By Monday morning, Lake Street in Wayzata looked like it always does. The carnival trailers were gone. The dachshunds had gone home. The 52nd annual James J. Hill Days had drawn more than 80,000 people to downtown Wayzata over three days, then packed itself up and disappeared until next September.
Six miles west, on Bass Lake Road in Plymouth, nothing packed up. Nothing was ever set up to begin with. What's there just kept being there, and it kept getting a little bigger than it was the week before.
That difference is the whole story of these two towns right now, and it says something worth understanding if you live in either one.
What Eighty Thousand People Look Like for Three Days
James J. Hill Days has run every September since 1975, and this year's edition, presented by Sandvold Financial Group and organized by the Wayzata West Metro Chamber, brought its familiar mix back to the shores of Lake Minnetonka: a 175-vendor street market, the Lake Minnetonka Carnival, a Coaster Cart Derby for kids, and the 42nd annual Dachshund Races at the JJHD Dog Park. The Wayzata Depot Museum opened its doors for the weekend too, running its model railroad for anyone who wanted a look at the town's history alongside its present.
None of that is new. What was new this year was the music. For 2026, the Wayzata City Council approved two ticketed concerts at the Boatworks property, expected to draw about 2,500 people each night, with promoter Rick Born and RB Productions running the shows. That approval mattered because a similar proposal for 2025, branded WAAM Fest, had been turned down after residents raised noise complaints. The council came back around this year, voted 5-0, and attached conditions on sound levels, parking, and crowd management. Members were candid that they hadn't forgotten the calls that came in last time.
That's a small fight over two nights of music. But it's evidence of something bigger: downtown Wayzata has one Lake Street, and it has neighbors living close enough to hear a bass line through their windows. Every addition to the festival, even a beloved one, has to be negotiated against that same fixed strip of ground.
Even the Restaurant Two Blocks Over Picked Easier
The same tension shows up in smaller ways. Days before Hill Days kicked off, Lindsay Pohlad's restaurant Eloise closed for a few days and reopened Sept. 4 under a new name and a new posture: Bar Eloise. The fine dining format is gone. In its place is an expanded patio, bar seating, televisions, and a menu built for walk-ins rather than reservations. The restaurant's own message to guests was straightforward: people loved Eloise, but they wanted something easier to drop into on a regular Tuesday.
That's not a big headline on its own. But paired with the concert fight, it reads as the same instinct twice. Wayzata's downtown is compact, historic, and largely built out. When something new wants in, something else has to flex, whether that's a restaurant rethinking its format or a festival negotiating decibel limits with the block behind it.
Six Miles West, Nobody Had to Fight for the Space
Plymouth doesn't have that problem, because Plymouth has 75 acres that used to be a Prudential Financial office campus and is now becoming something else entirely. The project is called The Boulevard, a joint effort between Roers Companies and Scannell Properties, and unlike Lake Street, it isn't squeezed against a fixed footprint. It's being built from a blank slate, one tenant at a time, with room left over.
Here's how the buildout has actually gone so far:
Tenant or Phase | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|
Summit Orthopedics | Open since October 2025, first tenant on site |
Coborn's Market & Table | Opened March 12, 2026, anchoring the retail core |
The Buttered Tin | Operating inside Coborn's, third location for the bakery-cafe |
The Global Table (chef David Fhima) | Open inside Coborn's, three concepts under one roof |
Penny Horse Parlor | Open inside Coborn's, ice cream counter using Kemp's |
Belterra apartments | 207 units, leasing has started |
Chase Bank | Expected to open within weeks |
Fairview Health clinic | 12,000 square feet, targeting a January opening |
Melrose apartments | 212 affordable units, under construction |
Coborn's Market & Table is the anchor, and it's not a standard grocery run. Inside, chef David Fhima built three concepts under one banner called The Global Table: Basta Pasta, Abuela's Mexican Kitchen, and Brother's Burgers. The Buttered Tin, known for scratch-made breakfasts and baked goods with locations in northeast Minneapolis and St. Paul, opened its third location here. Penny Horse Parlor rounds it out with a retro ice cream counter serving Kemp's.
Everything before Coborn's had already been building for over a year. Summit Orthopedics broke ground in October 2024 and opened its 78,000-square-foot clinic a year later, giving Plymouth residents an orthopedic surgery center, imaging services, and physical therapy without a drive to Eagan or Woodbury.
What Gets Added Next
The pace hasn't slowed. According to recent reporting from CCX Media, Belterra's 207 apartments have started leasing, with the building's amenity list running toward the unusual for the west metro: a sky deck, a sauna, a cold plunge room, a golf simulator, and a speakeasy. A Chase Bank branch is expected to open within weeks along Bass Lake Road. A 12,000-square-foot Fairview Health primary care clinic is slated for January. And Melrose, a second apartment building with 212 units set aside as affordable housing across a range of income levels, is already under construction, something Plymouth city leaders had pushed for over several years.
A two-tenant retail building with a dental office and a Jersey Mike's is also planned to open in 2027, and the city has a public park with walking trails designed around the site's wetland, expected to break ground the same year.
The Real Difference Between the Two Towns
Wayzata solved the question of shared public life by compressing an entire year of it into one long weekend. That's not a criticism. It's a function of geometry. A small historic downtown on a lake can only host so much at once, so the town builds one enormous, carefully negotiated event and spends the other 362 days being quiet.
Plymouth is solving the same question differently, because it has the acreage to do it differently. Instead of one weekend that everyone circles on the calendar, The Boulevard is adding a grocery counter here, a clinic there, an apartment building with a sauna, a bank branch, a second round of affordable housing. None of it needs a permit fight over noise, because none of it is competing for the same three days on the same stretch of road. It just keeps accumulating.
If you live in Wayzata, that means your town's big civic moment is genuinely big, and genuinely worth planning around, because it only comes once a year. If you live in Plymouth, it means paying attention to a slower story: every few months, something else along Bass Lake Road opens its doors, and the corner reads a little more like a real district and a little less like the old Prudential campus every time.
Both towns are getting somewhere. They're just getting there on different clocks.
If you're curious what either rhythm means for a home search in Wayzata, Plymouth, or anywhere else in the west metro, the team at Move Real Estate knows both towns well enough to walk you through it block by block. Let's Connect.
