"I remember coming here with my grandpa, sitting on his lap for breakfast. He came here religiously."
That's Brody Bakken talking about the old Isanti Farmer's Creamery, the building at 104 Main St. W that housed a restaurant from 1979 until it closed during the pandemic and never reopened. Bakken and his business partner Nick Scherer bought the place last year. What they're doing with it says something about how this town is choosing to grow, and it's not the story you'd expect from a Main Street redevelopment grant.
A few blocks away, at Bluebird Park, the city just spent public money on a used skateboard bowl that used to sit in a stranger's backyard in California. Two projects, no obvious connection, and the same underlying decision made twice in one year: when Isanti had a choice between something new and something with a history attached, it kept picking the one with history.
Four Phases and a Family Memory
The Creamery building went up in 1925. It's been an actual creamery, then a restaurant, then apartments upstairs, then nothing on the ground floor for the better part of five years. Scherer and Bakken bought it with what they've described as a four-phase plan: get the six upstairs apartments filled, get the office suites leased, reopen the restaurant, and eventually figure out what to do with the old boiler room in back.
The first two phases moved fast. By March, the office suites had ribbon cuttings organized through the North 65 Chamber of Commerce: Tony Zerwas opened Mission Home Loans and Johnny Jakubowski brought in his marketing and production agency ReelVision. A motorcycle club moved in too, on a two-year lease for what everyone's calling the Wooden Churn.
The apartments came together faster than the two men expected. "It was surprising how great those apartments already were," Scherer said at the time. Two tenants were already in place when the sale closed, and the remaining four units were expected to fill within weeks.
The restaurant is the slower phase, and the one most people in town are actually asking about. It has a name already: the Creamery Kitchen and Taphouse. Scherer and Bakken are planning breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus a full liquor license, which means new plumbing, a new bar layout, and bathrooms going from two up to four or five, something Bakken said hundreds of community members had brought up unprompted. As of this writing there's still no firm opening date. The last phase, the boiler room out back, is a two-thousand-square-foot space with asbestos that has to come out before anyone can use it for anything, a job Bakken has priced at around thirty thousand dollars. He's called that piece two to four years out.
None of this reads like a standard commercial redevelopment. It reads like two guys with a personal stake in one specific building, working through it room by room.
The City Isn't Funding Growth. It's Funding Specific Addresses.
Isanti's city government put actual money behind this, and the way it chose to spend that money tells you more about its priorities than any press release would. Through the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development's Main Street Economic Revitalization Program, administered locally by the Initiative Foundation, the city secured a $96,000 award and gave every applicant who asked for funding a piece of it. The Creamery building received the full $75,000 it requested. The HearSwell building got its full ask of $9,000. The Rockstad building asked for $30,000 and received $12,000.
That's not a program built to spread money evenly across downtown. It's a program built to reward the buildings people were already trying to save, in amounts proportional to what those specific projects needed. The city isn't subsidizing generic commercial growth. It's funding named addresses with owners who showed up and asked.
The same instinct shows up in Isanti's new Restaurant Recruitment Program, approved by the Economic Development Authority in May 2025. The program specifically targets what it calls "destination" restaurants, meaning places that don't already have a location within five miles and that pull customers in from outside town. It offers up to 30 percent of the cost of required kitchen equipment and accessibility upgrades, plus waived permit fees, but only in exchange for a minimum five-year lease. The city isn't trying to add restaurant square footage. It's trying to add restaurants nobody else around here already has.
Put those two programs next to the Creamery project and the pattern gets clearer. Isanti isn't chasing scale. It's chasing things that are specific enough to be worth the paperwork.
Bluebird Park's Backyard Bowl
The skate park tells the same story with a completely different set of characters. In November 2025, the city council approved $71,228 for the first phase of upgrades at Bluebird Park: a concrete quarter pipe, a beginner fly box, a steel grind rail, a bank ramp. Standard stuff, built by Ramparts Skateparks, meant to bring the park up to a modern baseline.
Phase two is where it gets strange, in the best way. In March 2026, Ramparts came back to the city with an offer: a used concrete and steel skate bowl, known in the skateboarding world as Leon's Bowl, currently sitting in the backyard of a man named Chris Conway in Vista, California. Conway had used it for years to host informal sessions that drew, according to the city, Olympians and professionals along with everyday local riders. The council voted to buy it, disassemble it, ship it to Minnesota, and rebuild it at the south end of the skate park, all for $32,426, less than half of what Ramparts said a comparable new bowl would cost to build from scratch.
Mayor Luke Merrill framed the deal as a rare shot at owning something with an actual pedigree instead of a generic replacement part. Ramparts leaned into that framing too, calling it a chance for Isanti to inherit "a celebrated West Coast legacy" and build something new around it. X Games gold medalist and Olympian Andy Macdonald put his name behind it publicly, saying he was excited to drop in on the bowl the next time he's through the Midwest.
The city's park dedication fund, sitting around $300,000 after other commitments, covered the purchase. Ramparts is throwing in a free mini ramp as a donation. And the whole thing came together not because the city set out shopping for a used skate bowl, but because Ramparts happened to know about one and brought it to a mayor who'd been telling his council to wait for the right deal rather than rush into a generic build.
The Same Choice, Twice
A grandson rebuilding the restaurant where his grandfather ate breakfast every week. A city council waiting months for a specific piece of skateboarding history instead of ordering a catalog ramp. A grant program that pays out based on which named buildings show up with an application, not which zip codes need more commercial square footage. None of these decisions required each other, and none of them were coordinated. But they all land on the same instinct: given a choice between something generic and something with a story attached, Isanti keeps choosing the story.
If you've driven past the Creamery this year and wondered what's actually happening behind that storefront, now you know it's not a teardown or a chain replacement. It's two guys finishing a building their own family history is tied to. And if you've heard your kids talking about the new bowl at Bluebird Park, it didn't come from a catalog. It came from a backyard in Vista, California, by way of a mayor who was willing to wait for the right one.
If you're curious about more of what's changing around Isanti, from local businesses to community projects, Amy B's Realty keeps a running local guide on the Isanti neighborhood page worth bookmarking.
