If you have driven past Fourth Street and Beltrami Avenue this month, you have probably noticed the sidewalk traffic outside the old Elks building. A matcha shop just opened on the street level. The restaurant upstairs has been busy for the better part of a year. Four hotel rooms sit above that. All of it happens inside walls that have stood on that corner since the building went up as the Elks Lodge in the early 1900s.
That is the part worth sitting with. Bemidji is not adding square footage downtown right now. It is stacking new uses inside old ones, sometimes three and four deep in the same address. If you want to know what downtown actually looks like this fall, the story is less about ribbon cuttings on empty lots and more about how much work a single building can be made to do.
One Building, Three Businesses
The building at 324 Beltrami Ave. NW spent most of the last century as the Elks Lodge. Developer Mitch Rautio, restaurateur Keng Dechawuth, and a silent partner bought it in 2022 and spent nearly two years turning it into what is now called the Fourth Street Lodge. The second floor became Blue Oyster, Dechawuth's Thai-American restaurant known for dishes built around mushrooms he grows himself at his Puposky Pearl farm north of town. The same floor holds four boutique hotel rooms operating as the Fourth Street Lofts, each one named after a hotel that used to stand in downtown Bemidji a century ago: the Rex, the Dalton, the Markham, and the Lakeshore. The Markham, for what it's worth, actually opened in 1890 and stood until 1984.
Rautio put it simply when the project was nearing completion: he wanted to see the downtown continually change and adapt and flourish. What he built didn't stop changing once the ribbon was cut. This month, the street-level storefront that sat empty below Blue Oyster filled in too. Kin Cafe Brew and Bite Bar opened there on September 2, run by Tata Nuankhao, whose sister Patcharin "Meow" Nuankhao already owns Kin Asian Market, Kin Poke, and Pho Bemidji a few blocks away. The cafe specializes in matcha, a shaded green tea Kin sources as a blend from Japan, and Japanese-style fruit sandos built on thick milk bread with whipped cream and seasonal fruit. Meow summed up the timing this way: matcha is viral in the world right now.
So one building at one corner is now a hotel, a restaurant, and a cafe at the same time, three different business types layered into a structure that was never going to be torn down or expanded outward. That is the model repeating across downtown this season, just in smaller doses.
The Pattern Holds Up Elsewhere
Two more storefronts opening this fall tell the same story with different tenants.
| Address | What it used to be | What it is now |
|---|---|---|
| 324 Beltrami Ave. NW | Elks Lodge, built early 1900s | Fourth Street Lodge: Blue Oyster restaurant, Fourth Street Lofts hotel, Kin Cafe Brew and Bite Bar |
| 407 Beltrami Ave. NW | Downtown Goodwill store | BRIO Pilates and Hot Yoga Studio, opening November 2026 |
| 1426 Bemidji Ave. N, Suite 3 | A run of past tenants including an exhaust shop, a computer repair business, and a home care office | Blue Ox Playroom |
BRIO is moving into the space that used to be downtown's Goodwill, and it is doing so by way of a fairly personal route. Owner Sadie Gardner grew up spending summers on Lake Bemidji, Lake Movil, and Lake Beltrami, where her family has had cabins for three generations. She left a career in healthcare, then ran a Minneapolis floral business called Sadie's Floral, before deciding two years ago to become a fitness instructor and bring a studio back to Bemidji. When it opens in November, BRIO will run Reformer Pilates, heated yoga, and studio classes with hours from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. every day of the week, including a noon window built specifically for people who work downtown and need something to do on a lunch break.
Blue Ox Playroom took the reuse pattern furthest. The Suite 3 space at 1426 Bemidji Ave. N has cycled through an exhaust shop that owner Bailey Weller's uncle once ran, a computer repair business, and a home care office before Weller opened it as an indoor play space for kids ages 0 to 5 this summer. Her husband AJ runs Xquisit Ink, a tattoo shop right next door in Suite 9, and it was conversations with his clients, many of them parents, that convinced her Bemidji needed a calm indoor spot for young families. That one small strip of storefronts has now been rebuilt from the inside out at least three times in twenty years without anyone adding a single new wall to the block.
What This Actually Tells You
None of this is a coincidence of timing. It is what happens in a town where the downtown footprint stopped growing outward years ago and the available real estate is whatever becomes vacant. A Goodwill closes, a Pilates studio moves in. A home care office closes, a kids' playroom moves in. An Elks Lodge sits half-used for years, and it comes back as a hotel, a restaurant, and now a cafe, all under one roof.
If you already live here, this matters for the ordinary reasons. It means the walkable stretch of downtown between Third and Fifth Streets is doing more in September 2026 than it was doing in September 2025, without a single new building on the horizon. It means the next open storefront you notice, whatever it used to be, is a live question rather than a foregone conclusion. Harmony Food Co-op is leaning into that same seasonal energy with its annual Harvest Fair on September 15, offering a farmers market alongside in-store sampling and live music from April Mae & Two Hearted, a reminder that the fall calendar downtown is filling in fast, not just the storefronts.
Where to Actually Go This Month
- Kin Cafe Brew and Bite Bar, 324 Beltrami Ave. NW, open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekends, for the matcha and the fruit sando.
- Blue Oyster, second floor of the same building, for dinner with a view over Fourth Street.
- Fourth Street Lofts, same address, if you want to put out-of-town family up somewhere with more history than a chain hotel.
- Blue Ox Playroom, 1426 Bemidji Ave. N, Suite 3, for scheduled play sessions with kids under five.
- BRIO Pilates and Hot Yoga Studio, 407 Beltrami Ave. NW, opening its doors in November.
Downtown Bemidji's next chapter is being written inside buildings that already exist. That is worth knowing whether you are grabbing a matcha this weekend or just keeping track of what your neighborhood is turning into.
If you are curious what a downtown-adjacent home is actually worth in a market where the buildings around it keep finding new life, The W Group offers a free home valuation whenever you are ready to look.
