Prospect Park becomes a hot spot thanks to a new food hall and distillery

A new Twin Cities hot spot popped up while you might have been hibernating through the pandemic.

What's happening: Prospect Park is hopping these days with the recent additions of the Market at Malcolm Yards and O'Shaughnessy Distilling, to go along with Surly Brewing, which helped put the once heavily industrial area on the map back when it opened in 2014.

• Malcom Yards is a 19,000-square-foot food hall with nine different vendors.
• O'Shaughnessy serves whiskey cocktails and small plates at its high-end new building, which cost $15 million to build, according to city permits.

What's ahead: A lot more. Wall Cos., which developed the food hall and sold the land to O'Shaughnessy, is under construction on a 210-unit market rate apartment building and in a matter of days will break ground on a second, 143-unit, income-restricted building.

• President John Wall said he's been talking with potential tenants to take a large retail/restaurant space on the first building's main level, which could just add to the buzz.

State of play: Prospect Park is a Minneapolis neighborhood on the Green Line in between the University of Minnesota campus and the St. Paul border.

• It's been in growth mode for several years as developers have added hundreds of apartments and a Fresh Thyme grocery store.

The intrigue: Wall Cos. began prospecting (pun intended) in the neighborhood 20 years ago, buying the first parcels of what would eventually become 20 acres.

• John Wall saw the land as a potential research park in partnership with the University of Minnesota, but that never materialized.
• "I still feel some sadness about the whole science park/tech park concept because I really think it's the right thing for that location, but I couldn't seem to make a connection with university work."

But now the food hall, which his wife Patricia created with a Denver group, is the engine for the area, Wall said, and he hopes it and the distillery will catalyze more development.

• His current plan is to build a 200,000-square-foot office building on the site, but first he needs a company to commit to a large chunk of the space.