Bob Bayers hasn't owned a hardware store in Linden Hills since 2012. He sold shovels, ice melt, and paint out of the same shop his father ran before him, on the same stretch of 43rd Street, until a bigger Ace Hardware moved in less than 25 feet away and the numbers stopped working. Bayers Hardware closed after 89 years. And yet this past Saturday, at the neighborhood's 51st annual Fall Festival, Bob Bayers had a table again, telling festival-goers about the old store while the Linden Hills Neighborhood Council billed him as a special guest.
That's an odd thing for a neighborhood to do: invite a man back every year to talk about a business that stopped existing over a decade ago. But it tells you something true about how Linden Hills actually works. The businesses along its two-block commercial spine don't so much open and close as they accumulate. Somebody who's been gone for fourteen years still gets a table at the festival because the neighborhood hasn't fully let him leave, and the restaurants that have opened in the last few years haven't displaced the ones that were already there. They've stacked on top of them.
A hardware store that never fully left
The short version of the Bayers story, confirmed by CBS Minnesota's coverage at the time, is straightforward business competition. Mark Settergren, who already ran hardware stores elsewhere in the Twin Cities, bought the old Linden Hills Co-op building around the corner and opened Settergren's Ace Hardware, roughly twice the size of Bayers' shop. Bayers tried adding a small grocery section called The Pantry to compete. A mild winter cut into his shovel and ice-melt sales, and by September 2012 the liquidation sale was over and the doors were shut for good.
What didn't end was Bayers' place in the neighborhood's memory. He'd organized the 9/11 tribute concert at the Lake Harriet Bandshell since 2002, served on the local business association and the neighborhood council, and become enough of a fixture that Twin Cities Business once described the sale of his building as a story people in the neighborhood were still debating a year later. This year's festival program lists him tabling to share hardware store history, more than a decade after that history stopped being a going concern. For a resident who's lived here long enough to remember the actual shop, that's not trivia. It's a sign of how this particular commercial district treats its own past, which is to keep folding it into whatever comes next rather than erasing it.
The same two blocks, five restaurants deep
Walk that same stretch of 43rd and Upton today and you'll find a similar pattern playing out with restaurants, just without anyone having to close first.
Tilia has anchored the corner since 2011, according to its own history, long enough that an entire generation of newer restaurants has opened around it without ever being its replacement. Martina, known for wood-fired Argentinian cooking, sits nearby as an established part of the same strip. Then there's the newer layer. Le Burger 4304, a fast-casual French-inspired burger spot from Jonathan Gans and Josh Hoyt, took over part of the old Zumbro Cafe space, a story Mpls.St.Paul Magazine covered when it opened. Picnic, a neighborhood bar from Elizabeth "E" Kitzenberg and her husband Andrew, moved into the space that used to hold Clancey's Meats and Fish, a story Bring Me The News reported when it was announced. Rosalia, a Neapolitan pizzeria, rounds out the current lineup on the same two blocks.
| Business | What it serves | How it got its spot |
|---|---|---|
| Tilia | New American | Opened in 2011, no interruption since |
| Martina | Wood-fired Argentinian | Established fixture on the strip |
| Le Burger 4304 | Fast-casual, French-inspired burgers | Took over part of the former Zumbro Cafe space |
| Picnic | Neighborhood bar | Filled the space Clancey's Meats and Fish left behind |
| Rosalia | Neapolitan pizza | Current addition to the same commercial stretch |
None of these openings required an existing restaurant to fail first. Le Burger and Picnic both moved into space that had already gone quiet, one from an old cafe, one from a shuttered meat market. Tilia and Martina kept operating the entire time. The pattern isn't turnover. It's density that keeps adding a layer without subtracting one, which is the opposite of what people usually mean when they call a restaurant scene hot.
As Bayers put it to WCCO the week the doors finally closed:
"I have seen everything come and go."
He was talking about decades of small business turnover on that same commercial block. What he didn't fully predict is that the businesses arriving after him wouldn't repeat that cycle in the same way. They'd stay.
Where the calendar goes once the Bandshell goes quiet
The Lake Harriet Bandshell's 2026 concert season ended on Labor Day, September 7, closing out a summer of free outdoor shows a few blocks from the Linden Hills commercial strip. The Fall Festival, the neighborhood's other big seasonal draw, ran for one day, September 26, with a Parade of Wheels, live music from student and adult bands, and a kickball tournament. Last year's 50th-anniversary festival pulled food trucks from vendors including Picnic, France 44, Old Southern, Hana Bistro, Broders, and Adam's Ice Cream, the kind of local lineup this event tends to draw each fall.
Once both of those wrap for the year, the neighborhood's gathering spots don't go dark. They shift from seasonal, one-time programming to something weekly and ordinary. The Linden Hills Farmers Market keeps running on Sundays in the Settergren's Ace Hardware parking lot at 2813 W. 43rd Street, continuing into late October with a rotating lineup of more than 45 local growers, makers, and musicians. Wooden Ship Brewing, at 44th and Zenith, has already shown this year that it doubles as informal neighborhood infrastructure. It hosted one of the council's new Wednesday book clubs earlier this year, with a Gerhard's Brats food truck parked outside, while a companion group met Thursdays at El Travieso near 50th and Xerxes and another met Saturdays at Jones Coffee.
The businesses doing that hosting work aren't civic organizations. They're just the places where the civic organization happens to meet, which means the neighborhood's actual social calendar this fall runs through the same restaurant list described above, not around it. Once the Bandshell's summer stage goes dark and the festival packs up its inflatables, a Sunday morning at the farmers market or a weeknight at Wooden Ship Brewing is what fills the space that used to sit empty until next June.
What this adds up to for someone already living here
None of this is really about restaurants or hardware stores individually. It's about what kind of neighborhood keeps its old business owner on the festival roster fourteen years after his shop closed, while also letting five straight years of new restaurant openings pile onto the same two blocks without a single longtime anchor losing its lease. That's not a coincidence of small-town sentimentality. It's what a commercial district looks like when there's more foot traffic and civic attention than there is available storefront space, so nothing goes away completely and nothing new displaces what came before it.
If you've lived in Linden Hills long enough to remember when Bayers Hardware was still open, or long enough to remember when Clancey's was still slicing meat at 4307 Upton, the throughline is the same. The neighborhood doesn't reset. It accumulates, and it keeps inviting the people from the last chapter back to the festival table.
If you're the kind of neighbor who's already planning which Sunday to catch the last farmers market of the season, or which restaurant on that stretch of 43rd you haven't tried yet, McKevitt Perez Real Estate would love to compare notes. We're a few blocks from all of it ourselves.
