On June 25, a small crowd gathered on the new Vernon Avenue bridge over the CPKC railroad tracks to cut a ribbon. Mayor Jim Hovland spoke. So did Hennepin County Commissioner Heather Edelson and a deputy district engineer from MnDOT. The crew from Ames Construction, the contractor that had spent more than a year on the span, stood nearby while everyone else parked in the Grandview Parking Ramp and walked over for the ceremony, then headed to Davanni's on Gus Young Lane for cake and coffee. Vernon Avenue reopened to traffic the next morning, June 26, ending 14 months of detours through the heart of Edina's Grandview District.
That part of the story is finished. Fifty yards away, on the same three acres the city has owned since 1962, a different Grandview story is still going, and it has taken far longer than the bridge did. The restaurant that's supposed to anchor that empty lot has been in the works since 2020. It has already survived one collapsed development deal. As of this spring, it's on its second attempt with a different developer, a different building footprint, and still no name.
Fourteen Months on Eden Avenue
The Vernon Avenue & Highway 100 Interchange project broke ground in April 2025 as a joint effort between the City of Edina, Hennepin County, and MnDOT, with a combined price tag of $28.2 million. Edina covered about $15.49 million of that, including $4.21 million in federal funding. Hennepin County put in roughly $12.42 million, with $7 million of it federal. MnDOT chipped in $300,000 plus in-kind engineering and inspection work.
The project replaced two aging bridges (one over Highway 100, one over the CPKC railroad) and swapped out what the city's own planning documents called a redundant tangle of six access ramps connecting four different streets for a standard tight diamond interchange. The new bridges carry 10-foot sidewalks, ADA-compliant pedestrian ramps, refuge islands for people crossing on foot, and a noise wall for the adjacent Sunnyslope neighborhood.
The Highway 100 portion, including the ramps most drivers actually use, reopened back on November 15, 2025. The Vernon Avenue bridge over the railroad was supposed to follow within months. Instead, crews hit a buried power line inside the railroad right-of-way that nobody had mapped, which meant a pause while Xcel Energy and CPKC worked out a relocation agreement. That single discovery pushed the finish line from late 2025 into June 2026.
For all of that time, from spring 2025 through late June 2026, Eden Avenue carried the entire east-west detour load through the district. If you live in Grandview and default to Eden Avenue out of habit before checking whether Vernon is actually open again, you're not wrong to double check. The habit is barely three months old.
The city leaned on Explore Edina's "Worth the Detour" passport program to keep foot traffic moving to local shops and restaurants during the closures: collect a stamp for shopping or dining in the district, enter to win gift cards, plus a Restaurant Week social media contest and free family movies on select Saturday mornings at the Edina Theatre. It's a small detail, but it tells you the disruption was serious enough that the city built a marketing campaign specifically to counteract it.
The Lot That's Been Waiting Longer Than the Bridge
The 3.3-acre parcel at 5146 Eden Avenue sits just west of the new bridge, at the southeast corner of 50th Street and Highway 100. It has been city or HRA-owned and tax-exempt since 1962, most recently serving as a Public Works storage yard, and in 2025 it did double duty as a staging area for the interchange construction itself.
This isn't the site's first attempt at a second life. Back in 2022, United Properties and Jester Concepts (the Minneapolis hospitality company behind Butcher and the Boar and P.S. Steak) won preliminary rezoning approval for an 86-unit senior housing cooperative called Applewood Pointe, paired with a standalone two-story, 13,500-square-foot restaurant seating 347 people, a public plaza, and a pedestrian bridge connecting to the parking ramp at the neighboring Jerry's Foods. That deal fell apart in October 2023 when the developer couldn't secure financing.
The city went back to the market. In March 2025, the Edina Housing and Redevelopment Authority issued a new request for proposals, this time with a stated preference for owner-occupied housing over rentals and a note that the land would sell as is. Eleven proposals came in. Offers on the land ranged from just over $1 million to nearly $6 million. The HRA didn't take the highest bid. Instead, in August 2025, the board picked a team led by Hempel Real Estate, alongside Monarch Development Partners, Jester Concepts, and Rokos Advisors, at a $4 million purchase price, citing design quality and fit with the city's long-standing Grandview Development Framework over the raw dollar figure. The city council formally approved that $4 million purchase agreement in March 2026.
The plan this time looks different from 2022's version. Instead of senior housing plus one large freestanding restaurant, it's 38 owner-occupied townhomes and 32 condos spread across six buildings, built around a 30-plus-foot grade change that Hempel's team says it wants to use as a design feature rather than flatten out, plus green space and a restaurant at the corner of Eden and Arcadia Avenues. Jester Concepts is still attached, still hasn't announced what the restaurant will actually be, and has now been circling this specific parcel for six years across two different partnerships and two different building plans. Hempel's own target is to start construction this summer and finish in summer or fall of 2027.
Grandview Already Knows What a Jester Concepts Restaurant Looks Like
None of this is a bet on unproven demand. Jester Concepts already operates in the district. Starling, the company's first suburban restaurant after a decade of building its name in downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul, opened on the ground floor of the Maison Green apartments at 4917 Eden Avenue, in a space that used to be a Perkins. Founder Brent Frederick has said he lives on the northwest side of Edina himself and found the dining options thin enough that having even one more mattered. Starling doesn't take reservations and runs first-come, first-served, which founder Brent Frederick described as a smoother opening than expected once word got around the neighborhood.
That's the case for why a second Jester project in Grandview makes sense. It's also a reminder that "finished" is relative in this district. The pedestrian bridge connecting Arcadia Avenue to the Grandview Parking Ramp, built in 2024, ran into its own snag last September when a U.S. Department of Justice review found it doesn't fully meet federal accessibility standards. The bridge is reachable from the ramp's second floor, but that floor isn't reachable from the west side without driving up to it, and the review flagged a shortage of accessible parking. The city is now working through a remediation plan under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
What This Adds Up To
Two systems have been running on separate clocks in Grandview. The public infrastructure clock moved on a delay measured in months: a buried power line pushed a bridge opening from late 2025 to June 2026. The private redevelopment clock moves on a much longer cycle: a deal that started with United Properties in 2020 collapsed in 2023, and its replacement, now backed by Hempel and three other named partners, still hasn't broken ground as of this fall, even though summer 2026 was the stated target.
There's also a decade-old idea sitting quietly behind both of these projects. City planners floated a concept back in 2017 for a "Grandview Green," a land bridge over Highway 100 meant to physically reunite the parts of the district the highway splits. It never advanced past a feasibility study. The interchange went from groundbreaking in April 2025 to a June 2026 ribbon-cutting, while the Grandview Green concept and the Eden Avenue site have each unfolded over many years and several rounds of planning. Public works and private development simply keep different calendars, and Grandview is now living with both at once.
If you walk the corner of Eden and Arcadia this fall, the loudest thing happening is landscaping crews finishing sod work around the new bridge approach. Somewhere in the next several months, that's likely to be replaced by the sound of a different kind of crew, on a different kind of project, starting the timeline over on the same three acres.
If you've been watching the Grandview District change and want someone who's been tracking it as closely as you have, reach out to The McNamara Group. We're happy to talk through what's opening, what's stalled, and what it might mean for your corner of Edina.
