Around 9 p.m. on a Friday in early June, roughly 40 people gathered on First Avenue North between Fifth and Sixth streets, surrounded by food trucks, bounce houses, and karaoke. That attendance number fluctuated throughout the night. About an hour and a half later, 60 people were on the block. Then, as midnight struck, the crowd dwindled to 20 people.

Granted, it was the initial return of Warehouse District Live, a City-sponsored effort to create an “enhanced pedestrian zone” in downtown Minneapolis on Friday and Saturday nights during the summer. But sparse attendance on night one didn't detract from Warehouse District Live's potential in the eyes of Minneapolis Downtown Improvement District (DID) leaders.

“It's a good way to try out tactically and programmatically what we're trying to do out here,” President and CEO of the DID and Downtown Council Adam Duininck said shortly after midnight on June 8.

Still, the $750,000 price tag for 22 weekends of programming in 2024 leaves some people, like Minneapolis resident Akash Gogate, wondering if it’s a worthy investment. 

“The light rail, we should be expanding it. The bus transportation could be more regularized,” Gogate told Downtown Voices as he hung out at Warehouse District live with friends. “I didn’t know it cost that much. If this is $750K, put that shit somewhere else.”

Warehouse District Live is produced by the DID, a nonprofit dedicated to boosting vibrancy and safety across downtown Minneapolis, and gets funding through the City's annual budget. It's scheduled to run from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays through October on one to three blocks of First Avenue North.

Warehouse District Live was initially expected to resume on May 31, but organizers decided to postpone this season’s kickoff following a shooting in Whittier that killed Minneapolis police officer Jamal Mitchell the day before. Rain forced Warehouse District Live’s cancellation two other times in June. The DID hasn’t yet determined how extra funding from the canceled events will be used since there wasn’t a rain-out during the inaugural season last year.

Planning for Warehouse District Live predates the pandemic. The idea came from a 2015 hospitality zone assessment, which revealed a number of things about how to activate downtown Minneapolis, in addition to engagement with national experts and local business owners on how the Warehouse District could “reach its potential,” according to DID Chief of Staff Ben Shardlow. 

“You need really strong entertainment options, you need great transportation options for people who are coming to the downtown entertainment district for fun, and for employees who work there at those establishments, you need to attend to quality-of-life concerns,” Shardlow said. “There hasn't been enough focus on understanding that entertainment and hospitality and socializing are incredibly big deals for successful, healthy cities.”

Warehouse District Live provides late-night food options, as well as much-needed public restrooms, especially on Fridays and Saturdays in the Warehouse District.

“Warehouse District Live is a bundle of resources to make the entertainment district safer and more vibrant for the times in which it is busy,” Shardlow said.

The DID claims Warehouse District Live has helped bring pedestrian volumes back to pre-pandemic levels in the surrounding area. The organization cites data from traffic analytics platform Placer.ai, which counted approximately 1.6 million visitors in the Warehouse District in 2019 and 2023, up from 1.3 million visitors in 2022. 

Crowds at Warehouse District Live are more robust when there’s a large-scale event happening in downtown Minneapolis.

The following Friday around 8:40 p.m., about 200 people streamed from a Minnesota Lynx game at Target Center into Warehouse District Live, with dozens of them sticking around for karaoke, food, or games. The number of attendees fluctuated between 40 and 60 through midnight.

Organizers aren’t necessarily interested in turning Warehouse District Live into a big production that attracts hundreds of people on a given weekend night. 

“This is more like a small pedestrianization than it is a festival. It's meant to create an enhanced pedestrian area for people at a time and place, where there really, frankly is not enough space for people who want to gather,” Shardlow told Downtown Voices in a phone interview. 

This distinction is why the DID dismisses the comparison commonly seen on social media of Warehouse District Live and Open Streets Minneapolis, a traveling event series that transforms the City's busiest streets into pedestrian-friendly zones for one day.

Fans of Open Streets have questioned the City's decision to allocate $750,000 to Warehouse District Live, rather than $850,000 to Open Streets, as requested by the series’ original organizers, Our Streets, for five events this summer. Since the City severed ties with Our Streets, it has had difficulty finding other organizers for Open Streets events.

For Shardlow, the comparison of Warehouse District Live and Open Streets is like apples to oranges.

“The Open Streets events happen in one place once a year, and they have different goals and different things happening in the space,” Shardlow said.  “There are block parties that happen throughout the city, all of these things involve closing streets and activating them. It doesn't really help any of us to try to disparage other projects that are activating Minneapolis streets to make them more vibrant, because vibrant streets are safe streets.” 

