Over the past 10 years, Minneapolis/St. Paul's A-listers pinned their hopes on attaining three historic "firsts" for the region: A Super Bowl win, a truly top-shelf hotel and to play host to an international event on par with the World's Fair.
As of 2023, the Minnesota Vikings football team is still the champion of heartbreak, and the state could again be passed over to host a world expo. The hotel, however, is in the bag thanks to the RBC Gateway development, which ended the Twin Cities' run as the nation’s largest urban area without a five-star establishment.
The hotel is a 222-room Four Seasons at 250 Nicollet Mall on the northwest edge of downtown Minneapolis. It is just one piece of a new skyscraper that also includes RBC Wealth Management's U.S. headquarters and the offices of the companies of the Pohlad family, which owns a long list of ventures that includes the Minnesota Twins baseball team and the developer of RBC Gateway, United Properties. It is topped by Four Seasons-branded condominiums and its ground floor is occupied by Mara, the newest restaurant from Gavin Kaysen, a James Beard award-winning chef who made his name at New York City's world-famous restaurant Café Boulud.
RBC Gateway has been in the works officially since 2014 and its journey was a bit of a rollercoaster. United Properties announced in 2019 that it would break ground on the project, shepherded it successfully through the coronavirus pandemic and opened the building in the spring of 2022.
About the project: RBC Gateway is a 37-story, 1.2 million-square-foot structure at 250 Nicollet Mall, at the crossroads between Minneapolis' downtown core and affluent neighborhoods on its edges. The building includes office space, a hotel, condominiums and retail. Work on the project began in 2019 and wrapped up in February 2022.
What the judges said: More than one judge in this year's CoStar Impact Awards said RBC Gateway was the "only option" for the award, due to its ambitious size and sumptuousness, along with the many years of painstaking effort that preceded its realization. Two also noted that it was the first tall office building to go up in downtown Minneapolis since the arrival of 50 South Sixth in 2001, and would likely be the last for the foreseeable future.
"RBC Gateway raised the bar for downtown Minneapolis development and created an engaging connection between the downtown core, North Loop and Downtown East," said Tony Strauss, vice president at Transwestern's Minneapolis office.
They made it happen: The developer was Minneapolis-based United Properties. The United Properties team included Rick McKelvey, Sonja Dusil and Chris Wold. The architecture firm was Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart & Associates of Atlanta. Engineering work was handled by Kimley-Horn, a national firm based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The general contractor was McGough Construction of St. Paul, Minnesota. Leasing was handled by a team from JLL's Minneapolis office that included Jon Dahl, Brent Robertson, Andrea Leon, Kari Glaser, Jessica Maidl and Olivia Richard.
