In Better Know a Twin Cities Suburb, Racket readers write love-letter travelogues to their suburban hometowns. Why? Because us city rats could stand to learn a thing or two about our vibrant and increasingly diverse neighbors! Want to sing the praises of your suburb? Hit up jay@racketmn.com.
New Hope
Founded: 1936 by a bunch of crusty farmers (more on that below)
Population: 20,000-ish, the same as every other inner-ring suburb
Celebrities: There are none, but The Mighty Ducks (1992) was filmed inside the ice arena
Where is New Hope? Be honest: Could you find it without Google Maps? Maybe you recall an enormous water tower on I-169, or a Brigadoon-ian sense you were there once but can’t find your way back. Maybe you went to a comedy show at the Outtakes Bar, and wondered why there’s a hip hangout in a strip mall in-between a Family Dollar and Arc’s Value Village Thrift Store.
I have bad news for you, Racket reader, even if you think you’re within New Hope, you may not be. Just look at this non-Euclidean mess:
What kind of goofy-ahh boundary is that?? Even our current dystopian U.S. Supreme Court would throw that map out for being too gerrymandered. Why does the scary robot monster completely envelop part of Crystal for its eye, and what is that tumor on its forehead?
Let’s look closer:
If you exit I-169 on Bass Lake Road to get to the Crystal Target, you will cross the border between New Hope and Crystal seven times. How could this cartographical Rorschach blot happen?
The answer, of course, is shortsighted NIMBY politics. As the metro area expanded in the 1930s, Crystal Lake Township to the east began organizing to incorporate as a city. The land area to the west was largely still farm country and those residents didn’t want to pay taxes for sewers and streetlights. Landowners along the border that wanted to be part of the new city asked to add their parcels to Crystal, and those that couldn’t extrapolate demographic trends chose to be part of the dorkily named township of New Hope. (And yes, we’ve all heard the joke that it should be called No Hope. It’s still not funny. And we’ve also heard all the Stars Wars jokes, which are a little more funny.) In 1936 the city of Crystal and township of New Hope split, but by 1953 the growth of housing in the township overwhelmed the rural voters and they chose to become a city.
So surely, 70 years later, that noteworthy territory is unique from all the cities around it, right? Ha ha ha, that’s funny, I see you’ve never been to an inner-ring suburb before. As housing developments filled in the empty fields, the city lined up with a planned grid of streets that made the borders indistinguishable from one suburb to the next. On the one hand, it’s great for organizing your city like the ancient Romans; on the other hand, it fades into the network of everything around it. The only thing that differs is where to send your water bill.
But enough about the past! Here’s what brings folks to New Hope today.
New Hope Attractions
Like many towns of its ilk, New Hope struggled to centralize any kind of commercial district, instead relying on a handful of strip malls near major thoroughfares that provided goods and services to a post-war, car-centric population. In addition, it doesn’t boast some of the large attractions that other nearby cities do: Plymouth has Medicine Lake and the attached French Park; Robbinsdale has its leftover downtown from the streetcar network; Crystal even has an airport!
But, what New Hope does have is its own Kmart drama, which should sound relatable to Minneapolitans. Right near Winnetka & 42nd Avenue, the second-most-infamous Kmart in the Twin Cities sat for decades. No, it didn’t stupidly block either of those streets, but it did offer blue-light specials on sadness for years before finally closing in 2011. The city, which smartly didn’t sell a one- trillion-year lease for the land, bought the site in 2012, determined to develop it with a partner that would bring a properly nice store to town. In 2015 it became the metro’s first Hy-Vee.
I know a grocery store is not a good reason to visit a place, even if it’s a very nice one (and it is!), but the Hy-Vee heralded a rebirth near the intersection of Winnetka & 42nd Avenue, and that's gotta count for something. The city flip-flopped its city hall and pool sites, opening a new city hall in 2019 and the water park in 2021. While they’re not directly on Winnetka, they anchor a vision of a walkable central district for the city, if not quite a downtown. There’s housing, recreation, and shopping all nearby.