Ward 7 Councilmember Katie Cashman, who represents the block where Warehouse District Live takes place, sees some similarities between Warehouse District Live and Open Streets. 

“This is the opportunity to have Open Streets in the downtown corridors specifically at night. Warehouse District Live goes until 3 o’clock in the morning. There are not many things in our City that go until 3 a.m. where you can actually get food. Having 50 Open Streets events for $750,000 makes it actually generally cost effective,” Cashman said during a phone interview. Warehouse District Live got unanimous support from City Council in the 2024 budgeting process, with Ward 12 Councilmember Aurin Chowdhury saying “it’s a good model for other parts of our city.”

Supporters have touted Warehouse District Live’s positive impact on public safety. According to data provided by the City, violent crime within a half-mile of Warehouse District Live decreased by 24%, with 250 incidents in 2023 compared to 328 in 2022. Reports of shots fired decreased 56%, from 128 in 2022 to 57 in 2023, a larger decrease than the city’s overall 46% reduction in shots fired reports from year-to-year.

“Ironically, a byproduct of this, kind of almost an unintended consequence. No one had thought this would happen,” Ward 3 Councilmember Mike Rainville said about Warehouse District Live’s impact on downtown crime in a phone interview. Rainville is one of Warehouse District Live’s biggest supporters and made it his biggest budget priority for 2024.

Loring Park resident Venelli Felling feels Warehouse District Live is a good investment, unlike Gogate, who would rather see the money go elsewhere.

“We need to invest in our community, we need to make sure that we feel safe, especially us who live down here,” Felling said as she perused a karaoke booklet with her mother.

But one business owner on the block feels his restaurant is negatively affected by Warehouse District Live. Pizza La Vista owner Youssef Abdelwahab estimates that the presence of food trucks causes a 50% drop in sales compared to weekends when Warehouse District Live is not happening. The pizzeria sees more customers when the food trucks start leaving around 2:30 a.m. Abdelwahab claims blockades around the perimeter of Warehouse District Live deter people from visiting the block, and in turn, his business. 

“They think there's some construction going on or something and they avoid the block completely,” he said.

Street closures and blockades also frustrate people who are spending time in the Warehouse District for other reasons. Minneapolis resident Tana Hargest tweeted that Warehouse District Live “only succeeded at making it 90% more difficult to get to the Lynx game and to leave” on June 14.

Shortly after Warehouse District Live's return, urban planner Alex Schieferdecker, an occasional Downtown Voices contributor, shared thoughts on the forum UrbanMSP and voiced concern over the DID being out of touch with what people actually want to do in downtown Minneapolis. 

“I'm worried no user research is being done right now to iterate a better event. This was designed without input from the people it was intended to attract and as a result, it's not attracting people,” Schieferdecker wrote on June 10.

But a month later, Schieferdecker penned an opinion piece on his own blog, in which he admits his initial take on Warehouse District Live was wrong. Upon further reflection, he's decided it's a proactive strategy to address public safety, especially around the 2 a.m. bar close, while also providing a space for people to gather.

"Something I did not fully appreciate before looking deeper into Warehouse District Live is how concentrated safety problems are in this area and at this time," Schieferdecker writes in the July 10 post.

However, Schieferdecker feels there's still room for improvement, and Warehouse District Live could certainly do a better job of enticing sober people earlier in the evening.

Shardlow told Downtown Voices that the DID seeks feedback from downtown residents and regularly engages with associations representing downtown neighborhoods. 

“We advocate for residents’ perspectives to be heard in important planning efforts, and we engage a lot with individual residents through our programs. We know that the residential population is growing downtown and we’re very eager to hear more from residents about how downtown can become an even better place to live,” Shardlow said. 

Two of the newest additions to Warehouse District Live are a chalkboard and an A-frame sign with a QR code intended to solicit feedback on how the DID can improve it.

The DID plans to piggyback off of other events happening downtown and introduce themes to Warehouse District Live, like it does with Downtown Thursdays on Nicollet Mall, in a bid to draw more attendees, according to Duininck.

Offerings at Warehouse District Live are expected to change throughout the summer. Bounce houses and inflatable games are “stand-ins for other free entertainment we’re going to roll out over the course of the season,” Shardlow said.

The DID is also soliciting performers for paid opportunities to perform at Warehouse District Live. Interested performers should complete this form.