Everyone who lives here calls Northeast Minneapolis Noreast, and beginning in the late 1990s the arts district you are walking into turned from a gritty industrial and working-class neighborhood into one of the most vital arts districts in the Midwest. The catalyst was cheap rent. As artists were priced out of Uptown and the Warehouse District, they moved to Northeast, converting industrial buildings into studios and live-work spaces.
The Northeast Minneapolis Arts District now contains over 700 working artists and dozens of galleries, studios, and arts organizations, concentrated along Central and University Avenues and in the converted warehouse spaces along the rail corridor. The Art-A-Whirl open studio event held every May is the largest open studio tour in the country, drawing tens of thousands of visitors to studios that are ordinarily closed. The neighborhood retains its Eastern European Catholic church heritage — Polish, Ukrainian, Czechoslovakian, Slovenian, and Croatian parishes dot the grid, their domes and spires visible above the rooflines — alongside the new galleries and coffee roasters.
Walking Northeast today means moving between worlds: a Ukrainian cultural center next to a contemporary art gallery next to a fifty-year-old Polish deli.