A rider slows at the fork just south of Cedar Lake, one hand already drifting up out of habit to signal a turn onto the old gravel detour. Then she catches herself. There's no detour anymore. The asphalt just keeps going, straight through, the way it used to before anyone in the neighborhood needed to think about it.
That small hesitation is the whole story of Southwest Minneapolis this summer. The Kenilworth and North Cedar Lake trails, closed since May 2019 for construction tied to the Green Line Extension, are open again after nearly seven years. The corridor is back. What hasn't caught up yet is everyone's sense of how to get around their own neighborhood.
Seven Years Is Long Enough to Forget a Shortcut
The numbers help explain why this matters more than a routine trail repaving would. Before the closure, a 2013 count put daily use of the Kenilworth Trail at roughly 2,100 cyclists and 410 pedestrians, and by 2019 the corridor was logging an estimated 746,000 visits a year, making it, by the city's own description, the most intensely used trail in the Minneapolis park system relative to its size. That's not a scenic side path. It's the connective tissue between the Chain of Lakes and downtown, the kind of route people build a whole commute or a whole Saturday around.
| Kenilworth and North Cedar Lake Trails | |
|---|---|
| Closed | May 2019, for Green Line Extension (Southwest LRT) construction |
| Originally promised reopening | 2021 to 2022 |
| Fully reopened and celebrated | May 2026, during Bike Month, almost exactly seven years later |
When the closure hit in 2019, detour signage and construction fencing rerouted regular users onto slower, less direct streets for the better part of a decade. Two promised reopening windows, 2021 and 2022, came and went. Most of the corridor was back in use by late 2025, but a few connection points near Target Field and the Midtown Greenway junction stayed patched together with detours into early 2026. The full loop wasn't formally finished and celebrated until this spring, when Metro Transit marked Bike Month with an event it called Open Trails to Rails.
Here's the detail that makes the delay land harder: as of July 2026, construction on the Green Line Extension itself is largely complete and testing is underway, but the line isn't expected to open to riders until 2027. The trail that the light rail project closed is back in service a full year before the trains it was built for ever run. Southwest Minneapolis got its bike corridor back before the thing that took it away is even finished.
What the Corridor Actually Connects
If you haven't ridden it since the closure, the geography is worth a refresher. The Kenilworth Trail itself runs about a mile and a half, linking the Cedar Lake Trail to the north with the Midtown Greenway to the south. Together, the two trails form the direct, car-free link between the Chain of Lakes and the western edge of downtown, and from Cedar Lake they connect further out to St. Louis Park and Hopkins.
There's a quirk in the layout that longtime users will remember and new riders should know about: near the trail's northern junction just south of I-394, staying on the Cedar Lake Trail toward the lakes requires a marked right turn. Riders who miss it end up on the Kenilworth Trail instead. People have been making that wrong turn for years. It's a small thing, but it's exactly the kind of muscle-memory detail that either gets relearned this summer or keeps sending riders the long way for another season out of habit.
One Minneapolis rider, describing the corridor to CBS Minnesota after the reopening, put it simply: "now it's just going to be that much better." That's the sentiment. Not a discovery. A return.
Why the Timing Matters Right Now
None of this would be worth writing about in isolation if it weren't landing in the same stretch of summer as the last weeks of the Lake Harriet Bandshell season, which makes this corridor's return feel less like infrastructure news and more like a genuinely usable piece of the neighborhood's calendar again.
The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board's Music and Movies in the Parks program runs 95 concerts at the Bandshell alone this year, out of 208 free shows scheduled across eight park venues citywide between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The season closes September 7, which leaves a short, specific window of what's actually left to catch:
- Kenwood Symphony Orchestra, Sunday August 9, evening set
- Zorongo Flamenco Dance Theatre, Sunday August 9, matinee
- Piece of Cake, Wednesday August 26, evening
- The Roundabouts, Saturday August 29, evening
- Dan Israel, Friday September 4, evening
- Dred I Dread closes the season on Labor Day, Monday, September 7
Sunday concerts at the Bandshell run alongside a Minneapolis Park Market set up near the venue, so a Sunday matinee and a walk through the market stalls are already built into the same trip without any extra planning.
For food, the walk-up window at the Lake Harriet Pavilion is Bread & Pickle, the seasonal concession Kim Bartmann has run since 2011, when it became the first Minneapolis Park concession to compost and recycle. The menu leans on grass-fed beef from Peterson Farms in Wisconsin, along with cheese curds, sandwiches, and ice cream, and it's open daily into the evening through the season.
A few miles away in Linden Hills, the neighborhood's own farmers market runs Sundays from 10am to 1pm in the Settergren's Ace Hardware parking lot at 2813 W. 43rd Street, through late October. It's a different market from the one at the Bandshell, smaller and more residential in feel, with a rotating lineup of growers and live music that's been part of the neighborhood since 2012.
The Weekend This Actually Adds Up To
Put the pieces next to each other and something clicks. For most of the last seven years, getting from downtown or St. Louis Park into the Chain of Lakes on a bike meant either fighting through detour signage or giving up and driving. Now the direct route is open again, right as the last few weekends of Bandshell programming, the Sunday Park Market, and the Linden Hills market are all still running on their normal late-summer schedule.
That's a car-free Saturday or Sunday that wasn't fully assembled in this shape for the better part of a decade: ride the reopened Cedar Lake and Kenilworth corridor in from downtown, land at Lake Harriet in time for a matinee or evening concert, grab something from Bread & Pickle, and if the timing works out, swing by Linden Hills before the market wraps at 1pm. None of the individual pieces are new. What's new is that the connective route between them doesn't require a detour anymore.
The gap between what's physically true and what residents still believe about their own commute is usually the last thing to close after a construction project wraps. Southwest Minneapolis is in that gap right now. The trail reopened months ago. The habit of routing around it hasn't fully worn off yet, and the last stretch of Bandshell season, closing September 7, is a good, low-stakes reason to test whether it's worth updating.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood by its actual rhythms rather than its listing photos, that's the sort of detail MinnCenturyMod pays attention to for clients buying, selling, or just trying to understand a specific corner of the Twin Cities. When the time comes to put a number on a home in Southwest Minneapolis or anywhere nearby, get your instant home valuation and start the conversation from there.