Directly on the corner of Winnetka & 42nd is the ubiquitous strip mall, of course. You already know what’s there: a McDonald’s, a credit union that used to be a Blockbuster Video, and somehow, still, an Applebee’s. But there’s also the School District 281 headquarters, a quirky building that kinda resembles the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco.
The city’s other main highlight is the aforementioned Outtakes Bar & Cinema Grill collab. Cinema Grill showed up back in the '90s with the novel idea of combining restaurant table service with first-run movies. Plenty of other places have expanded on that formula since then, but it turns out dinner and a movie still makes for a popular date—who knew? Now you can also head next door to Outtakes and catch a comedy show, live music, karaoke, meat raffles, or trivia. You know, bar stuff. But where else can you get all that under one roof?
But Where Should I Eat?
Your first stop should be Fat Nat’s Eggs. White coffee cups, red vinyl and stainless steel seats at the counter, laminated menus with peeling corners, and a line out the door on weekends—Fat Nat’s checks every breakfast box. It’s a perfect greasy spoon diner, except kicked up a notch. This was the first location, and it was a big enough hit to open up two more. Most of what’s on the menu is everything you already expect, but with inclusions such as chorizo, carnitas, and a warning about their spicy salsa that would make Tim Walz blush.
Arizona Taco Co. is tucked into, yep you guessed it, another strip mall off I-169 & 36th Avenue. Even though the 36th Avenue exit is closed for the summer while the bridge is being rebuilt, you should still go out of your way for this yummy taco/burrito/pizza place. Imagine a Rusty Taco except the people there give a damn. The slow-cooked meats cut through every dish, the salsas are smoky and hit when they need to, and the pizza crust, the most important part, is a unique blend of chewy and crunchy. Notably, even the folks behind Arizona Taco Co. doesn’t know what city they’re in:
Right next door is Gion Restaurant, which despite the signage that proclaims it serves Vietnamese food, also has Chinese and Thai options. There’s pho, banh mi, pad thai, curry options—you get the idea. It should be the perfect 3.5-star Asian restaurant, but the Minnesota Nice suburban Yelpers didn’t get the memo. Regardless, it’s everything you need, nothing you don’t.
Pub 42 is another fun hangout. There’s a lively restaurant, a full bar, and one of the best patios in the Twin Cities.
What Gives a Place a Sense of Place?
New Hope is an intermediary between the density of Minneapolis and the sprawl of outer-ring suburbs and exurbs. I’m sure at one time the idea that the city would expand past the rolling farm fields seemed silly, but now defining that as a place different from the cities north, south, and east of it seems just as silly. (In my opinion, urban planning styles take a significant shift as you cross I-169.) The houses look the same, the streets look the same. However as Racket already showed, there’s an independent streak running through Minnesotan suburbanites. People want their own place to call home; they don’t want to be hoovered into a conglomerate of other neighborhoods where their issues go to the bottom of a priority list.
With its ludicrous border and near-identical resemblance to its neighbors, New Hope will always be mistaken for other nearby cities. The housing stock is affordable, there’s easy freeway access, there are delightful parks, and there’s even a quasi-bikeable north-south corridor on Boone Avenue. Most importantly, even if there’s not much to bring you to New Hope, it’s close to everything else. I spent about 10 years there after I bought what was supposed to be a starter house right before the Great Recession. Turns out it was a great place to raise two kids while the market recovered. As long as you don’t expect too much, it’s a perfectly cromulent place to live. To make a non-millennial reference, it don’t got rizz, but it’s not Ohio.
However, while writing this article I went back. The masonite-sided houses are still there and the car-centric neighborhoods remain unchanged, but that new city hall and waterpark looks real spiffy, plus I sure wish I could have shopped at that Hy-Vee. And right nearby, I spotted the beginnings of density, with apartments five stories tall! New Hope finally has a geographic hub to draw people in. I hope the city keeps evolving. Maybe someday they’ll finally be ready to annex Crystal.
Previously in Better Know a Twin Cities Suburb...
