Brooks: St. Paul’s Midway is a neighborhood on a journey, but to what?

In a week, the Midway Cub will be gone. The doors will close, the shelves will empty, and 96 people could be out of a good union job.

But until then, there’s work to do, neighbors to feed, and a deli case to polish until it gleams.

“All of the workers here love working here. They’re fiercely proud to work at this store,” said interim St. Paul City Council Member Matt Privratsky, on a morning grocery run. Around him, the early shift stocked and tidied a business going out of business. “It’s hard to have a nuanced conversation about something as heartbreaking as this.”

Neighborhood grocery stores are shutting down across the country. Kroger. Albertsons. Safeway. Giant. Winn-Dixie. Piggly Wiggly. Amazon Fresh. Each time it happens, the conversation goes something like this: What did the neighborhood do wrong? Too much shoplifting? Too much panhandling in the parking lot? Did someone, somehow, steal all the shopping carts?

The Uptown Minneapolis Cub closed abruptly. Is Uptown dead? Lunds, the last grocery store in downtown St. Paul, shuts its doors. Is downtown dead too?

It’s always the community that let the corporation down, not the other way around.

It’s easy to look around Midway and see what isn’t there anymore.

Many of those businesses were bulldozed to make way for Allianz Field and the neighborhood redevelopment that was sure to follow. Restaurants. Shopping. A hotel. Office space. Much-needed housing.

Today, the soccer stadium sits surrounded by parking lots, the shining promise of the United Village redevelopment plan and an even shinier sculpture of a three-story loon that looms over the intersection of University and Snelling.

There are more projects in the works beyond the 32-acre stadium development zone, said Privratsky, who is filling former Council President Mitra Jalali‘s seat until the Aug. 12 special election.

“There’s a lot of other development that’s in the queue along this area of University — housing being proposed just nearby, things that aren’t unveiled and constructed yet, but I know are in the pipe,” he said. “For a store to close now, right before all of those things are coming, just leaves a really sour taste.”

Midway, as it says right there in the name, sits smack between downtown St. Paul and downtown Minneapolis. Walkable, accessible, a hub for bus and light-rail lines, close to college campuses, locally owned shops and some fantastic Asian and African specialty food markets. A place of infinite promise.

“We’ve dealt with years of empty lots. We’ve dealt with years of the possibility of development but waiting for that investment,” Privratsky said. “We do deal with issues that other neighborhoods don’t, because folks who have challenges will find the places where they can find resources.”

Midway is not the kind of neighborhood where people’s first impulse is to shove someone in pain back onto a train. But you can care about someone having a mental health crisis and still wish your grocery store had grocery carts. Or that you had a grocery store.