Around where I live in Portland, the Northwest District off Burnside Street, between 21st and 23rd avenue, it is filled with shops and restaurants and bars.
This is great for walking around, and even better when the block sizes are half-size city blocks (200 feet vs. the standard 400-foot).
My only guess is that when designing the blocks, they wanted to encourage walking, but also wanted to keep the sizes small for another (valuable) reason. Corner lots are worth tons more to developers than non-corner lots. I am sure many real estate developers have lined their pockets because of the extra cash they can charge for a corner lot, and in Portland there are twice as many!
here is a Portland block on the left, and a St. Cloud block on the right
You can see the Portland block is about half the size from north to south, but a tad longer on west to east. (This is not a scientific proof, I just pulled 2 random blocks from Google maps :))
Steve Novoselac's Blog 