The Kenilworth Trail Reopened in Lowry Hill. The Party Hasn't.

Ride west out of Lowry Hill this month, drop onto the Cedar Lake Trail below Kenwood Parkway, and you'll notice something that wasn't there a year ago: a continuous, unbroken path all the way to Target Field. No plywood detour signs. No chain-link maze routing you onto Cedar Lake Road. For the first time since May 2019, you can pedal from the western edge of the neighborhood straight into downtown without touching a traffic lane.

That's the headline version. The actual story, the one worth knowing if this corridor is part of your daily route rather than something you read about once in March, is a little messier. The trail is open. The project that closed it is not finished. And the gap between those two facts says something about how infrastructure promises age in this city.

What Seven Years Actually Cost

The Cedar Lake and Kenilworth trails closed on May 13, 2019, to make way for construction of the Metro Green Line Extension, the light rail line that will eventually run from downtown Minneapolis to Eden Prairie. At the time, officials expected the closure to last two to three years. It stretched to nearly seven, with the remaining sections finally reopening this past winter, according to the Hill & Lake Press, the monthly paper that has covered the East Isles, Lowry Hill, Kenwood, Cedar-Isles-Dean and Bde Maka Ska neighborhoods since 1976.

The scale of that closure is easy to understate until you see the numbers. Before 2019, the Metropolitan Council estimated the trail network carried close to a million visits a year. The Kenilworth segment alone, the narrow stretch that runs through the trees east of Cedar Lake and past Kenwood, averaged roughly 2,100 cyclist trips and 400 pedestrian trips a day. That made it, by the city's own description, the most heavily used trail corridor in the Minneapolis park system. For nearly seven years, that volume of people got pushed onto surface streets or longer, less direct routes instead.

Andy Schwarm, an avid cyclist who lives in Lowry Hill and serves as treasurer of the Hill & Lake Press, put it plainly in the paper's own coverage of the reopening: the trail's return means Minneapolis's "bike freeway" reconnects the city. It's a fair description. The corridor links Cedar Lake, Lake of the Isles, the Midtown Greenway, and downtown into something residents have long treated as a single loop rather than four separate trails.

Where "Reopened" Still Has Asterisks

Here's the part that doesn't make it into most of the celebratory coverage. Two friction points remain, and they're the kind you'd only know about if you actually ride the corridor rather than skim a headline about it.

• Near Target Field, ongoing work has left fencing that narrows the Cedar Lake Trail down to a tighter path than the rest of the route.
• South of Cedar Lake, where the Midtown Greenway meets the Kenilworth Trail, a zigzag detour is still in place rather than the direct connection riders had before 2019.

Neither one closes the trail. Both slow it down at exactly the two points where volume is highest: the downtown terminus and the Greenway junction. If your commute or your Saturday loop runs through either spot, you'll feel it before you see it explained anywhere.

The Celebration That Hasn't Happened Yet

Back in March, the Metropolitan Council told the Hill & Lake Press it planned a public celebration of the full reopening once the remaining work wrapped up, and it pointed to this past spring as the target. Spring has come and gone. As of a July 2026 update on its own project page, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board describes construction as "largely complete" with testing now underway on the line itself, and it lists 2027 as the expected opening for the Green Line Extension. There's no mention of a ribbon-cutting or public event in that update, and nothing surfacing since suggests one has happened.

That's not a knock on the project. It's a useful pattern to notice if you live near it: the promised timeline that slipped from three years to seven didn't stop slipping just because the trail reopened. The corridor is functional. The rail line running alongside it is still being tested. The finish line keeps moving a little further out, one season at a time.

What This Means for the Rest of the Season

This fall is effectively the first full outdoor season Lowry Hill and Kenwood residents have had with the whole corridor back since before the pandemic. That matters for two practical reasons.

First, usage is likely to climb back toward that pre-2019 baseline as more people rediscover the route, which means the two remaining pinch points near Target Field and the Midtown Greenway junction will see real pressure for the first time in years. If you're planning a ride into downtown or a loop out toward St. Louis Park, building in a little patience at those two spots isn't a bad habit to start now.

Second, the corridor connecting Cedar Lake, Kenwood Park, and Lake of the Isles is exactly the kind of daily-use amenity that's easy to take for granted until it's gone for seven years. The Lowry Hill Neighborhood Association's own list of neighborhood parks and trails puts these routes right alongside the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden as core to what makes the area what it is. Watching it come back fully, asterisks and all, is a small but real marker of the neighborhood settling back into a rhythm it hadn't had in nearly a decade.

None of this required a press release to notice. It required riding the thing.

If you're the kind of person who tracks how Lowry Hill actually changes, from a reopened trail to a reopened storefront, we're paying attention to the same details. MN Living Real Estate works this neighborhood block by block, not just listing by listing. Let's Connect if you want more of what we're seeing on the ground here.