Excelsior MN Fall Events on Water Street This Season

Stand at the corner of Water and Lake on a Tuesday evening this month and count what is actually open. The Port has been closed since May. The Dock's marquee has been dark since the pandemic. The lot at 10 Water Street, empty since a Pizza Hut came down about fifteen years ago, is still empty. Three storefront-widths of the busiest intersection in a one-square-mile city are, at the moment, doing nothing at all.

Now walk two blocks south. That is where the town went.

The corner that used to be the front door

Haskell's Port of Excelsior had held the Water and Lake corner since 1977. On May 6, a two-alarm fire called in around 1:30 in the morning tore through the building, and crews from five departments needed roughly 90 minutes to get it under control. They kept the flames out of the attached Wine & Spirits shop. The restaurant and bar did not survive. Haskell's president Ted Farrell, whose family bought the space from the city decades ago, told reporters he intends to rebuild and come back "better and stronger," and the company set up a Venmo account, @HaskellsPortRelief, to route tips directly to displaced Port staff. As of late August there is no announced reopening date, and the corner reads exactly the way it reads.

Next door, the other half of that block has its own stall. Mithun Companies won preliminary approval in July 2025 for a three-story mixed-use building at 10 Water Street tied to a partial revival of the Dock Cinema, which opened as the Tonka in 1940. Then on March 2 of this year the City Council affirmed the Heritage Preservation Commission's denial of the site alteration permit on a 3-2 vote, and denied the tax increment financing agreement 5-0. The sticking point was arithmetic. City code caps partial demolition of a historic structure at 30 percent, and the commission counted the proposal at 33 percent once it included the basement and the hallway connecting the theater to Lagos Tacos. Mithun has said it would meet the 30 percent line. Mayor Gary Ringate has said publicly that he "really wants this project to happen" and considers it the best proposal the city has seen for the site. Nothing is under construction there this fall.

So the practical fact for anyone who lives here: the block you used to treat as the anchor of downtown is now the block you pass through on your way somewhere else.

Where the town actually is now

The 200 and 300 blocks absorbed everything. The old Jake O'Connors corner building at 200 Water Street now holds three Jester Concepts restaurants stacked together, with Mirabelle on the main level, the small ramen counter Shiki alongside it, and Parlour in the lower level. Across the street, David Fhima's Vagabondo runs Sicilian at night and a coffee-and-pastry cafe by day in the former Red Sauce Rebellion space. Layline sits at 301 Water Street in a converted auto repair shop, from Daniel del Prado and Innerbloom Hospitality. MontegoBlu took the former Suburban at 304 Water. Coalition is at 227. Old Southern BBQ Smokehouse still shares its footprint with Excelsior Brewing, Red Bench Bakery still runs music nights, and Licks Unlimited still moves a line on a warm afternoon.

The retail spine tracks the same stretch. The Lakes Running Co. at 218, Leipold's Gifts & Antiques at 239, Sanctuary Salonspa at 250, Brightwater Clothing & Gear at 256. If you are sequencing a Saturday, the walkable core is now roughly 200 to 320, not the lakefront corner.

What Labor Day changes, in numbers you can use

Ringate has described Excelsior bluntly as a "Thursday-through-Sunday" town, and only really from Memorial Day to Labor Day. That is the constraint every operator on Water Street is planning against, and it is also the opening for residents.

Consider the contrast. In its first summer, Vagabondo released a month of reservations and watched them disappear in about seven hours. That is a number built entirely on day-trippers from Jordan, Minneapolis and everywhere in between. After Labor Day, that inbound traffic drops off a cliff while the seat count on Water Street stays exactly where it is. The supply does not shrink. The demand does. September and October are the only stretch of the year when this many restaurants and this few visitors overlap.

A few specifics that follow from that:

• Layline's four-season screened patio is the one outdoor room in town that keeps working into October. Most patio seats on the street stop being pleasant around the second week of the month.
• Mirabelle serves dinner seven nights and runs a daily happy hour, which in the off-season is functionally a locals' program.
• Shiki is a roughly 30-seat room. It was never going to work as a summer walk-in. It works now.

One last summer item is still on the calendar. Cinema in the Commons closes its season with The Sandlot at 8 p.m. on Saturday, August 29, at the Commons. The August 15 showing was canceled for weather, so this is the last one.

Apple Days is a parking decision before it is a festival

Apple Days runs September 18 through 20 this year, staged on Water Street between 3rd and Lake. Hours are 5 to 10 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. The Excelsior-Lake Minnetonka Chamber has run some version of this since 1935.

The programming is deep: apple pie baking and pie-eating contests, the historic Water Street walking tour, a LEGO free build added for families, live music running to a street dance, the Modus Advisors Beer Garden at the center of it, and VIP tickets available for Friday evening or Saturday. First aid sits on 2nd Street near the beer tent.

For residents, the whole weekend hinges on one thing. Saturday parking is the ramp on One West Drive, the Excelsior East Lot behind Excelsior Brewing, and Mount Calvary Lutheran Church. There is no shuttle. If you live inside the one square mile, the correct move is to leave the car home entirely.

A Saturday that works:

1. Walk in from the north side before 10 a.m., while the vendor rows are still being set and the tour groups have not formed.
2. Take the historic Water Street walking tour if you have never done it. It is the one piece of Apple Days programming that most residents skip and most visitors cannot find.
3. Eat off the street, not on it. The food vendors are for visitors. Your reservation at a Water Street dining room is the thing visitors could not get.
4. Come back for the street dance after 8, when the day crowd has cleared the ramp.

October is the month that is actually yours

Then the calendar tightens, and every one of these is built for people who live here rather than people driving in.

Two things worth planning around. First, October 24 is triple-booked. Trick or Treat the Street runs 10 to 4, the Minnesota Streetcar Museum runs Trolleyween on its Excelsior line the same day, and the 40th Rake-A-Thon is that morning. A family can do all three, but not casually. Second, the Halloween Character Hunt is the sneaky good one: ten characters hidden across participating businesses, a sheet you pick up at any of them, and ten gift card winners drawn from submissions. It is the only event on this list that gets your kids inside stores they have walked past a hundred times.

The Spooky Sprint after-party at the Commons runs fire pits, s'mores, a hot cocoa bar and a DJ. Witches Night Out is ticketed and storefront-based, with a costume contest and silent auction.

Why the empty corner matters to the full blocks

Amanda Maday, whose firm Studio Grey designed both Mirabelle and Vagabondo, made the point last year that no restaurant wants to be the only one on its island. That is the quiet stake in the next eight weeks. Water Street just added a run of well-capitalized rooms from operators based in Minneapolis, and it lost its most reliable year-round corner anchor to a fire in May. The 10 Water Street project, whatever you think of its height, was pitched partly on the theory that downtown residents produce weekday customers in February.

None of that gets resolved this fall. What happens instead is that roughly 2,300 residents decide, one Thursday at a time, how much of the off-season these rooms can survive. That is a more interesting thing to be part of than a festival.

If you own here and you have been watching the corner with a mix of frustration and curiosity, you are reading the market correctly. Downtown composition, walkability and what sits at the end of the block are exactly the factors that shape value on this side of the lake, and they are moving right now. When you want a grounded read on what that means for your specific address, Morgan Real Estate Group is here. Request Your Home Valuation.