking and one-lane-each-way layout left her fearing more congestion. Judy Longbottom, who runs the UPS store at 28th and Hennepin, was more hopeful: "We will have traffic going in both directions. This will be beneficial to the area".

Sarah Rust, manager of the Spectacle Shoppe near Hennepin and 24th Street, said the construction had made the store hard to find. "It's been a long summer of watching everybody struggle to find us again, so getting the cones off" was a relief, she said.

The optimists' case rests on the redesign itself: a corridor that is genuinely nicer to walk and bike should draw more lingering foot traffic than the street it replaced. But habits formed over a year and a half, shopping elsewhere, ordering in, avoiding the area, can be slow to reverse, and reopening removes the obstacle without restoring the traffic.

The city tried to cushion the blow during construction, serving 36 corridor businesses through its Business Technical Assistance Program from 2023 to 2025. Whether the rebuilt avenue translates into sales, the only metric that keeps doors open, is the question the coming season will answer.