Ray Harris, legendary neighborhood developer, surveys his handiwork with an impish smile from his apartment on the 15th floor of The Kenwood.
Ray, 94, scoots around his rooms on his “Lamborghini,” an electric wheelchair, as he pursues his many projects past, present and future.
Unstoppable, his latest is the Ray Harris plan for the redevelopment of the stretch of Hennepin Avenue out his window, from Douglas to Lake Street, that has been yet another painful kerfuffle in the annals of bad city street redesign.
As he says in his delightful and trenchant blog, therayharris.com, “I believe that my experiences in these 60 years of my professional real estate career have filled me with some promising ideas that could improve our lives — for all of us.”
First, some background. Harris is the self-professed Don Quixote of developers, sallying forth tilting at impossible development problems others failed to defeat and making them work handsomely for all concerned.
Local proof?
When my family moved to Lowry Hill in 1974, the neighborhood was in the midst of two hot and apparently unresolvable development conundrums.
The century-old Douglas School at Franklin Avenue between Dupont and Emerson had been torn down, leaving a vacant lot. The school board insisted on selling it, neighbors fought for a park.
Irresistible force meets immovable object. Until Ray Harris rode in, proposing and eventually building the first attached townhomes in Minneapolis, with a corner portion of the site left open to the neighborhood. Some of you live in those townhomes today.
The bigger conundrum, the one that led to the founding of the Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association, was the Dunwoody site, 4.5 empty acres on Mt. Curve on which the once massive Dunwoody mansion had overlooked the city. The mansion long torn down, in 1959 a developer planned to erect a 12-story high rise residential tower on the site.
The neighborhood rose up against this violation of neighborhood scale, stalled, then stopped that plan dead in the water, but what to do?
After a 20-year standoff, enter Ray Harris, who acquired the site after the original developer finally gave up, and built the neighborhood-scale townhomes, now called Mt. Curve Place, overlooking the city, threading the needle for all.
Ray also developed Calhoun Square, now known as Seven Points, on another highly controversial abandoned school site about which everyone seemed to have strong, differing opinions. Harris’ magical lance pulled off a five-year negotiation and super-complicated financing (“Yes, my family ate rice and spaghetti for a while”), the result was the region’s first in-town neighborhood retail mall, a resounding success inhabited by mostly local businesses at the time, necessary public parking attached.
More quietly along the way he developed Greenway Gables townhomes bordering the new Loring Greenway, helped Orchestra Hall get built on a complex downtown site, worked on the original highly successful Nicollet Mall, and much more.
A Stanford grad, Ray credits his real estate knowledge to “a summa cum laude at Meatball Tech and magna cum laude at the College of Hard Knocks,” no degrees more valuable then and now.
You get the idea. If it can’t be done, Don Quixote Harris rides into the fray with patience, persistence, a workable vision, great good humor, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Now to the present.
Ray called me out of the blue last spring, after reading all the heat in the Hill & Lake Press over the redevelopment of Hennepin Avenue, city and neighborhoods bitterly divided. He saw it as another fertile target for Don Quixote’s lance.
In early October, Ray completed a six-page detailed plan for the Hennepin corridor based on the sane notion that it should not just be a connector of downtown to Uptown, but an enhancement of adjacent neighborhoods by radically expanding the scope while allowing the pavement redo to proceed apace.
Look for the plan on his blog, therayharris.com. He looks forward to presenting it to council candidates, neighborhood leaders, the director of public works, the mayor and other leaders who have a stake in the success of Hennepin Avenue for all stakeholders, not just commuters.
You may think, that cow is out of the barn, that cat escaped the cradle, that dog is lost, but we’d all be damn fools not to listen to Ray Harris, the man who made a brilliant career out of solving unsolvable city problems, fashioning solutions that worked for everyone, not just the few.
