Thanks for the reminder of the fishy environs of the Great Northern Market - I lived briefly at the Seville Hotel on Seventh St. in the mid-1970s and liked that store a lot. To the points about size and marketability, do recall the overly optimistic retail market profile decisions made about the Riverplace/Main St. development that ate so much CDBG money in the 1980s. There were numerous individual business failures and the St. Anthony Main developers in particular were badly overextended. I bet you can still hear a pin drop down there during off-peak shopping hours and days. Driving carriage in the mid-80s in the St. Anthony Falls Historic District, I heard many complaints from my customers about the upscale atmosphere - not geared to Lake Wobegon's ostensible economy; nice to visit and see the sights, but don't expect dollars to flow out of ordinary pockets; in short, no buy-in by the mass market and not enough upscale traffic to carry the overhead. Our feeling as locals who had helped with the whole riverfront area plan was that planners living in prosperous suburbs had let their pretensions get the best of their better judgment as Minnesotans, or Minneapolitans, or something when it came to the festival market option. Suburbs don't seem to have much institutional memory, sense of cultural continuity, volkgeist - the "I remember when..." crowd that lives in the heart of the city. The Target subsidies don't seem particularly home-grown either but I'll surely shop there unless they fiddle with the price structure. Fred Markus, Horn Terrace, Ward Ten _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - Minnesota E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
