Editor’s note: This is the fourth and last in a series examining the diverse community surrounding the University.
Joe Carlson

Stadium Village initially grew up around Memorial Stadium many years ago and gave the area its identity. With the stadium gone, the University clientele who frequent businesses along Washington Avenue define the character of the community.
“Clearly, the students and the faculty and the staff certainly make up the majority of the customers in Stadium Village,” said Michael McLaughlin, coordinator for the Stadium Village Commercial Association.
About 90 businesses, providing services from fast food to body piercing, make Stadium Village easily identifiable as the little commercial community just east of the University.
However, this community could have fiercer competition from the University for a chunk of the local revenue, as the school develops private partnerships with national corporations.
Although these partnerships are still in their infancy and their impact cannot be accurately predicted, they have caused Stadium Village business owners to take a critical look at its customer base.
A split community
Although Prospect Park lies just east of Stadium Village, village businesses don’t rely on those patrons because of physical boundaries and because Prospect Park residents don’t view Stadium Village as its own community.
“It’s an informal name for an area within the University,” said Tom Kilton, former president of the Prospect Park/East River Road Improvement Association. “I don’t really consider Stadium Village to be in Prospect Park.”
Interstate 94 split Prospect Park from an eight-block section of houses and University dorms that used to be considered a part of the neighborhood, but are now known as the Motley neighborhood.
While many Motley residents patronize Stadium Village, many in the hills east of Huron Boulevard do not.
Prospect Park is a tight-knit urban village of about 2,500 houses in the hills to the east of Stadium Village. The neighborhood, which contains the highest natural hill in Minneapolis, is a private enclave hidden behind the businesses along University Avenue.
For many Prospect Park residents, the small businesses and highway that act as a buffer are too wide to easily cross on foot. Driving to Stadium Village can cause other difficulties.
“I don’t think it’s easy to park,” said Susan Larson-Fleming, president of the Prospect Park neighborhood association. Others perceive that parking is hard to find and expensive.
But there might be more factors at work that prevent Prospect Park residents from patronizing Stadium Village businesses.
No commercial diversity
There is also a general perception that the restaurants and shops of the village cater almost exclusively to the desires of college students, especially those living in the dorms on the Superblock.
“There are a fair amount of people (from Prospect Park) who are going there for movies, but as far as shopping, that isn’t the first place I think of going,” said Larson-Fleming, who has lived in Prospect Park for about 20 years.
For example, residents to the east would like to see a hardware store or a Target within walking distance, rather than four separate places to buy a sub sandwich.
“You’d think all University students do is eat,” Kilton said.
Stadium Village business owners agree that a more diverse business district would draw more patrons from the immediate area.
“I don’t think we really have anything to offer them,” said Cindy Taylor, former president of the Stadium Village Commercial Association. “There’s no major retail worthwhile for them to come down here.”
The lack of commercial diversity is one of the major issues that the commercial association is trying resolve.
Lately, the fate of the industrial building on the corner of Washington Avenue and Huron Boulevard has come under question. Several developers have examined building a commercial center on the site.
“There have been at least two proposals in the last year to turn that into a fast-food heaven,” Kilton said. “We’re not too excited about that.”
McLaughlin said although many would like to see the property better utilized, the neighborhood would not support a development if it had more than one food vendor in it.
But the neighborhood association does not have too many ways to stop developments they do not support.
“Essentially our teeth are political teeth,” McLaughlin said. For example, the commercial and neighborhood associations could tell the city council and zoning officers their opinions, but they could not actually stop any development.
The University connection
Although there are benefits to living next to the University, Kilton said there are also drawbacks.
He said the community appreciates the cultural opportunities the school brings, but at the same time, views the University as “an 800-pound gorilla that they’re constantly having to fight with.”
Currently, the biggest concern to the Stadium Village Commercial Association is the possibility of a partnership between the University and ARAMARK, a Pennsylvania-based food services provider, McLaughlin said.
University Food Services is projected to lose $1.1 million this year. In an effort to stave off future losses, Food Services is in the process of establishing a partnership with a private corporation.
In the arrangement, ARAMARK would bring private food vendors into places such as Coffman Memorial Union and provide catering services to University entities. Part of the profits from those businesses would go to the University.
“(ARAMARK) would go to Pizza Hut or Pepsico who owns them and say, ‘I want to put a Pizza Hut here,’ and they would own it,” McLaughlin said.
It is not simply duplication of services that worries the businesses surrounding the University, but the fact that students and faculty members will have fewer reasons to venture outside the institution. Thus, the flower shop might be hurt if University traffic in front of it decreases.
If approved, the deal would become the biggest partnership between any vendor and a university in the United States.
Given the magnitude of the deal, some local business people are alarmed at the speed and lack of input with which the University has pursued the deal.
“Up until a week before the public forums, no one in the surrounding area … had any idea the University Food Services division was considering out-sourcing its food services,” McLaughlin said.
But Taylor, who is the owner and manager of Subway in the Stadium Village Mall on Washington Avenue, said although she would have preferred an opportunity to provide more input to the process, she does understand why the University might want an in-house decision.
“I don’t really like the way they went about it, but University Food Services is their own entity,” Taylor said. “They’re a business just like me.”
The deal has yet to be approved by the Board of Regents. If it is approved, which many have said is likely, McLaughlin said he hopes that ARAMARK will at least consider local businesses as candidates to be located inside the University.
Although the University had been doing a better job in communicating its actions to the communities that surround it, the institution’s size still hinders full disclosure.
“It seems like there’s so many facets to the University that it is impossible for anyone to know about all of the initiatives that are going on,” said Harrison Nelson of the Neighborhood Improvement Association in Prospect Park.
“When you have a big organization like the University, you have built-in communication problems.”
No matter how Stadium Village is affected by the partnership, one thing is sure: The combination of local businesses and national chains is not going to simply disappear.
“I’m not being apocalyptic,” McLaughlin said. “This isn’t going to end Stadium Village, we just would have liked to have known about it.”