On April 13, 2026, The Lowry posted a message on social media that a lot of longtime regulars didn't see coming. After fifteen years on Hennepin Avenue, the restaurant was closing. Last call would be April 26.
What made the timing strange wasn't the closure itself. Restaurants close. What made it strange is that the road construction everyone blamed for years of empty tables had already ended six months earlier. The ribbon was cut in late October 2025. The Lowry didn't survive the reopening. It survived the construction and closed after.
That gap between "the road is open" and "the neighborhood is fine" is the actual story here, and it's worth understanding if you live along this stretch of Hennepin, because the corridor is still working through the aftermath in ways that aren't visible just by looking at the pavement.
Two Years, Then Six More Months
The City of Minneapolis rebuilt Hennepin Avenue South between West Lake Street and Douglas Avenue in two phases. Phase 1, from Lake Street to 26th Street, wrapped in 2024. Phase 2, from 26th Street up to Douglas Avenue, was substantially finished in 2025, and the city's project page confirms the roadway reopened to two-way traffic with bike lanes and sidewalks back in place.
The scale of the project is easy to forget once the barrels are gone. Minneapolis spent more than $30 million on the corridor's first major rebuild in over 65 years, on a street that carried between 22,000 and 25,000 vehicles a day before crews arrived, according to Star Tribune reporting from the reopening. That's not a neighborhood side street. It's one of the busiest connectors between downtown and Uptown, and for close to two years, businesses along it operated with barrels and dirt piles between them and their front doors.
The city held a ribbon cutting when it reopened. Business owners quoted along the corridor at the time were relieved but not celebratory. One longtime shop owner who had run her business through the unrest following George Floyd's murder and through the pandemic told the Star Tribune the construction years had simply been slow, and said she was hoping the rebuilt street would finally help.
The Corner That Didn't Make It
The Lowry's statement pointed to more than one cause. Blue Plate Restaurant Co., which also runs Longfellow Grill and The Freehouse in Minneapolis along with the Groveland Tap and Highland Grill in St. Paul and 3 Squares in Maple Grove, cited "multiple compounding issues over several years" rather than a single blow. The company's statement named changing consumer behavior, city mandates, and economics, but singled out the Hennepin Avenue construction as a reason CBS Minnesota reported "business cannot recover."
That's a company with five other restaurants across the metro area saying the math on this specific corner stopped working. The roughly 50 employees at The Lowry were offered spots at Blue Plate's other locations, according to Minneapolis Today's reporting on the closure. The building itself, at 2112 Hennepin Avenue, doesn't have a confirmed next tenant as of this writing.
The lesson isn't that construction killed a restaurant. It's that a fifteen-year anchor with a built-in customer base and a well-capitalized parent company still needed six months of a fully reopened street to decide it couldn't come back. If that's what it took for The Lowry, it says something about how long recovery actually takes for smaller, less cushioned businesses on the same block.
What's Still Standing
Not everything on the corridor is a casualty story. Walk the stretch today and you'll pass a mix of businesses that made it through, according to the Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association's own directory:
- Bogart's Doughnut Co., a bakery that's part of the current business roster
- The Lynhall No. 2640, which continues booking private events and catering out of its Hennepin Avenue space
- The Walker Art Center Gift Shop, tied to the museum that anchors the neighborhood's south end
- Joanne R. Levin Park, which never closed and doesn't depend on foot traffic to function
That list matters because it shows the corridor isn't empty. It's uneven. Some tenants weathered two years of reduced access and are still there. Others, like The Lowry, ran out of runway right as the finish line appeared.
The Association Throwing Its Own Party
The Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association isn't waiting for foot traffic to come back on its own. Its 2026 community meetup moved two blocks north to Lagoon and Girard Plaza, with free Sebastian Joe's ice cream as the draw to get neighbors talking to board members face to face. That relocation wasn't cosmetic. It happened because construction is still active nearby, just not the construction most residents think of.
Last winter, the association used a $30,000 grant from the city to run "Holidays on Hennepin," a passport-style program from Black Friday through New Year's where visitors collected stamps at participating businesses for a chance at prizes. The goal, as described in Star Tribune's reporting at the time, was explicit: reestablish Hennepin as a commercial hub after two years of people avoiding it out of habit as much as necessity. That's not a marketing gimmick dreamed up in a vacuum. It's a neighborhood association acknowledging that reopening a road doesn't automatically reopen a customer base.
The Ramp Work Nobody Mentions
Here's the part that doesn't show up in the "Hennepin Avenue is open" headlines. While the surface street project finished in October 2025, MnDOT started a separate job in July 2025 repairing bridges and ramps along I-394 and I-94 between downtown and Highway 100, including realigning the I-394 to Dunwoody Boulevard ramp and replacing the deck on the Penn Avenue bridge. That work runs through fall 2026.
I-394 and I-94 form Lowry Hill's northern and eastern edge. So even with Hennepin Avenue itself fully rebuilt, the neighborhood's freeway boundary is still an active work zone for several more months. That's the real answer to why the neighborhood association keeps rerouting its own events. It's not nostalgia for the old barrel-lined Hennepin. It's a second, less visible project that hasn't wrapped yet.
One Thing That Did Change for Good
Not every shift on the corridor is temporary. The Uptown Art Fair, long held blocks from Hennepin, relocated to Bachman's during construction and now runs as the SoMi Art Fair. Whether that's permanent or eventually reverts isn't settled publicly, but for now it's a different event in a different place with a different name, and residents who used to walk to the old fair location will need to drive or bus to the new one.
The corridor also gained something. The METRO E Line, a rapid bus route connecting the University of Minnesota, downtown, and Edina along Hennepin Avenue, launched in December 2025. It's the kind of infrastructure that takes years to show its full effect on a commercial strip, but it's one more variable in how this stretch of Hennepin looks a year from now compared to how it looked before construction started.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
The road is open. That part is true and worth appreciating after two years of detours. But "open" and "recovered" are different claims, and the gap between them is where a fifteen-year restaurant closed, where a neighborhood association is still moving its own meetups, and where a bridge project overhead won't finish until fall. If you're wondering why Hennepin still feels like it's catching its breath even with the cones gone, that's why.
If you want to talk about what any of this means for your own property, or you're curious how the corridor's slow reset is showing up in what's selling nearby, Josh Zuehlke & Co knows this stretch of Southwest Minneapolis block by block. Contact Us to talk through it.
