A year after riots, 35 of 270 impacted St. Paul businesses remain closed

Days after looting and arson rocked St. Paul’s University Avenue business corridor, the Midway Target reopened its doors to banner foot traffic.

While Target sales were buoyed by stay-at-home workers and the shopping trends of the pandemic era, it would take months longer for the owners of Bole Ethiopian Cuisine to regain their footing after their University Avenue restaurant was burnt to embers.

Bole, which held its official “grand reopening” ribbon-cutting on Thursday, is now situated outside the neighborhood, closer to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. After losing its lease in the Midway Shopping Center, Peking Garden reopened this month for dine-in service off Western Avenue. Other commercial tenants of damaged Midway buildings have never returned. Business advocates say an immigrant-heavy business corridor remains pockmarked by too many empty buildings.

Among them, some 19 shops in the strip mall surrounding Allianz Field — a $250 million, city-owned soccer stadium — remain vacant and shuttered, several bearing telltale black singe marks left over from the riots that engulfed the Midway a year ago in the days after the death of George Floyd. Others seem on the verge of collapse. The city recently ordered the 19 stores demolished by mid-June.

Read more: https://www.twincities.com/2021/05/29/st-paul-riots-businesses-george-floyd-midway/