On Saturday, September 19, drive nine minutes west of the Mall of America and you land at Nine Mile Brewing on James Avenue, where a beer taproom that didn't exist five years ago is hosting the third annual Bloomington Street Arts Festival alongside its own Oktoberfest. Drive nine minutes the other direction and you land at Normandale Community College, where a two-acre garden that has been quietly growing since the Nixon administration is marking its 50th anniversary. Same day, same city, fifty years of difference in age. Nobody planned it that way. But the coincidence says something true about how Bloomington actually works: the things residents show up for aren't the newest additions to the Mall of America's directory. They're the institutions people here built themselves.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because this is also the fall that the Mall added Primark, SKIMS, POP MART, and a Sweetgreen, all corporate arrivals that will get their own headlines. Worth knowing about if you're heading there anyway. But the events actually anchoring this particular Saturday, and the restaurant news bracketing it on either side, trace back to people who live here deciding something was missing and building it themselves.
A Garden Raised by Garden Clubs and Veterans
The Normandale Japanese Garden didn't arrive as a gift from a developer or a line item in a parks budget. Plans began in 1967, when the college campus itself was still under construction, and the Bloomington Affiliated Garden Clubs spent the next several years raising the $75,000 needed to fill a swampy corner of Green Heron Pond with sand, stone, and trees. Support also came from Japanese American veterans of the Military Intelligence Service Language School, who trained at Camp Savage and Fort Snelling during World War II and helped fund the project as a gesture of goodwill toward Minnesota. Tokyo landscape architect Takao Watanabe designed the layout, choosing plants that could survive a Minnesota winter while echoing a Japanese garden's proportions. Groundbreaking came in 1972, dedication in 1976.
Fifty years later, the garden's 300-plus Minnesota-hardy plants, four bridges, three islands, and one waterfall still sit tucked behind Normandale's brick campus buildings at 9700 France Avenue South, and most people driving past on France have no idea it's there. The 50th anniversary celebration runs from noon to 4 p.m. on September 19, free and open to anyone, with traditional performances, guided tours, and food. The Toro Company is presenting this year's event, alongside the Japan America Society of Minnesota and the Bloomington Sister City Organization, a lineup of sponsors that reads like a list of people who never stopped showing up for fifty years running.
The Brewery That Filled a Gap Nobody Else Noticed
A few miles away, Nine Mile Brewing exists because one Bloomington resident got tired of a question with no good answer. Bob Countryman had spent years visiting taprooms around the metro and kept wondering why Bloomington, Minnesota's fourth-largest city, didn't have one of its own. He assembled an investor group of local residents and industry veterans, including Ilan Klages-Mundt, a founding member of Insight Brewing, and built a 10,500-square-foot facility named for the creek that runs less than a mile away. The taproom seats about 200 people and has a dog-friendly patio, and it opened as Bloomington's first craft brewery.
The Bloomington Street Arts Festival didn't start there. It began outside The Arts Creative in 2024 as a scrappier gathering, then moved to Nine Mile Brewing in 2025 and grew into something bigger. This year's version, running 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on September 19, brings more than 40 local artists and makers, a Hot Art Bus for hands-on activities, and a youth vendor booth with eight young sellers, all layered on top of the brewery's own Oktoberfest programming happening the same afternoon. Two organizations that didn't exist a decade ago are now, together, drawing a crowd that treats late September as a fixed date on the calendar.
Here's how the day actually breaks down if you're deciding where to point the car:
| Time | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 10 a.m.-6 p.m. | Bloomington Street Arts Festival + Oktoberfest | Nine Mile Brewing, 9555 James Ave S |
| 12-4 p.m. | Japanese Garden 50th Anniversary Celebration | Normandale Community College, 9700 France Ave S |
Both are free. Both run through the early afternoon overlap. Neither one is at the Mall.
The Restaurant Scene Is Making the Same Point
Bookend that Saturday with what's happening at the dinner table and the pattern holds. On September 15, four days before the festival and the garden anniversary, Smack Shack's Bloomington location on Minnesota Drive rebrands into Smack Shack Steak, a wood-fired concept built around a 10-foot grill and a menu of USDA Prime steaks alongside the seafood the restaurant has served since it started as a Minneapolis food truck in 2010. Co-owners Josh Thoma and Kevin Fitzgerald aren't opening a new concept from outside investors. They're reworking a restaurant they've run themselves for fifteen years, and they brought on chef Ben Pichler, previously of Grand Café and Burch Steak and Pizza Bar, to run the wood fire.
Earlier this year, on January 5, Travail Collective opened its second Pig Ate My Pizza location at 10700 Bloomington Ferry Road, a more than 4,000-square-foot space with 90 indoor seats and another 90 on a patio covered for year-round use. The beer list pours exclusively from Nouvelle Brewing, the group's own house brewery in Robbinsdale. Travail's chef-owners, James Beard semifinalists Mike Brown, Bob Gerken, and James Winberg, picked Bloomington as the second stop for a restaurant that started as a cult favorite eleven years ago, not because a developer offered them incentives, but because the Twin Cities' appetite for it kept growing.
None of this is happening at the Mall of America, where Sweetgreen, Primark, and SKIMS arrived this year as national chains expanding into a new market. Those openings are worth a visit if you're already there. But they're additions to a directory, not decisions made by people who live here about what their own neighborhood needed.
What October Adds to the Picture
The pattern extends past September. Three Rivers Park District has set October 10 and 11 for the Hyland Hills fall chairlift rides, a ride to the top of Mount Gilboa, one of the highest points in Hennepin County, with live music and food available on the hill. Hyland Hills is public parkland, not a private attraction, and the fall chairlift program exists because a public park district decided a ski hill built for winter shouldn't sit idle the rest of the year. Like the garden and the brewery, it's infrastructure that outlived its original season because someone local kept finding a use for it.
Put the calendar together and a resident's actual fall in Bloomington doesn't look like a mall directory. It looks like a sequence of dates set by garden clubs, a homegrown brewery, a chef who's been cooking here since a food truck, and a park district running a chairlift past ski season. September 19 just happens to be the day two of those threads land on the same afternoon, a few miles apart, with fifty years between them.
If you're already a Bloomington resident reading this over coffee, you probably knew about one of these events and not the other. That's usually how it goes here. If you're weighing a move into this part of the south metro and this is the kind of civic texture that matters to you, that's a longer conversation, and it's one Eric Frank has been having with buyers and sellers in Bloomington and the surrounding south metro for years. Let's Connect.
