By Burl Gilyard @ tcbmag.com, Nov. 1, with photos

Downtown Minneapolis has been largely abandoned since last spring. But on a Wednesday night in late August, a raucous round of looting and window smashing hit the Nicollet Mall like a handful of grenades. Amid the chaos, Brit’s Pub in the 1100 block was set ablaze.

“Looters got in and went through everything. Computers, TVs, broke everything, broke doors, got into the office … for a couple of hours they had a ball, and then decided to set the place on fire,” says Kam Talebi, CEO of Kaskaid Hospitality, which acquired Brit’s in 2019. Talebi says that the staff called 911 but got no response. “I just don’t think that the police had enough resources to deal with what was happening.”

The outbreak was fueled by false reports that Minneapolis police had shot a Black man on the mall. The man, a suspect in an earlier homicide, actually shot himself in the head as police approached. But the looters and window smashers were not interested in the details.

Talebi sounds unsure about Brit’s reopening. “We certainly will look to bring it back. I don’t know how long it’s going to take.” He speaks for many downtown business operators airing frustration with the double whammy of the Covid-19 pandemic and the growing perception of downtown as a lawless no-man’s-land in the city. “There’s no office [workers], there’s no shows, there’s no sports, and everybody fears coming downtown,” Talebi says. “So I’d like somebody to tell me why I should open up.”

Two weeks later, many downtown buildings’ windows were still boarded up, including the Nordstrom Rack at IDS Center, the first level of Target Corp.’s headquarters building, Foot Locker on Seventh Street, and the Caribou Coffee next to Brit’s. Some, like Nordstrom Rack, were open for business.

Taking a spin through the center city these days can be eerie and unsettling [....]