urbanMSP

Nah it's nothing horrible. Just looks ugly from the outside. But the inside is fine. As I said, the biggest complaint I had was that you can't open any windows.

Former Papa Johns location has a banner in the window that says "Ramen House Coming Soon"

Four fabulous words that go great together. I eat a lot of pho at bona.

I don't know if there's already another thread about this; if so please feel free to move it.

I was riding the greenline today, and I started thinking about the massive parking lot just East of Stadium Village station. Any chances of it being developed? I believe, at one point there was a motel there. I understand that the gophers need the parking spots. could they potentially build them a ramp, and utilize the rest of the space for either academic or mixed use construction? Any thoughts?

The hotel is still there. The land belongs to the University, and they've got some ideas in their long range plans, including it looks like a building plus a parking structure:
https://regents.umn.edu/sites/regents.u ... ession.pdf

Page 109 has a good view.

Back when the U was fighting Met Council to get the Green Line underground through campus, they drew up a whole series of plans and sketches that included the Stadium Village station being enclosed within the bottom floor of a parking ramp. Even when the final plans had it sitting out on its own I assumed that was just a phase one, with the enclosed station being done later when the ramp gets built, similar to the Humphrey Terminal station at the airport. But the document Peter links appears to indicate that the eventual ramp for that area will be built near the station, without enclosing it.

This is a broader light rail observation, but I'm not sure I understand why our region is so reluctant to actually enclose the light rail stations, even when it would be incidental to other projects and come with minimal additional costs. IIRC the only reasonably-enclosed stations on the whole system are the two airport stations and the MOA. Several others could easily be incidentally enclosed, and a few (Lake Street and the new Target Field) it seems like they actually went to some trouble to *avoid* enclosing.

The Greek place next to Noodles and Company whose name I can no longer remember has been closed for a while. I saw last week there was a demo permit on the glass and the inside looked gutted, so presumably something new is going there.

Aw, Dino's closed?

Guess I was right when I said they wouldn't make it after my roommates and I moved out of Dinnaken.

That Dino's location always had sub-par food. They cut some corners on how they prepared items, probably to try and serve people faster, but it went too far for me.

The food is a lot better at their Snelling & Larpenteur location in Falcon Heights.

Sprout is opening to in WaHu this summer

Is this what you mean by Sprout?https://www.sprouts.com

Walked by just now and saw that the former Dynos is going to be a Naf Naf Grill.

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Wow, they're expanding quickly.

OT: I haven't been upstairs in City Center for a while. Have they started work on that Naf Naf location yet?

Edit: Their website says "Summer 2016" for both City Center and Stadium Village, but Stadium Village is marked "Now Hiring". I guess it's slower to build a shawarma shop from scratch than it is to convert a gyro shop into a shawarma shop.

I was in Chicago last week and had Naf Naf for the first time. This is my reaction now that we'll have one in the city that's open past skyway hours.

I also saw a several Nando's peri peri chicken shops. I am eagerly awaiting their arrival.

Nandos. Need.

Wow

http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/n ... -near.html

Apparently I'm out of Biz Journal articles, but from the one picture it shows it looks like this bulldozes the Days Hotel, right?

Well, it looks too ambitious for that area, but since I assume (I also couldn't read the article) that any redevelopment here involves the U since they're owners, I imagine there's good support behind the proposal. The proposed style matches the styles of the new biomedical buildings behind the stadium, and I'm guessing the U would be one of the tenants in some capacity.