Walk the parking lot behind the shops on Brookside Plaza this week and you'll see it: a stretch of fresh, pale concrete running north from 63rd Street toward 62nd Terrace, the kind that hasn't had a season of foot traffic on it yet. For the length of a couple of city blocks, joggers and dog walkers have been rerouted around orange fencing since early August. That fencing is coming down. City project records list the concrete and trail improvements in this section as complete by September 24, 2026, closing a gap that has interrupted the Trolley Track Trail through the heart of Brookside for as long as most residents can remember.
What those same project records also show is that this is the easy part. The parking lot resurfacing, the repaving of Brookside Plaza itself, and work on 62nd Terrace are scheduled to run through the end of November. Anyone who assumes the trail construction wrapped up this week is going to be surprised by a fresh round of lane and lot closures in October.
Why the Trail Never Actually Connected
The Trolley Track Trail runs six miles, from the Country Club Plaza south to 85th and Prospect, built along the old Country Club streetcar right of way. For most of that distance it reads as a single continuous path. Through Brookside, it never has. Kansas City's Public Works Director has said plainly that when the parking lots behind the Brookside Shops went in, they broke the trail apart, leaving walkers and cyclists to cut through lot traffic and tennis courts instead of following a marked path. One woman who told a local TV station she'd lived nearby for 25 years described the gap as a long-standing barrier to the kind of heavy recreational use the rest of the trail gets.
Fixing it took years of process before it took a single shovel. Kansas City held public design meetings on the project in 2023 and again in October 2024, when the design was still only about 30 percent complete and had no construction funding attached. Two design options were on the table then: reducing Brookside Boulevard from four lanes to two, adding parallel parking along the boulevard, and cutting off direct lot access from 63rd Street in favor of a raised crosswalk with a flashing pedestrian beacon. It wasn't until January 15, 2026, that the city council approved more than $340,000 to actually finish the upgrades between 62nd Terrace and Meyer Boulevard. City Councilman Kevin O'Neill said at the time that anyone who's walked the trail understands how significant that step is for connectivity through the area.
What Closes Now, What's Still Torn Up
The project has moved in phases, and the phase ending this week only covers part of the disruption residents have been navigating since summer.
- The north portion of the parking lot, closed for trail construction between August 3 and September 18, is reopening as that segment of concrete work finishes.
- Three more sections of the same lot, marked out separately in city project maps, will each close for several days in early and mid-October while crews resurface them in turn.
- Mill-and-overlay work on the north parking lot, on Brookside Plaza itself, and on 62nd Terrace is set to begin in October and finish by November 1.
- The Community Improvement District's broader Trolley Track Trail work is expected to wrap by the end of November.
In practical terms, the trail gap that's frustrated walkers for years closes this week, but the lot behind the shops keeps shifting through most of October, and Brookside Plaza will have its own construction footprint into November. Anyone parking behind the shops for a quick coffee run or an evening walk should expect at least one more month of rotating closures before the whole footprint settles.
The Businesses Betting on the Connection
A few of Brookside's newer additions have been positioning themselves around the trail well before the concrete finished curing. Paws and Purrvisions, a pet-focused shop that moved into the former Edward Jones space at 6241 Brookside Plaza, just north of Cru Bistro & Bottles, chose the location specifically because of how many residents already walk dogs along the trail through the neighborhood. It's a bet that foot traffic on a fully connected trail is worth more than foot traffic on a trail people have to detour around.
Meddys opened a second Kansas City metro location at 6301 Brookside Plaza this year, adding to a stretch of Brookside Plaza dining that already includes Carmen's Café, Brookside Barrio, and Charlie Hooper's. A few blocks off the plaza, Tierra Encantada, a Spanish immersion child care and preschool center, opened at 114 E Gregory in February 2026, drawing families who are as likely to be walking a stroller down the trail as driving to the shops.
None of this reads as coincidence once you look at the timeline. The design meetings, the funding vote, the construction phases, and this cluster of openings have all landed within the same twelve months, in a business district whose boundaries, Wornall Road to the west, Main Street to the east, 62nd Terrace to the north, and Meyer Boulevard to the south, are compact enough that a single missing link in the trail affects nearly every storefront inside them.
What This Means If You Use the Trail This Fall
If your routine runs through Brookside on foot or by bike, the next two months are worth planning around rather than reacting to. The gap between 62nd Terrace and 63rd Street should read as continuous trail again starting this week for the first time in the memory of most people who use it regularly. Parking behind the shops will still be inconsistent through October as crews rotate through the remaining lot sections, and Brookside Plaza's own resurfacing pushes that inconsistency into November.
For anyone whose weekend walk, run, or dog-walking loop depends on parking at that lot specifically, building in a backup plan for early and mid-October isn't overcautious, it's just reading the same schedule the city has already published. By the time the Community Improvement District closes out its portion of the work at the end of November, Brookside will have a stretch of trail that's been broken for decades finally reading as one uninterrupted path from the Plaza through the shops.
That kind of infrastructure fix tends to outlast any single season of construction annoyance. A neighborhood that's spent years explaining to visitors why the trail just stops behind the shops gets to stop explaining it.
If you're weighing what a home near Brookside's shops and trail is worth once this kind of connectivity work is finished, LUX Network KC can walk you through what's changed on the ground and what it means for your specific block.
