Hmongtown Marketplace opens (2004)
Entrepreneur Toua Vang converted a shuttered Kmart on Como Avenue into Hmongtown Marketplace, the nation's first Hmong market. Dozens of refugee vendors sold produce, fabric, and cooked food from one-time department-store aisles.
The market drew large crowds and proved a vacant big-box store could carry immigrant small business.
It set the template that Hmong Village later expanded at a bigger scale.
Hmongtown showed that converting closed retail space into an ethnic market works; Hmong Village is the larger second act.
