Walk the same six blocks of downtown Minneapolis often enough and you start collecting mysteries. Why is there a fenced dog park wedged behind Bunker's that never seems to belong to anyone? What actually happens inside the columned building at Washington and Hennepin that looks like it should have a security checkpoint? Why has the ground floor of that 30-story tower on LaSalle Avenue sat dark since the brewery closed?
These aren't new questions. What's new is that four of downtown's longest-standing mysteries are getting answered at once, and not with more fencing or more vacancy. Each one is opening, in the literal sense, to people who couldn't get inside before. That's the thread worth pulling on, because the four projects are moving at wildly different speeds: Parcelle and Watershed's 2026 targets have passed, the LaSalle Plaza food hall and Bathhouse are projected for 2027, the Grain Exchange has no completion date, and 20 Washington is targeted for 2028.
The building everyone mistook for something official
Twenty Washington Avenue South has spent sixty years looking like it belongs to a government agency. It doesn't, and never has. Developer Chad Tepley, who bought the building in November 2025 for $7.1 million through his firm CDT Realty, has heard the theory enough times that he addressed it directly in an interview with Mpls.St.Paul Magazine: the building was originally headquarters for Northwestern National Life Insurance, then held a rotation of tenants including Voya Financial, before sitting empty on the market.
Architect Minoru Yamasaki, who later designed the World Trade Center towers, built 20 Washington in 1965 with a white-columned portico and reflecting pools meant to feel less like a corporate campus and more like a park with a building inside it. For most of its life, the public could admire that porch from the sidewalk and nothing more. Tepley told KARE 11 he grew up noticing it: "This is a 6,000 square foot porch, people know it as the porch to the city."
His plan converts the six-story building into a 165-room boutique hotel, preserving the portico and marble facade while adding a first-floor restaurant along the reflecting pools and a rooftop deck built over the old mechanical penthouse for a lounge and pool. Tepley is pursuing historic tax credits and told the Star Tribune he expects construction to start in early 2027, with an opening targeted for summer 2028. That's a two-year wait from where things stand today, but it means the building most people have only ever seen from the outside will eventually have a front door that opens for something other than a lease renewal.
A trading floor that's been silent since 2008
The Minneapolis Grain Exchange stopped trading grain by open outcry on December 19, 2008. Since then, the 1903 building's most striking feature, a trading floor under 34-foot coffered ceilings with the old ticker boards and phone booths still intact, has functioned mostly as co-working space and an event venue, while the rest of the complex stayed office space.
This spring, Minneapolis-based Sherman Associates purchased the Grain Exchange complex from its Miami-based owner with plans to convert the original 1903 building into apartments, according to Axios Twin Cities. The project calls for 232 units, 186 of them affordable, while the newer buildings in the complex retain office, event, and retail uses. No completion date has been announced yet, which is typical for a conversion this early in the process, but it marks the first time in the building's 120-plus year history that anyone will actually live inside it.
The dog park was never really a park
Here's the detail most people walking their dogs near Bunker's don't know: that fenced lot at North 3rd Street and 8th Avenue was never public land. According to the North Loop Neighborhood Association, property owner Schafer Richardson let the neighborhood use it as a free dog park for roughly 15 years, with everyone understanding the arrangement would end once the lot sold. It sold. Minneapolis developer Swervo bought the parcel and partnered with the New York wellness brand Bathhouse to build a three-story, 45,000-square-foot club on the site, with hot and cold pools, Turkish steam baths, banya and aufguss saunas, and a rooftop pool.
Construction broke ground this spring, and the company has projected an opening in mid-2027. NLNA board member David Crary, who has visited a Bathhouse location elsewhere, called it a positive addition for a neighborhood built around walkable amenities.
The dog park's disappearance isn't the whole story, though. A few blocks away, Watershed Spa announced last October that it would open a second Minneapolis location in the former Bev's Wine Bar space at 250 Third Avenue North, with a target of summer 2026. If that timeline held, downtown residents already have a communal soaking pool within walking distance while Bathhouse is still under construction.
Here's how the four projects line up on timing:
- 20 Washington hotel (CDT Realty): construction expected to begin early 2027, opening targeted for summer 2028
- Grain Exchange apartments (Sherman Associates): plans announced spring 2026, no completion date set
- Bathhouse North Loop (Swervo Development): broke ground spring 2026, opening projected mid-2027
- LaSalle Plaza food hall (Hempel Real Estate): opening expected by early 2027
The brewery space that's been dark since 2022
Rock Bottom Brewery closed its LaSalle Plaza location in 2022, leaving a dark storefront on the ground floor of the 30-story office tower at 800 LaSalle Avenue, a building Hempel Real Estate bought in 2023 in its first downtown purchase in nearly a decade. Hempel has spent the years since renovating the tower's upper floors with a private club, pickleball court, and sauna for tenants, but the ground floor sat empty until the company tapped Patricia Wall, the developer behind Prospect Park's Malcolm Yards food hall, to design something new for the space.
The plan, a $10 to $20 million buildout, calls for a 30,000-square-foot food hall with 16 restaurant stalls, two bars, a self-pour beer wall, a kids' play area, and courts for pickleball and shuffleboard. Wall told local media she wants the design to speak to downtown's history rather than ignore it. Timelines have moved since the project was first announced. Hempel originally hoped to open by summer 2026; by June 2026, the company was describing an opening "by early next year," which pushes it into 2027. A smaller piece of the plan already landed on schedule: Parcelle Organics, an organic cafe concept, signed on for a ground-floor space at LaSalle Plaza with a target opening in the second quarter of 2026, giving the building some street-level activity ahead of the larger project.
What this actually means for your walk downtown
Three of these four projects aren't new construction pulling vacant lots into use. They're buildings that already existed, that you could already see, but couldn't actually enter, whether because they were a private office campus, a dead trading floor, or a storefront nobody had touched since a chain restaurant left. Bathhouse is the exception: it will replace the dog park with a new three-story club. What's changing isn't the skyline. It's which doors are set to open over the next few years.
If you're tracking the timing, Parcelle Organics and Watershed Spa's North Loop location had the earliest target openings, both in 2026. Bathhouse is projected for mid-2027, and the LaSalle Plaza food hall was expected by early 2027. The Grain Exchange apartments have no completion date set, while the 20 Washington hotel is targeted for summer 2028. That timeline matters more than knowing all four exist, because the projects have very different schedules.
If you're already living downtown and keeping an eye on how these openings reshape the blocks around you, or you're thinking further ahead about what a changing downtown means for your own next move, the team at David K. Wells III Real Estate knows this corridor block by block. Contact David & Wren to discuss your next move.
