Ride the Kenilworth Trail north from the Midtown Greenway on a weekday morning and the woods close in fast, oak and buckthorn crowding the path before it opens onto the eastern shore of Cedar Lake. From certain clearings you can just make out the rooflines along Kenwood's western edge, the kind of houses that don't need to announce themselves. For most of the last decade, that view wasn't available to anyone. The trail was fenced off, torn up, and rerouted for light rail construction, and what you saw through the trees was equipment, not architecture.
It reopened earlier this year, after nearly seven years closed. That timing turns out to matter for reasons that have nothing to do with biking. Two days from now, on August 7, the Uptown Art Fair returns after a long absence, and instead of setting up on Hennepin Avenue where it has run for six decades, it's setting up on Lake of the Isles Parkway, closer to Kenwood's front doors than the fair has ever been in its history.
The closure that outlasted its own timeline
The Metropolitan Council closed large stretches of the Kenilworth and Cedar Lake trails in the spring of 2019 to build the Green Line Extension, the light rail line eventually meant to run from downtown Minneapolis through St. Louis Park, Hopkins, and Minnetonka to Eden Prairie. The trails were supposed to reopen by 2021 or 2022. Delays kept them closed for five additional years, with the last sections clearing earlier this year.
Before the closure, the Kenilworth corridor carried an estimated 746,000 visits a year, more than any other trail segment in the city's park system, according to the Kenilworth Trail's own usage history. That traffic didn't relocate while the path was closed. It mostly stopped, and cyclists who used to cut through the trees got funneled onto Cedar Lake Parkway and side streets that were never built to carry that volume.
The trail is open now, but the project it made room for isn't finished. The Metropolitan Council still expects the Green Line Extension to begin passenger service in 2027, and while test trains are already running on other parts of the line, testing through the Kenilworth corridor itself wasn't scheduled to start until later this year. A spring 2026 report from Hill and Lake Press noted fencing still narrowing the Cedar Lake Trail near Target Field and a detour remaining at the Midtown Greenway junction at the time. But the part that touches daily life in Kenwood, the walking and biking path itself, is back.
The fair that used to be blocks away is now on the parkway
The Uptown Art Fair has run for 62 years, almost always along Hennepin Avenue in the commercial heart of Uptown. It was canceled outright in 2020 and 2021, then in 2024 it moved to a parking lot at Bachman's on South Lyndale and rebranded as the SoMi Art Fair, a response to Hennepin Avenue construction, ADA access problems on the redesigned street, and the rising cost of round-the-clock security.
This year it's back under its old name, but not in its old spot. Rebranded "Art in the Isles" for 2026, the fair is setting up along Lake of the Isles Parkway and the adjoining Mall, a stretch of parkland it has never occupied before in six decades of existence. New Uptown Association executive director Stefani Pennaz has called the move a milestone in the district's recovery, and half of the event's net proceeds will go toward a new Uptown District Reinvestment Initiative aimed at business support and safety.
The numbers on how big the fair actually is depend on who you ask. The Uptown Association's own event page lists 200 juried artists. Press coverage ahead of the event, including reporting from the Star Tribune, put the figure closer to 300. Either way, it's a lot of tents on a parkway that normally sees dog walkers and the occasional wedding photographer.
Hours for the weekend, per the East Isles Neighborhood Association's calendar: Friday from 1 to 7 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Why the location itself is the real story
Here's the detail that gets lost in the coverage about the fair's comeback: Lake of the Isles Parkway isn't technically Uptown at all. A small area plan the Minneapolis City Council approved in 2008 draws Uptown's boundary to end where the Chain of Lakes begins, which means this year's fair is happening just outside the district whose name it carries, on ground that borders Kenwood, East Isles, and Lowry Hill instead.
That's not a trivia point. It changes what the weekend feels like on the ground. A fair on Hennepin Avenue is a commercial-strip event you drive to and park near. A fair on Lake of the Isles Parkway is happening on the street residents already walk their dogs on, next to the bench they already sit on, in view of houses instead of storefronts. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board requires a parkway use permit for any event that closes lanes or brings in vendor trucks, the same permit process that governs weddings and block parties on that stretch, so residents should expect the ordinary version of that disruption: reduced parking, foot traffic on quieter blocks, a Sunday that doesn't feel like other Sundays.
Two boundary corridors, open at the same time, for the first time in years
Put the two stories next to each other and the coincidence stops looking like a coincidence and starts looking like a pattern worth naming. Kenwood is bordered on the west by the Kenilworth corridor and on the east by Lake of the Isles Parkway. For most of the last seven years, one of those edges was fenced off entirely and the other was just a lake you happened to live near. This is the first August since before construction began that a person could walk out one side of the neighborhood onto a fully reopened regional trail and out the other side into the biggest art fair the region runs, set up closer to home than it's ever been.
That's a different neighborhood than the one that existed in July. Not because anything about the houses changed, but because the two corridors that define how people actually move through Kenwood are both active again, at the same time, for the first time since the fences went up.
The block in between hasn't slowed down either
None of this displaced the smaller rhythms that were already here. The Kenwood, the neighborhood restaurant on West 21st Street across from Kenwood Elementary, changed hands in 2021 when chef Joel DeBilzan bought it from founding owner Don Saunders, who opened it in 2012 while also running In Season, a sister restaurant a few blocks away. DeBilzan started as a sous chef under Saunders, left for Seattle to train under restaurateur Ethan Stowell, became head chef of Stowell's flagship Tavolata Belltown, then came home in 2019 to run the Kenwood's kitchen before buying the place outright two years later. Not far away is Birchbark Books and Native Arts, the independent shop owned by Ojibwe author and Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Erdrich.
Earlier this summer, the neighborhood's other landmark got its annual tune-up. The Lake of the Isles Pencil, a 20-foot sculpture carved from a 180-year-old bur oak that came down in a storm on a lakeside lawn, was sharpened in front of a crowd on June 6, the fifth year the neighborhood has turned out for it. Peavey Fountain, the 1891 horse trough at Kenwood Parkway and West Lake of the Isles Parkway that was later rededicated as a memorial to the horses of the 151st Field Artillery, sits on the exact stretch of parkway the art fair will occupy this weekend. It's been there through six decades of Uptown Art Fairs that never came this close. This is the first one it will actually watch happen.
None of this is a reason to buy or sell anything. It's just what this particular August looks like here, and it hasn't looked like this in a long time.
If you're curious how Kenwood's slice of the market is holding up alongside all this activity, or you just want a longer conversation about the neighborhood from someone who spends a lot of time paying attention to it, Josh Zuehlke & Co would be glad to talk. You can also browse our full Kenwood neighborhood page or see what else is happening around Southwest Minneapolis this season on our weekly events roundup. Contact Us anytime.
