The First Plymouth Summer With Both New Anchors Running

A resident who has lived off Bass Lake Road for the past few years remembers what used to sit behind the chain-link fence at the old Prudential campus: nothing. A quiet, fenced-off 75 acres between the highway and the neighborhood, waiting. This summer, for the first time, that lot has a grocery store with three restaurants inside it. Across town, the Hilde Performance Center, long known for its free summer concerts, is hosting its first-ever ticketed weekend with a national touring lineup. Neither of those things existed a year ago. Both are running right now, in the same July and August, for the first time.

That timing is the story. Plymouth has had new restaurants before and it has had concerts at the Hilde before. What it has not had, until this summer, is both of its biggest recent investments live at once. If you have lived here long enough to remember the empty Prudential site or a Hilde calendar with nothing but the free concert series, this is the season where both bets finally paid off on the same calendar.

The Boulevard Gets Its First Working Address

The Boulevard is the name for the redevelopment of that old 75-acre Prudential Financial campus at I-494 and Bass Lake Road, a project led by Roers Companies and Scannell Properties that will eventually bring up to 800 housing units, a business campus, and a park to the site. Most of that is still coming. What opened on March 12, 2026 is the part residents can actually walk into: Coborn's Market & Table, a flagship grocery store built around what the company calls a grocerant model, groceries and full-service restaurants under the same roof.

The dining is not an afterthought bolted onto a produce aisle. Minneapolis chef David Fhima built three fast-casual concepts inside the store, packaged together as The Global Table: Basta Pasta for Italian-inspired dishes, Abuela's Mexican Kitchen for family-style Mexican cooking, and Brother's Burgers for gourmet burgers. Alongside them is The Buttered Tin, the scratch-made bakery and breakfast-and-lunch counter founded by Alicia Hinze, a former Food Network Cupcake Wars champion. This is the Buttered Tin's third location after spots in Northeast Minneapolis and St. Paul, and it runs counter-service style with food delivered to your table rather than a self-serve line. There is also Penny Horse Parlor for Kemp's ice cream and dirty sodas, a Coborn's Wine & Spirits shop, an on-site fuel kiosk, and a pickup and drop-off point for Mulberry's Garment Care.

None of this is generic grocery-anchor filler. It is a specific answer to a specific gap: Plymouth residents on the I-494 corridor previously had to drive toward Maple Grove or into Minneapolis for a sit-down bakery breakfast or a chef-driven Mexican plate. Now that stretch of Bass Lake Road has its own kitchen. The rest of The Boulevard, including the Belterra residential community Roers has been marketing on the same site, is still filling in behind it. Coborn's is the piece that is actually open, and it is the piece that changes a Tuesday errand run into an actual destination.

Hilde's Two Different Summers, Running at Once

The Hilde Performance Center, tucked behind City Hall and next to Life Time Fitness on Plymouth Boulevard, has spent years building a reputation on one thing: free. Hilde Nights brings a headliner and an opening act to the lawn each month all summer at no cost, and Music in Plymouth, a tradition that predates most of the neighborhood's current housing stock, has drawn crowds for more than 50 years with a Minnesota Orchestra performance capped by fireworks.

This year the city added a second, very different layer on top of that free calendar. Hilde Amplified is a brand-new ticketed series, announced in a city press release in May, bringing nationally touring acts to the same lawn for the first time. Jennifer Tomlinson, the city's Director of Parks and Recreation, described the venue as having "exceptional acoustics, expansive lawn seating and a welcoming atmosphere." The 2026 debut weekend backs that up with names Plymouth has never hosted before at this scale.

Reading that table straight through is the point. A resident who only ever went for the free Hilde Nights show now has a second, entirely different reason to end up on that lawn in the same season, and the city timed the ticketed debut to land in between two of its long-running free dates rather than competing with them.

The Wednesday That Moves to the Same Street

The Plymouth Farmers Market runs every Wednesday from 2 to 6 p.m., June 17 through September 30, at Parkers Lake Playfield. That part is not new. What is worth noticing is where it goes on three specific Wednesdays this season: July 15, August 12, and September 16, the market relocates to Plymouth Boulevard, the same street the Hilde sits on.

Those three dates fall in the gaps between the summer's biggest draws. July 15 sits between Music in Plymouth on July 8 and Hilde Nights on July 17. August 12 lands less than two weeks after the Hilde Amplified weekend. It is a small, easy-to-miss scheduling detail, but it means the city's own weekly market is threading itself through the same corridor and the same calendar as the concert lineup, rather than staying parked at Parkers Lake all season. The vendor list stays the same wherever the market sets up: Diamond City Bread, Great Harvest Bread, Untiedt's Vegetable Farm, Svihel Vegetable Farm, and Natasha's Perogi are among the regulars, with this year's market sponsored by Revolution Chiropractic Wellness Center.

What the Trails Are Doing While You're Not Watching

None of this reads the same if you cannot get there without a car, so it is worth knowing what the city is doing with its trail network this year. Lake Camelot Park has been under construction since the fall of 2025, when boardwalk removal began as part of the Chankahda Trail Project. Playground installation there is scheduled to start today, August 17, with the new four-season restroom building, picnic shelter, and bike racks following close behind. If you have avoided that stretch because of the closed lots and flaggers, the finish line is close.

On the Luce Line Regional Trail, the east boardwalk near West Medicine Lake Drive has permanent decking installed and is fully open. The west boardwalk is running on temporary decking while Three Rivers Park District waits on timber for the permanent fix, but the trail itself has not closed. That corridor matters beyond the repair work: it connects to the paved West Medicine Lake Trail, which runs 2.7 miles between the Medicine Lake Regional Trail and the Luce Line, linking neighborhoods around Medicine Lake to Parkers Lake and, from there, into the same general orbit as the Hilde and the farmers market's Wednesday moves.

The Season Adds Up to Something New

Take these threads together and the pattern is not a list of separate happy accidents. A grocery store with three chef-driven restaurants opened on a site that sat empty for years. A concert venue built its reputation on being free added its first-ever ticketed weekend with national touring acts. A farmers market that has run at the same park for years started spending three Wednesdays a season on the concert venue's street instead. None of these are dependent on each other, but all three are new this year, and all three are active in the same few weeks. That has not happened before in Plymouth, and it is worth knowing before assuming this summer looks like the last one.

If any of this has you thinking about what it would mean to actually live inside that walk-to-it version of Plymouth, or to sell a home here while that story is still building, Elizabeth McKevitt Perez and the team at McKevitt Perez Real Estate know this corridor block by block. Reach out when you're ready to find the lifestyle you want.