If you walked the Trolley Track Trail behind Brookside Plaza this week, you hit orange fencing where the path normally slips past the tennis courts and into the lot. The asphalt back there is gone, chewed up by machinery, and a detour sign pushes you out to 63rd Street instead. This isn't a two-day inconvenience you can wait out over a coffee at the Roasterie. It's the start of a city project that's going to change how you move through the shops for the rest of 2026.
Here's what would surprise you if you only look at the fencing: two new businesses just opened in Brookside anyway, betting that people will keep walking through the disruption instead of driving around it.
What's actually closed, and until when
Kansas City's Capital Projects office has been gathering resident input on this stretch of trail since at least August 2023, when it held the first of two public design meetings. City Council put real money behind it on January 15, 2026, approving more than $340,000 for design work on the Trolley Track Trail. Councilman Kevin O'Neill put it plainly when the funding passed: "I think anybody that's walked the trail knows how significant this step is in connectivity to that area."
Here's the part that doesn't show up on the orange fencing: the project is split into two phases, and only one of them is actually funded and moving right now. The city's own project page lays it out:
- The north portion, between 62nd Terrace and 63rd Street, started construction in August 2026. That's the work behind the fencing right now.
- The south portion, from 63rd Street down to Meyer Boulevard, is still in design and still waiting on construction funding. Nobody has broken ground on that half.
- A section of the parking lot behind the shops is closed from August 3 through September 18 while crews finish the funded north segment.
- That funded segment, along with related concrete work, is expected to be done by September 24.
- Mill-and-overlay resurfacing on the north parking lot, Brookside Plaza, and 62nd Terrace all start in October and are targeted to wrap by November 1.
- The Community Improvement District's complementary work along the trail is expected to be finished by the end of November.
So the disruption you're feeling this month is real, but it's also half the story. The funded stretch should be walkable again by late September. The other half, toward Meyer Boulevard, isn't scheduled at all yet.
Two new storefronts bet on foot traffic anyway
You'd expect new businesses to wait out news like this. Two didn't.
Disco Burger, the smashburger concept that's been running out of a kiosk at Varsity Club in River Market since 2024, is opening a brick-and-mortar in the Brookside neighborhood at 600 E. 63rd St. this summer. Owners Matt Chapman and Darren Carter are opening in stages: a to-go window first, then a dine-in section with an expanded menu that adds steak frites and seasonal vegetables to the smashburgers and crinkle-cut fries that built their following downtown.
Inside the Brookside Shops themselves, a different new business made a similar bet, and said so out loud. Paws and Purrvisions, a pet retail shop, moved into the former Edward Jones space at 6241 Brookside Plaza, just north of Cru Bistro & Bottles. According to Inside Brookside, the owner picked the location specifically because Brookside is walkable and "so many residents walking their dogs along the trail." She's stocking sports-themed pet gear, cat enrichment toys, and breed-specific jewelry, offering pet photography sessions several times a year and custom portraits year-round, all built around foot traffic that arrives on two legs and four paws instead of four wheels.
Only one of the two owners named the trail out loud as her reason for choosing Brookside. But both signed leases while the neighborhood's biggest public works project in years was already on the calendar.
A shopping district built for cars now runs on people walking dogs
That bet only makes sense once you know what Brookside actually is. Visit KC's own description calls it Kansas City's first suburban shopping area, planned by J.C. Nichols starting in 1919 and explicitly designed to serve what the fact sheet calls "the automobile set." It was, from the ground up, a car-district. Parking lots weren't an afterthought here. They were the point.
Which is what makes the current construction interesting rather than just annoying. The trail has had a real gap running through this stretch of the shopping district for years. When Martin City Telegraph covered a public design meeting back in October 2024, the stated goal was to reconnect the trail across the full stretch from 62nd Terrace to Meyer Boulevard because it disappears within the shops themselves. Nearly two years later, the city has only found the money for half of it. The north half, behind the tennis courts and the parking lot, is what's getting fixed this fall. The south half, down toward Meyer Boulevard, is still just a design file waiting on a budget line.
So the timing lines up in a way that's easy to miss if you're only frustrated about the missing parking spots. A car-first district built in 1919 is, in 2026, funding its pedestrian connection one half at a time, and a pet store owner already signed a lease based on the half that exists today.
What still runs on schedule
Not everything in Brookside is paused for construction. Two things residents can plan around right now:
- The Brookside Farmers Market runs Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., a schedule confirmed on the Brookside Business Association's site, through October 31, at HJ's Community Center, 6425 Wornall Road. Construction doesn't touch that lot.
- Dog Days of BKS, the Brookside Business Association's dog-focused event, is set for Saturday, August 15, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. It lands right in the middle of the funded construction phase and not long after Paws and Purrvisions opened its doors, which makes it a reasonable place to see whether the shop's bet on dog traffic is already paying off.
Both are worth putting on the calendar regardless of which entrance to the plaza you end up using this month.
The fencing is the story, not the interruption
It's tempting to read a torn-up parking lot as bad news for a shopping district, especially one with more than 80 shops, restaurants, and services packed into a few blocks. But set the two-phase construction timeline next to what opened this summer and what's already scheduled through the fall, and a different picture shows up. Only half the trail gap is funded. The parking lot is closed for weeks, not months. And the businesses that just signed leases aren't acting like either one matters as much as the sidewalk does.
If you live in Brookside, that's worth knowing before you plan your next trip to the shops. If you're the kind of neighbor who tracks what a place like this is actually worth, that same foot-traffic logic tends to show up later in how a block holds its value. When you're ready to talk about either one, Livin KC knows this stretch of Wornall and Brookside Boulevard block by block, construction schedule included. Reach out any time, or start with a free home valuation if you're curious what a Brookside address is worth right now.
