Who holds a licence to trade here
Every business the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and the state of Minnesota, license to trade at an address — restaurants, bars, grocers, childcare, care homes and clinics — with the date the licence was issued and the date it runs out. It answers who is next door for the trades that need permission to open, and it is silent about the ones that do not.
The file
5,951 licensed businesses on 3,753 of the 17,007 commercial sites in Minneapolis and Saint Paul — 22.07%
6,553 rowsCounties in this file: Anoka, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey · 16 columns available · free, no account, no rate limit.
Joins to an address on site_parcel_id, so it can be pointed at one property rather than read whole.
What the rows look like
10 real rows from this file, spread evenly across it rather than taken off the top — every file here is written in some order, so its first rows are never a fair sample of it. These are the default columns, which is what the download button hands over.
| business | type | address | licence status | expires |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1010 WASHINGTON WINE & SPIRITS | Liqoffsale | 1010 WASHINGTON AVE S | — | — |
| EL GUANACO BAKERY & CAFE | Restaurant | 501 LAKE ST E | — | — |
| LUNDS & BYERLYS - NE MINNEAPOLIS | Grocery | 25 UNIVERSITY AVE SE | — | — |
| SORRENTO CUCINA DUE | Restaurant | 200 5TH ST S #290 | — | — |
| Dancing Ganesha | liquor on sale | 1100 HARMON PL | Approved | 2027-04-01 |
| CARNICERIA VALERIES | Grocery Store | 3149 NICOLLET AVE | — | — |
| ARLENE'S HAIR DESIGN | registered business | 1075 HUDSON ROAD | — | — |
| GOLDEN STAR MARKET | registered business | 1261 PAYNE AVE | — | — |
| Novus Auto Glass/ Aramsco/ Trinity/ Salsa Lisa | registered business | 650 PELHAM BLVD | — | — |
| ZIMMERMANS T-SHIRT SHOP | registered business | 1656 GRAND AVE | — | — |
An em dash means the record is blank, and that is the source's gap rather than ours. Across the whole file: licence status is blank on 81.7% of rows, expires is blank on 81.7% of rows.
The cuts of this file
Every cut is the same columns, filtered. Pick one and the row count changes; the file does not.
Every column in this file
Columns marked default come down unless you pick your own with
&columns=.
| Column | What it is | In the default file |
|---|---|---|
business |
business | default |
type |
type | default |
address |
address | default |
status |
licence status | default |
expires |
expires | default |
category |
category | optional |
licensed_since |
licensed since | optional |
site_parcel_id |
site parcel id | optional |
joined_on |
joined on | optional |
source |
source | optional |
county |
county | optional |
mpca_files |
MPCA files on this parcel | optional |
mpca_open |
one of them still open | optional |
mpca_tanks |
storage tanks on this parcel | optional |
mpca_restricted |
use restricted by a recorded control | optional |
mpca_note |
what the MPCA columns mean | optional |
Where it comes from
Minneapolis and Saint Paul licence registers, and the Minnesota DHS and MDH licensed-facility registers
Records retrieved 2026-08-19 — the oldest capture date among the layers behind this file, because data is no fresher than its stalest input.
What this layer cannot answer is stated in full on the system card — read it before quoting a figure.
What you may do with it
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Share it, change it, build a product on it, sell that product — all fine. The one condition is credit: say it came from Brick & Mortar and link back.
Records published by City of Minneapolis, City of Saint Paul, Minnesota Department of Human Services, Minnesota Department of Health. Government data held by a Minnesota state agency or political subdivision, presumed public under the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act (Minn. Stat. ch. 13) and published by the agency itself.
Read the full licence · how we license every dataset, and the two we do not
Without the page
/api/export?dataset=licences&format=csv returns the
same file. Call /api/export
with no arguments for the whole catalogue.
Point an AI at it
Every file carries its own source, its capture date and the layer's own warnings in the header, so a model reading one gets the caveats with the numbers rather than the numbers alone. Paste this at an assistant that can fetch a URL:
Read https://brickandmortar.dev/api/export?dataset=licences&format=csv
Everything above the header row is provenance and limits. Read it first,
then answer using only what the rows support.llms.txt describes the whole warehouse the same way — what each dataset holds, which counties it really covers, and what it cannot answer.