Two Years of Detours: A Look Back at the Hennepin Phasing Plan

The Hennepin Avenue South reconstruction that wrapped up in late October 2025 did not happen all at once. The city built the roughly 1.4-mile corridor between West Lake Street and Douglas Avenue in two phases over about 18 months, a sequence that determined which stretches closed when and which detours residents and businesses lived with.

Work began around April 2024. Phase 1 ran from West Lake Street to 26th Street and was completed in 2024; Phase 2, from 26th Street to Douglas Avenue, was substantially finished in 2025. Crews moved north along the corridor in sequence rather than tearing up the whole street at once.

Phasing is a standard tool for rebuilding a busy street. A corridor like Hennepin is too important to close entirely, so crews work one segment at a time while traffic continues through the rest. Utility work, paving and curb construction also proceed in an order that cannot easily be done everywhere simultaneously, since underground utilities often have to be addressed before the surface above them is rebuilt.

The trade-off is real. Doing the whole corridor at once would likely be faster and cheaper but would cut off access to every business and home along it simultaneously. Doing it in segments kept Hennepin partly open and spread the burden, but stretched the disruption across two construction seasons. For Wedge, Lowry Hill and lakes-neighborhood residents, that meant the "where is the detour this month" question kept changing, and the businesses hardest hit shifted as the work rolled down the corridor.

Through 2023 to 2025, the city served 36 businesses along Hennepin through its Business Technical Assistance Program. With the corridor reopened and the METRO E Line running since Dec. 6, 2025, the phasing is now history, though punch-list and underground utility work continued afterward. The city documents the full timeline on its Hennepin Avenue South project page.