Quote:
Originally Posted by MplsTodd
As someone who worked in downtown Minneapolis for 20 years, I generally had a love-hate relationship with the skyways. They definitely detract from streetlife. Nicollet Mall has decent pedestrian traffic, but other streets in the core lack activity. But in winter months, you really appreciate the skyway and the volume of usage is amazing. No matter what the weather is like outside, huge crowds of people circulate throughout the downtown core via skyway, patronizing local businesses and restaurants.
In the past ten years, substantial development has occurred around the edges of the downtown core, greatly enlarging the active areas of downtown (North Loop, Mills District, Downtown East, etc...). What had been parking lots and non-descript commercial buildings has densified and been developed with lots of housing, decent amount of office, hotels, restaurants and even retail, especially in the North Loop.
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The skyway system's downside (taking people off the streets) is definitely outweighed by the upside: with climate control and security, there is a sufficiently large customer base to reliably support a whole slew of downtown businesses.
People in the Twin Cities are not weather wimps, as their four-season bike culture shows, but people--everywhere--tend to avoid going outside in inclement weather when they feel they have a viable alternative. In the case of shops and restaurants, that usually means suburban malls, and M-SP has those, just like everywhere else.
I suspect there would be fewer reliable customers (and thus fewer establishments) downtown without the skyways. Indeed, it's even possible much of what downtown Minneapolis has to offer, from shops and restaurants to office buildings and hotels, might well have been located outside downtown if not for the perks engendered in the skyway system. Being downtown has only been widely appreciated among the general public for the last 10 or 15 years or so. Before then, a lot more people and businesses wanted to be in the suburbs, and it didn't take much convincing. They skyway system offered them a downtown alternative, and still does, which is a big part of why I think it wins the thread.