"I don't think we've lost the luster of Grand Avenue," said Quinn of Bread & Chocolate, standing a few doors down from a storefront that had been dark for two years.
That's the strange thing about Grand Avenue right now. Drive its three-mile stretch through St. Paul and you'll pass blocks that feel exactly the way they always have, plus a few corners that have felt frozen since 2024. If you're weighing a home in Summit Hill, Crocus Hill, or Mac-Groveland, where a walk to coffee or dinner runs through this street, the contradiction matters. The empty storefronts don't trace back to the neighborhood losing interest in shopping or eating out here. They trace back to who owns the building.
Two Blocks Apart, Two Different Timelines
Look at Kenton House, the 80-unit development built by Minneapolis-based Reuter Walton on the former Dixie's on Grand property. It opened in 2023, and its retail spaces filled almost as fast as the apartments above them. Emmett's Public House and Saji-Ya Sushi & Japanese Kitchen reopened in the new building, and a third tenant, Razava Bread Co., moved in soon after. The whole project was pitched partly at longtime St. Paul residents and empty nesters who wanted to stay in the city they'd already built a life in, and the leasing pace suggests that pitch worked.
Now walk a few blocks to 870 Grand Ave, the Grand Place shopping center. Pottery Barn closed there in early 2024, following J.Crew and Lululemon out the door in the years before. The bookstore Bound to be Read, the salon Phresh, and an M Health Fairview clinic had already cycled through the same building earlier. By spring 2026, that storefront had sat empty for more than two years, even as Kenton House's retail spaces stayed full a short walk away.
Same street. Same customer base walking past both buildings. Wildly different outcomes.
The Landlord Behind the Empty Storefronts
Grand Place, along with Victoria Crossing South at 850 Grand, Victoria Crossing West at 867 Grand, and 917 Grand Ave, known as Milton Mall, are all owned by the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio, referred to locally as STRS Ohio. J.W. Hulme, the 118-year-old St. Paul leather goods retailer, closed its Victoria Crossing West location in November 2023. Chris Jensen, president of the Grand Avenue Business Association at the time, pointed to inflexible and costly lease terms from an out-of-state landlord as the reason these spaces sit empty longer than they should.
That doesn't mean the landlord is ignoring the problem. Sara Martin, executive vice president of JLL Brokerage Services, which markets the properties, said her team was negotiating proposals on all available spaces that we have on Grand Avenue. But negotiating and signing are two different things, and the gap between them is where a storefront can sit dark for years while a locally developed building down the street fills in months.
A Deal Three Years in the Making
The clearest evidence of that gap is Evereve. The women's clothing chain closed its Grand Avenue store on February 28, 2026, after 19 years, when its lease expired. At the time, Evereve had been in talks to move into the vacant former Pottery Barn space at Grand Place, the same building, the same landlord. Those talks stalled. Co-founder Mike Tamte described the negotiations breaking down in reporting from that spring.
Then, by April 2026, the deal was back on. Evereve announced it would return to Grand Avenue after all, occupying 6,000 of the 8,000 square feet in that former Pottery Barn space, with Tamte telling reporters, "Our goal is to open before Thanksgiving." He called the corner one of the best retail locations in the city.
Add up the timeline. Pottery Barn left in early 2024. As of this fall, the space is still empty, waiting on a lease that fell apart and then came back together, aiming for a Thanksgiving 2026 opening. That's close to three years for one storefront, with a motivated, locally known tenant actively trying to get in. Kenton House, a newer building a few blocks east, saw its ground-floor restaurants and bakery open on a much shorter timeline. The two buildings have different owners, different lease structures, and different sizes of space to fill, and the wait at Grand Place shows how long one large-space lease can take even with an interested tenant at the table.
Construction Made a Slow Year Look Worse
Grand Avenue also spent six months under construction between Fairview and Snelling avenues, reopening to traffic in the fall of 2025. That project hurt real businesses in real time. Damla Erten, vice president of development at Sencha Tea Bar, said the shop absorbed roughly a 35 percent loss in business during construction, offset in part because Sencha operates other locations. Her adaptation was practical: "When you know construction is coming, you downsize, you change something, to adapt," she said, describing how the shop retiled its kitchen and added outdoor lighting during the slow stretch. Baking Betty's leaned on catering orders and online sales to get through the same months. When the street finally reopened, Katie Wann of Italian Pie Shoppe and Winery said it couldn't come soon enough.
That construction project explains a genuinely rough year for occupied businesses trying to keep customers coming through active storefronts. It doesn't explain why a storefront with no customers to serve, no lease signed, and no construction barrier in front of it stayed empty the entire time. The Grand Place vacancy predates the road work and is still unresolved a year after the road reopened. Two separate problems, both real, only one of them tied to a calendar.
What This Means If You're Looking at a Home Near Grand
If you're touring homes in Summit Hill, Crocus Hill, or Mac-Groveland, the useful question isn't whether Grand Avenue has vacancies. It does, and it has for a few years now. The useful question is which building a listing sits closest to, and whether that building's ownership has a track record of filling space quickly or sitting on it.
The broader recovery numbers back up the idea that this is a landlord-specific problem rather than a corridor-wide one. The Grand Avenue Business Association's membership grew from fewer than two dozen businesses at the end of 2021 to 82 by late 2024, and by that point 32 businesses had opened or reopened along Grand since the start of 2023, including Baby Baby boutique in the former J.W. Hulme space and Russell's restaurant replacing the longtime Tavern on Grand. St. Paul's current mayor, Kaohly Her, has reportedly been working directly with landlords and business owners on the vacancy issue, according to business owners quoted in coverage of the corridor this spring.
None of that erases the empty storefront at Grand Place. It does mean that storefront is the exception on a street that's otherwise adding tenants, not the rule. When you're evaluating a home near Grand Avenue, walk the specific block. A storefront that's changed hands three times since 2020 tells you something different than one that's been dark since Pottery Barn left. Both exist on the same street. They're not the same story.
Is the Grand Avenue construction project finished? Yes. The six-month reconstruction between Fairview and Snelling avenues reopened to traffic in the fall of 2025, though some finishing work continued into the following months.
When will the former Pottery Barn space at Grand Place reopen? Evereve has said it's targeting an opening before Thanksgiving 2026 in that space, according to co-founder Mike Tamte, after earlier talks to lease the location had briefly fallen apart.
Grand Avenue's mix of quick turnarounds and multi-year vacancies is exactly the kind of detail that gets lost in a quick drive-by but matters once you're comparing specific blocks in Summit Hill, Crocus Hill, or Mac-Groveland. If you're trying to read a corridor before you commit to a home near it, Mitchell Culbreath can help you look at the right details in the right order. Let's Connect.
