What Grand Avenue in Saint Paul Looks Like After Reopening

Walk to the corner of Grand and Snelling this week and you will still find orange cones, plastic fencing, and a crew working through what looks like the last of the punch list. Saint Paul's own construction page for the project puts it plainly: the east side of the intersection is closed through mid-September. If you have lived along Grand Avenue for the past two years, that sentence probably does not surprise you. Some version of it has been true since April 2025.

What might surprise you is what is waiting on the other side of the cones. The work wrapping up this month at Grand and Snelling is only one part of a larger change on Grand Avenue. Some of what changed came directly from the construction. Some of it happened right alongside the construction and had nothing to do with it. The two stories have gotten tangled together in the retelling, and they are worth pulling apart before you walk back onto the avenue.

Two Summers Of Orange Cones

In 2025, the city rebuilt Grand Avenue between Fairview and Snelling from the ground up, replacing decades-old water and sewer lines beneath the street along with the pavement and sidewalks themselves. Work started in April and slipped past its original schedule after crews hit two surprises: a buried network of streetcar tracks near Macalester College that hadn't seen daylight since the 1950s, and a water line that needed full replacement. The road didn't reopen to through traffic until October 21, after roughly six months closed. Two summers running, Grand Old Day, the street festival that closes the avenue on purpose every June, had to end its route at Snelling instead of continuing to Fairview, because the western half of the street was already shut down for reasons that had nothing to do with the festival.

That project was supposed to close the book. Instead, 2026 brought a second phase: intersection improvements at Grand and Snelling, adding pedestrian bumpouts at all four corners and new traffic signals. The city's original estimate had the work starting in mid-to-late June and finishing by the end of August. The same city page now shows the east side of the intersection still closed, with a mid-September target instead. The slip is smaller than 2025's, but the pattern is familiar. This stretch of Grand Avenue has run behind its own schedule two years in a row.

None of that is unusual for a road project. What's unusual is what happened to the buildings on either side of the cones while everyone was watching the calendar instead of the storefronts.

The Anchors Were Already Leaving

Long before a single sidewalk panel came up in 2025, Grand Avenue's retail lineup had started thinning out. Pottery Barn closed its storefront near Victoria Street in early 2024, a full year before construction began. J.Crew, Anthropologie, and Restoration Hardware left the avenue in the years around it. None of those closures had anything to do with the road work. They were a separate, quieter shift in which national retailers were still willing to hold a lease on Grand Avenue, one that had already been underway before the first construction notice went up.

That distinction matters, because the two-year construction disruption didn't create the vacancy problem residents have been watching along the avenue. It just happened to overlap with it, so a stretch of sidewalk that was already down a few familiar storefronts also spent two summers surrounded by fencing. For a business trying to survive both at once, the timing was brutal. Roseline's Place, a shop that opened between Macalester and Cambridge streets in January 2024, closed in September 2025 after owner Roseline Friedrich said construction had cut off the foot traffic the business depended on.

What Replaced Half A Century Of Retail

The clearest evidence that Grand Avenue's transformation runs deeper than orange cones sits at the corner of Grand and Victoria, as The Villager reported. Victoria Crossing East, a mall built in 1915 as a car dealership and converted to retail roughly fifty years ago, spent decades holding a genuinely eclectic mix of tenants: Odegaard Books, the Royal Garden Chinese restaurant, Trade Winds, Paper Source, the Victoria Music Cafe, Billy's on Grand, Gather, and Juut Salon. This summer, the entire building came down.

In its place, developer Afton Park Development broke ground on August 6 on a six-story building called the Grand Victoria, with the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community as a lead investor. The new building will hold 90 market-rate apartments and roughly 13,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, a fraction of the storefronts the old mall supported across its many small tenants. Developers have put the project's cost at around $44 million, with some reporting closer to $45 million. Completion is targeted for early 2028.

Two of that ground floor's retail spaces are already reserved for restaurants with outdoor patios, though tenants haven't been named. Juut Salon, one of the mall's longest-running businesses, has said it plans to return once construction wraps, which means the salon that anchored that corner for years will simply be gone from the avenue for the better part of two years. Kitty-corner from the demolition, Evereve is renovating the space Pottery Barn left behind in early 2024, aiming for a 6,000-square-foot women's clothing store open before the 2026 holiday shopping season. The pattern isn't limited to this one corner either. Kenton House, a mixed-use building a few blocks away at 695 Grand, followed the same basic formula years earlier: ground-floor retail wrapped in several stories of housing above it.

Food Is Filling The Gap Retail Left

If retail on Grand Avenue is consolidating into fewer, larger footprints, food is moving the opposite direction, and doing it around the corner rather than on Grand itself. In Cathedral Hill, blocks from the avenue, chefs Meg and Bjorn Jacobse opened Restaurant Aubergine this spring in the space that last held St. Paul Revival, at 525 Selby Avenue. Meg previously ran the front of house at Meritage. Bjorn cooked at Bellecour before a stint in Portland and time at Joe Beef in Montreal. Aubergine is widely described as the first fine dining restaurant to open within the 651 area code since Karyn Tomlinson's Myriel debuted in July 2021, and it has already built a small ritual around itself. The kitchen makes exactly eight burgers a night, and regulars know to show up by 4:30 if they want one.

That dining room had sat empty since Revival's closure. But its arrival says something about where the neighborhood's new anchors are coming from. On a corridor that just watched a bookstore, a music cafe, and a half dozen small retailers get demolished along with their building, the businesses drawing people back in are chef-driven restaurants, not national chains.

The Businesses That Rode It Out

The Mac Weekly reported on how businesses on Grand Avenue fared through the construction. Wet Paint, the art supply store that has anchored its corner for fifty years, reported staying as busy as ever through the worst of the 2025 closures. Floor manager Chris Nolt credited new customers discovering the shop for the first time, people who might never have wandered in if road closures hadn't slowed foot traffic enough for them to notice the storefront. Baking Betty's, a cookie shop that had moved to Grand Avenue from a spot inside the Mall of America and opened that November, had a rougher run. Owner Emily Osterberg described customers who saw torn-up sidewalks and weren't sure it was safe, or worth it, to walk through the work zone to reach the door.

Both stories are true at once. The same two years of construction that scared some customers away also introduced others to businesses they had never tried. That contradiction is part of why "the construction is over" is such an incomplete way to describe what's happening on Grand Avenue this month.

What September Actually Signals

The intersection work at Grand and Snelling is expected to clear by mid-September, and the Grand Avenue Business Association has already scheduled live buskers along the avenue for Saturday, September 26, from 4 to 6 p.m., the kind of low-key event that only makes sense once foot traffic through that stretch is unobstructed again. For residents, that Saturday may be a more honest marker of Grand Avenue's changing rhythm than the day the cones actually come down. It's the first real chance to walk the finished sidewalk past a demolished mall, a shuttered salon waiting on a building that won't exist for another two years, and a dining room a few blocks over that didn't wait for any of it.

Grand Avenue isn't returning to what it was before April 2025. It's arriving somewhere it had already started becoming, cones or no cones.

Michael Favre and the team at Favre Real Estate keep an eye on corners like Grand and Victoria because a street's daily rhythm usually tells you more about a neighborhood than any single listing ever could. If you're curious what else is shifting in Cathedral Hill, Summit Hill, or anywhere else in Saint Paul, that's a conversation we're always glad to have. Let's Find Home.