Walk the corner of Grand and Victoria this month and you will find dirt. The building that stood there for decades, the retail strip everyone still calls Victoria Crossing East, came down within the last few weeks. Where Billy's on Grand used to sit, and later a spot called Gather Eatery and Watch Bar, there is now a fenced lot waiting for a six-story building to rise.
That hole in the ground is not a sign of trouble. It is the clearest evidence yet of what Grand Avenue has decided to become.
In recent years the street lost the kind of tenants that used to define it. Pottery Barn closed. So did J.Crew, Anthropologie, and Restoration Hardware. Salut, one of the avenue's larger restaurant spaces, closed too and sat empty long enough that locals still refer to it as "the former Salut." CBS Minnesota summed up the run of closures as an exodus running from Salut to Pottery Barn, and Grand Avenue Business Association board president Holly Weinkauf, who owns Red Balloon Bookshop on the avenue, has been candid about the toll it took on the street.
What replaced that retail wasn't more retail. It was people, parades, and a building designed to hold both.
The empty storefronts aren't staying empty, but they aren't staying retail either
The Pottery Barn space, kitty-corner from the demolition site, will not sit vacant much longer. Evereve, the women's boutique that closed its own nearby storefront in March 2026, is set to reopen there later this year. That is a lateral move within three blocks, not new investment from outside the neighborhood. It tells you something about who still believes in Grand Avenue's retail math: businesses already on the street, relocating within it, rather than national chains parachuting back in.
The bigger tell is what's rising on the demolition site itself. The new building at Grand and Victoria will hold roughly 90 apartments over about 12,000 to 13,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, according to the June 2026 announcement from the project's newest investor. That ratio matters. A retail mall is being replaced by a building where residents outnumber storefronts by a wide margin. Juut Salonspa, a Grand Avenue fixture, is set to return to the ground floor. Two restaurant bays of roughly 4,000 square feet each are planned alongside it.
The project has a name now: The Grand Victoria. And it has a financial backer nobody would have predicted a year ago. The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community signed on in June 2026 as a lead investor, a relationship SMSC Chairman Cole Miller framed around the tribe's practice of planning for the next seven generations. Saint Paul Mayor Kaohly Her called the corridor a crown jewel for residents and visitors alike when she welcomed the partnership.
The timeline has already slipped once. Early projections had the building open by summer 2027. As of the June 2026 investment announcement, the opening date has moved to early 2028. If you're the kind of person who tracks these things block by block, that's worth knowing before you plan around it.
Not everyone at the neighborhood meetings wanted this. At a March 2025 gathering at Summit Church, more than 40 residents showed up to review the plans, and the reaction split. One neighbor, Betsy Turner, wrote in opposition to the project's height:
"It'll keep going on, and on every empty spot. It ruins the scale of the place. It ruins the historic nature."
Others saw it differently. Jennifer Caritas, who has owned a condo on Avon Street for eight years, wrote in support, arguing that new residents living above Grand Avenue would be the ones keeping its remaining businesses in customers.
The parade moved here on purpose
The retail closures happened to Grand Avenue. The parades did not. Both of the city's two biggest annual crowds have been steered onto this specific street in the past two years, and that was a choice, not an accident.
The Saint Paul Winter Carnival's King Boreas Grande Day Parade ran through downtown for generations. In 2025, organizers rerouted it to Grand Avenue for the first time, a partnership between the Winter Carnival and the Grand Avenue Business Association. It happened again on January 24, 2026, marching westbound from Dale Street to just past Lexington Parkway. This year's parade even staged a Kings Tug-o-War at 656 Grand Avenue, at Russell's, fifteen minutes before the floats rolled.
Russell's sits in the space that used to be Tavern on Grand, a St. Paul institution that closed in early 2024. The person who bought the building and reopened it is Todd Russell, who grew up two blocks away at 1145 Grand Avenue, attended Linwood Elementary and Highland Park High School, and built a career in commercial real estate before deciding, in his own words, to bring new energy to the street he grew up on. He has also been active with the Winter Carnival's Vulcan Krewe since 1989, which is part of why the Grande Day Parade's move to Grand Avenue reads less like a marketing stunt and more like a homecoming for the people who pushed for it.
Grand Old Day did the same thing months earlier, on a bigger scale. On June 7, 2026, the festival drew more than 200,000 people to roughly 30 blocks of Grand Avenue, its 53rd year running. The 2026 edition added a Future Innovators Zone and a Kids Market for young entrepreneurs ages 5 to 17, alongside the usual six music stages and wiener dog races. Weinkauf told CBS Minnesota the event exists to highlight everything that makes Grand Avenue special year round, and organizer Elizabeth Emerson George told KSTP that 100 percent of the festival's proceeds go straight back into supporting the business district's operations.
Two crowds, engineered rather than assumed, in the same eighteen-month window. That is not what a struggling commercial strip does. It is what a street does when it has decided its foot traffic has to be built rather than waited for.
What's actually worth a walk right now
For anyone whose routine on and around Grand Avenue hasn't caught up with the last two years, here is what's changed on the ground:
- Russell's (656 Grand Ave), the comfort-food restaurant and neighborhood bar that replaced Tavern on Grand, still serves a walleye dish as a nod to the old spot, this one built as nachos rather than the classic entree.
- On Grand Avenue itself, the dining core that predates this whole cycle, places like Estelle, Due Focacceria, and Red Rabbit, has held steady through the retail churn, a reminder that restaurants have weathered this stretch better than apparel ever did.
- A few blocks over on Selby Avenue, an elevated French bistro moved into the former Revival space, running a rotating menu that borrows from 19th-century French technique.
- In Cathedral Hill, a Spanish bakery and deli took over the former Handsome Hog space, with fresh sourdough, sliced meats and cheeses, and grab-and-go Spanish staples.
- Elsewhere in the city, Take Care, a coffee shop founded by Five Watt co-founder Lee Carter, opened with an explicit focus on community and on coaching other small operators who want to build sustainably.
None of this reverses what left. But it maps onto the same pattern as the parade moves and the apartment count at Grand and Victoria: the businesses gaining ground are the ones built around people showing up in person, whether for a meal, a coffee, or a festival stage, not the ones that depended on browsing traffic alone.
What this adds up to
Grand Avenue's next chapter is not a retail comeback story. It is a shift in what the street is optimized for. When a shopping mall becomes a building where apartments outnumber storefronts three or four to one, when the city's two largest annual gatherings both get routed down the same six-tenths of a mile, and when the people opening new businesses are the ones who grew up two blocks from where they're opening them, the pattern points the same direction. Grand Avenue is building its own audience instead of hoping one shows up.
The next test comes fast. The Grand Old Day 2027 date will be set within months, the Winter Carnival returns to Grand Avenue again in January, and The Grand Victoria's early 2028 opening will either hold or slip again. Anyone who already calls this stretch of Saint Paul home has a front-row seat to which bet pays off.
If you're watching this corridor for reasons beyond a good bowl of rigatoni, from questions about property values to what a denser Grand Avenue means for a nearby street, the team at Sally English Group tracks these shifts closely across Saint Paul's established neighborhoods. Let's connect.
