The new owner of the North Loop’s historic Traffic Zone building is giving the property a facelift, bringing in at least one restaurant, and retaining more than a dozen artists who have had studios there for years.

St. Louis Park-based Crowe Cos. bought 250 N. Third Ave., a six-story building near the I-394 ramp, for $6.5 million in November, according to a Minnesota Department of Revenue record of the sale.

Two of the building’s ground-floor retail spaces are vacant, but they won’t be for much longer, the North Loop Neighborhood Association reported Thursday. 

A fast-casual restaurant plans to open in June at the southern end of the building, where Jeromeo used to be. Another restaurant and bar is interested in the spot where Bev’s Wine Bar operated for almost 30 years but hasn’t signed a lease yet.

“We went with who we thought would be good fits for the neighborhood,” Crowe Cos. owner Patrick Crowe told the neighborhood association.

A rendering of the renovated Wheelhouse building envisions a patio on Third Avenue attached to the former Bev's Wine Bar space.

The building’s new name is the Wheelhouse, after the historic wheel and cable system that’s still in the basement of the building, which dates back to 1886, according to the North Loop Neighborhood Association.

The Traffic Zone Center for Visual Arts cooperative has called the building home since the early ‘90s. About 16 artists from that 23-member group, downtown Minneapolis’ sole surviving artists’ cooperative, won’t be displaced after all.

When the building went up for sale in 2023, marketing materials suggested it could be transformed into a hotel or an apartment building.

Crowe is also negotiating new leases with James and Mary Laurie Booksellers on the ground floor between the incoming restaurants and the Italian Cultural Center on the sixth floor.