We’ve long heard about the charms of Hopkins’ Main Street from folks who once cruised it at night as partying teenagers, and who now enjoy patronizing its antique stores on weekends (just as their mothers do). We, too, appreciate goods from yesteryear, but let’s be honest, antique-shop districts can get a little precious—despite the presence, in Hopkins, of shops like World of Knives, A+ Vacuum, and our favorite, Steve’s Train City. Doubtless this has something to do with “antique” becoming adjective, noun, and verb.
It was with this in mind that, on our most recent visit to Main Street, we wandered toward the strip’s west end, where the antique stores trail off, to see what we could see. Around Tenth Avenue, past the assertively “new urbanist” Marketplace Lofts, past Tinkerbella and Somewhere in Time, the balance tips—here’s a gun shop, there’s a tanning salon—and the street also gains a more open feel as it heads into what was once farmland.
Along this stretch, in small-town fashion, no-nonsense enterprises like the MN Low Vision Blind Store, Carpet Resources, and Gopher Cash Register co-exist peacefully with a gift shop whose name—Live! Laugh! Love!—is perhaps overly whimsical but heartfelt, we’re sure. Near Twelfth Avenue, the awning of Munkabeans Café adds color to the street; across the way at Custom Wheelz of Hopkins (“where the players shop”), there’s a wall display of merchandise more dazzling than many a contemporary art installation.
It’s at this corner, too, where one can take in a full spectrum of arts: the Hopkins Center for the Arts hosts productions by Stages Theatre, concerts, films, art exhibitions, and classes; the Hopkins Cinema 6 is a discount theater that features mainly quality second-run films.
Out-towering Cinema 6’s neo-retro sign is the plain brick belfry of St. Joseph’s church, a block away. Built in 1953, this church is one of those modern yet still welcoming models. Next door, the former parish school, dating to 1922, recently became the Main Street School of Performing Arts (its students take advantage of the Center for the Arts).
We were heartened to see all of these institutions, plus a funeral home, lined up together on Hopkins’ Main Street; too often they are flung far and wide throughout a suburb. Watching a woman stroll by St. Joseph’s with a wagonload of day-care kids, the strip felt like a place that incorporates the full cycle of life. This is not just a great shopping street, we realized, but one that puts the very idea of civil society into practice.
—Julie Caniglia
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