Walk the west shore of Lake of the Isles on a weekday evening this September and you'll notice something that would have seemed unremarkable five years ago: a steady current of cyclists peeling off the parkway, dipping onto the Kenilworth Trail, and disappearing south toward the Midtown Greenway without slowing down. No detour signs. No plywood fencing forcing them onto Cedar Lake Parkway traffic. Just a straight shot through the channel between Cedar Lake and the Isles, the way the trail worked before most of this decade happened.
That straight shot was gone for nearly seven years. The Kenilworth Trail closed in May 2019 to make way for Southwest LRT construction, and it didn't fully reopen until this past November. For anyone who lives in Kenwood, walks a dog around the Isles, or commutes by bike toward downtown, that's not a footnote. It's the return of the single most direct connective tissue between this neighborhood and the rest of the city's trail network, and it changes what a normal loop around the lake actually looks like.
Seven Years Missing a Half-Mile
Before 2019, the Metropolitan Council counted roughly 2,100 cyclist trips and 400 pedestrian trips through the Kenilworth corridor on an average day, part of what officials have called the most heavily used trail corridor in the Minneapolis park system. When it closed, that traffic didn't vanish. It got rerouted onto Minnetonka Boulevard and a patchwork of city streets, a detour that planners always described as temporary and that ended up lasting more than double the original three-year estimate.
The full trail came back online this winter, and locals who track it have started calling it Minneapolis' bike freeway reconnecting the city. That's not hyperbole so much as a fair description of what the corridor does: it links the North Cedar Lake Trail, the Cedar Lake Trail, the Kenilworth Trail itself, and the Midtown Greenway into one continuous route from downtown through the Chain of Lakes and out toward the western suburbs. For seven years, a resident of Kenwood trying to reach the Greenway by bike had to choose between a slow patchwork or a fast ride next to car traffic. Now they don't have to choose.
But "reopened" doesn't mean "finished," and the honest version of this story includes what's still unresolved:
- As of this spring, a zigzag detour was still in place where the trail meets the Midtown Greenway south of Cedar Lake, and fencing continued to narrow the Cedar Lake Trail near Target Field. The Metropolitan Council said at the time that a public celebration of the full reopening would follow once that remaining work wrapped.
- Light rail train testing is scheduled to begin this fall in the Kenilworth tunnel and at the West Lake and West 21st Street station areas, according to the Metropolitan Council's own construction update, which also notes no further trail closures are anticipated for the rest of 2026.
The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board's project page confirms construction on the broader Southwest LRT project is largely complete as of this summer, with the full Green Line Extension expected to open in 2027. Translation for anyone living nearby: the trail is yours again, but the corridor next to it is about to get noisier before it goes quiet for good.
What the Loop Actually Passes Now
The value of a reconnected trail isn't abstract mobility. It's specific: what you actually pass on the way from one place to another. A loop that starts at the north end of Lake of the Isles and threads through Kenwood now moves past a small, particular set of landmarks that has nothing to do with the light rail and everything to do with what makes this neighborhood recognizable.
Peavey Fountain sits at the corner of West Lake of the Isles Parkway and Kenwood Parkway, originally given to the city in 1891 as a drinking fountain for horses. It was later rededicated as a memorial to the horses of the 151st Field Artillery Minnesota National Guard killed in the First World War. It's an odd, specific piece of history, a monument to horses rather than soldiers, tucked into a parkway corner most people walk past without a second look. It's worth one.
A few blocks in, Kenwood Park opens up, more than 30 acres of green space that has long been the neighborhood's gathering point for kids' soccer practice. The park's proximity to the trail matters more now that the corridor is whole again: families who used to have to navigate a construction-era detour to get from the park to the lake can once again cut straight through.
And at the edge of the park sits the neighborhood's one-block commercial node on West 21st Street, easy to miss if you're not looking for it and impossible to replace if you live here.
A Block That's Weathered Closures Before
This tiny stretch of storefronts has its own history of things closing and reopening, and it predates the light rail by years.
The Kenwood restaurant opened in 2012 under chef Don Saunders, whose earlier restaurants included Fugaise and the southwest Minneapolis spot In Season. Saunders built The Kenwood as an all-day neighborhood restaurant, open for coffee and pastries in the morning and a full dinner menu by evening. Joel DeBilzan came up through that same kitchen as a sous chef at In Season before leaving for Seattle, where he trained under restaurateur Ethan Stowell and eventually ran Stowell's flagship restaurant, Tavolata Belltown. DeBilzan returned to Minnesota in 2019 to take over as head chef at The Kenwood, and in 2021 he bought the restaurant outright. It's now his, seasonal menu and all, at 2115 West 21st Street.
Next door sits Birchbark Books and Native Arts, the bookstore Louise Erdrich founded in 2001, specializing in Indigenous American literature, art, and gifts. Birchbark has its own story of nearly closing. In 2011, when the neighborhood's longtime Kenwood Café shut its doors after a lease dispute, foot traffic to Birchbark dropped so sharply that Erdrich questioned whether the store could keep going. A community fundraising effort kept it open long enough for the block to stabilize, and Birchbark has since expanded, opening a second event space near Loring Park in 2023.
None of that history involves the light rail. But it's the same pattern playing out at a different scale: a small, specific piece of neighborhood infrastructure goes dark, the people who actually live here notice immediately, and it takes years, not months, before things look normal again. The trail's seven-year closure and the block's 2011 near-miss aren't the same event, but they're the same kind of event, and residents who lived through both know exactly what "back to normal" is worth.
The Weekend That Proved It
If you wanted evidence that the lake corridor can already handle real crowds again, the first weekend of August gave it. The Uptown Art Fair returned to Lake of the Isles Parkway August 7 through 9 this year after two years away from its traditional neighborhood setting, bringing juried artists, public art, and neighborhood business programming back to the same stretch of parkway the Kenilworth Trail now feeds into cleanly. For an event that has run for more than sixty years, a return to its original footprint isn't a small logistical detail. It's a signal that the physical space around the lake, trail included, is functioning at full capacity again after years of construction fencing and detour signage reshaping how people moved through it.
That single weekend won't tell you everything about how the neighborhood absorbs foot traffic once light rail service actually starts in 2027. But it tells you the trail, the parkway, and the block on 21st Street can already hold a crowd, which is more than could have been said in any of the past several Augusts.
What This Settles, and What It Doesn't
The honest read on Kenwood right now is that the biggest disruption to daily movement in this neighborhood in a decade has mostly resolved, months ahead of full light rail service. The trail works. The loop is a loop again. The block on 21st Street has its restaurant and its bookstore, run by the people who fought to keep them open the last time the neighborhood's public life took a hit.
What hasn't resolved is the next layer: train testing through the rest of this year, a 2027 opening date that will bring actual rail traffic to a corridor that's spent seven years as a construction site, and a station footprint at West Lake and West 21st Street that residents haven't yet lived next to in operation. The trail's return answers one question. It doesn't answer what daily life sounds like once trains are actually running through the channel between two of the city's most-used lakes.
For now, the loop is back, the fountain is still there, and the block still smells like whatever DeBilzan is running as a special that week. That's not nothing.
If you're weighing a move into Kenwood or anywhere along the Chain of Lakes and want a read on what these changes mean for a specific block or property, Shane Spencer has spent years tracking exactly this kind of neighborhood detail. Let's Connect — Request a Confidential Consultation.
