After Seven Years, the Kenilworth Trail Reopens

When crews closed large portions of the Kenilworth and Cedar Lake trails in 2019 for construction of the Metro Green Line Extension, officials expected the disruption to last a few years. It lasted closer to six. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board reopened the main stretch, between Cedar Lake Parkway and Target Field, on Nov. 28, 2025, ending a closure that had become a sore point of its own.

A short segment of the Kenilworth Trail between the Midtown Greenway and Cedar Lake Parkway remained closed for finishing work on a tunnel systems house before reopening. For many regular riders, the corridor had been off-limits for nearly the entire arc of their commuting routine, long enough that a generation of newer cyclists knew it only as closed.

The cause was the scale of the build. The bike and pedestrian corridor runs parallel to the BNSF Railway line out of downtown Minneapolis, the same narrow strip where the Metropolitan Council was installing track, building stations and boring the Kenilworth tunnel. Threading a railroad through that tight space beside an active freight line could not be done while keeping a busy trail open alongside it.

The Kenilworth and North Cedar Lake trails are not only recreational loops. They provide a low-stress, largely car-free link to downtown Minneapolis from St. Louis Park, Hopkins and Southwest Minneapolis, and the Park Board calls the route among the most intensely used trails in its system. With the corridor closed, riders were forced onto busier streets, and a key spine of the regional bike network was simply missing for years.

The reopening, reported by neighborhood outlets including the Hill & Lake Press, drew genuine relief from riders who had nearly given up on the route. The light rail the closure made way for will run for generations, with passenger service now slated for early 2027; the trail shutdown that came with building it touched the better part of a decade of bike commutes.