Down with the Uptown? A Debate on the Future of a Minneapolis Bar.

I hung out with Laura this past weekend. She just got back from Chicago when I received a text asking to meet her at the Uptown Bar. For anyone not from Minneapolis, the Uptown is a great dive bar that has helped launch a few local music careers, including The Replacements in the late 1970’s. It has grown to be a beloved location, especially since its once-exciting uptown surroundings have become increasingly corporate and stale.

I joined Laura and her friends in a booth and ordered a Grain Belt. They were arguing about the changes taking place in the area and broke the news to me that the Uptown Bar, unable to compete with rising rent costs, is closing down. It is to be replaced by a Columbia sporting goods store.

My first instinct was to be upset. I like this bar a lot and have a lot of good memories associated with it. But wait, I then thought, is this really so bad? I agree that bars like this, with personality, are hard to come by. And they add much more culture and interest to the city than a Columbia sporting goods store ever could. But preservation, I argued, even preservation of something positive, is not always a good move. Preservation suggests that things can’t be improved, that we have arrived at an ideal arrangement and plan to keep things the same, as it would be, forever.

However, I think that what has made the Uptown Bar and similar places special is not brick and mortar or street address, but rather the underlining sense of community that we, the customers, have created. And that community can not be “shut down” unless we let it be. This is why we don’t need to be afraid of neighborhood development. Economic growth helps the whole city. When one area builds its corporate, shopping, and tourist appeal, it forces the more adventurous crowd to dig into the city to discover new neighborhoods, venus, and bars to establish. A city is a many faceted entity and every group of people helps in legitimizing one another. Don’t segregate yourself from your surroundings. And don’t fear change. A city in transition is a city with life and vitality.

Laura rolled her eyes and said I was too optimistic. I ordered another Grain Belt. The crowd inside the bar was diverse yet unified. A collection of individual brands with a variety of values and ideals, each existing together peacefully in one social economy, standing out even more in the context of one another.