The Grandview Bridges Are Done. The District Isn't Finished Catching Up.
On the afternoon of June 25, a small crowd gathered on a bridge that didn't exist a year earlier. Edina Mayor James Hovland stood with City Council members Kate Agnew, James Pierce, Julie Risser and Carolyn Jackson, Hennepin County Commissioner Heather Edelson, and a crew from Ames Construction to cut a ribbon on the new Vernon Avenue span. Traffic returned the next morning, June 26, ending more than a year of detours through Edina's Grandview District.
That's the version of the story every local outlet already ran. Here's the part that doesn't show up in a ribbon-cutting photo: the bridges being open and the district being whole again are two different finish lines, and Grandview has only crossed one of them. A liquor store's books, a pedestrian bridge that failed a federal review after passing its own, and a decade-vacant lot a few blocks away all tell you the recovery clock is still running.
The easy story about construction disruption is that it's loud and annoying and then it ends. The real mechanism, at least for one Grandview business, was narrower and more specific: losing the parking lot.
Mike McBride, general manager of Edina's municipal liquor operations, told the City Council in March that the Grandview Edina Liquor store, tucked into a strip mall along Vernon Avenue, lost its primary access point to its own parking lot when MnDOT's bridge work began in April 2025. That single change, not the noise or the dust, is what he pointed to when he described the "drastic impact" that followed: a 20 percent drop in 2025 revenue, roughly $926,000, plus a two-week closure during construction. His response wasn't to wait it out. Staff leaned harder into monthly sales events and promotional programming to pull traffic back in, a strategy McBride described as ongoing even after the bridges reopened.
The city tried to soften the blow for businesses across the district before the worst of it hit. When Stage 3B closed most of the remaining Highway 100 ramps in September 2025, Edina and Explore Edina rolled out the Worth the Detour Passport, a loyalty program that gave people a reason to keep stopping at Grandview and 50th & France businesses even when getting there took an extra turn. It's a small detail, but it tells you the city understood the disruption wasn't abstract. Somebody's parking lot access is somebody else's revenue line.
Grandview's other bridge, the pedestrian span connecting Arcadia Avenue to the Grandview Parking Ramp, opened in 2024 and was reviewed by outside experts before it was built. That review didn't catch what a U.S. Department of Justice review found last September: the bridge doesn't fully meet federal accessibility standards.
The specific problem is almost bureaucratic in its precision. The bridge is accessible from the second floor of the parking ramp, but the second floor itself isn't accessible from the west side unless you drive up to it. The review also flagged a shortage of designated accessible parking spaces. City Manager Scott Neal has said the bridge was built to connect the district and bring people together, which is true in the literal, physical sense. It's also true that a bridge built to remove one barrier can quietly leave another one standing, and nobody notices until a federal review goes looking for it.
"When we build a bridge, we are making a statement that the people on one side matter to the people on the other side." — Edina Mayor James Hovland, at the June 25 ribbon-cutting
The city is now working with the DOJ on a remediation plan that adds an accessible connection from the lower parking lot and more designated spaces. There's no public timeline yet for when that work wraps.
A short walk from the new interchange sits 5146 Eden Ave, the site of Edina's old public works facility. It's been vacant for roughly a decade, sitting between Jerry's Foods, Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church and school, and a handful of newer apartment buildings. Part of the reason it sat empty that long has to do with the same interchange that just reopened. The site has a grade change of more than 30 feet from south to north, and until the ramp geometry and access questions around Vernon and Highway 100 were settled, building on that slope was harder to plan around.
Hempel Real Estate now leads the redevelopment team, with Jester Concepts, the hospitality group behind Butcher and the Boar, P.S. Steak and Rustica Bakery, attached as the anchor restaurant tenant, and Monarch Development Partners handling the residential piece. The preliminary plan calls for 38 townhomes and 32 condos, all owner-occupied, plus green space and a restaurant concept Jester hasn't announced yet. Groundbreaking was targeted for summer 2026, timed to land after the interchange's construction cleared the site's biggest external obstacle.
Whether that groundbreaking has actually happened yet isn't something the public record confirms as of this writing. What is confirmed is the sequencing logic: a project that's been circling this parcel since 2020 was, by design, waiting on the bridges.
Set the money and the waiting aside for a moment and look at what's physically different. The $28.2 million project, split roughly $15.49 million from Edina, $12.42 million from Hennepin County and $300,000 plus in-kind services from MnDOT, replaced a tangle of six separate access ramps with a standard tight diamond interchange. A few specifics worth knowing if you haven't driven through recently:
The delay caused by the buried CPKC power line, discovered near the railroad bridge's west support in May 2025, added costs that Hennepin County and Edina split roughly 80/20 under their existing cooperative agreement. Xcel Energy covered the cost of actually moving the line. None of that shows up when you're driving through, but it's the reason the project ran into 2026 instead of wrapping with the rest of Stage 3 last November.
The ribbon-cutting was real and the traffic relief is real. But Grandview's recovery isn't a single event you can photograph. It's a liquor store rebuilding a revenue line one promotion at a time. It's a pedestrian bridge that technically opened two years ago and still needs a remediation plan before it meets federal standards. It's a vacant lot that's been waiting since before the bridge project even started, now positioned to finally move because its biggest obstacle is gone.
If you live in or near Grandview, the honest read is that the hardest part is behind the district, not fully finished. Watching what happens at 5146 Eden over the next year, and whether the DOJ remediation plan for the pedestrian bridge gets a public timeline, will tell you more about the district's actual trajectory than anything a ribbon-cutting photo can.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property values or timing a move in or around Edina's west side, that's a conversation worth having with someone who's tracking it block by block. You can browse the Edina neighborhood guide for a broader look at the city, including the redevelopment activity happening a few minutes away at 50th & France.
Curious what a home near Grandview is actually worth once the detours are gone and the next redevelopment is underway? Blake Halverson can walk you through it with the kind of local detail this district deserves. Get a Free Home Valuation to start.
Whether you are buying, selling or investing in real estate, Blake has a proven track record to be the versatile agent you need. Through strong, aggressive representation, Blake will help you achieve your desired outcomes.
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