Chanhassen's Old Cinema Lot Finally Has Names, and They're Running on Different Clocks

Drive past West 78th Street and Market Boulevard this month and you will see two names stenciled onto construction signage where the Chanhassen Cinema used to stand: Harlow and Bennett. If you have lived here long enough to remember watching a movie on that corner, the names probably mean nothing to you yet. They should. The two buildings replacing the old cinema and the shuttered Country Inn & Suites are not one project with one finish line. They are two separate buildings on two separate schedules, and that gap matters more than the fencing suggests.

Roers Companies is building on roughly four acres at that intersection, the same footprint that once held the theater and the hotel. The east building, Harlow, is on track to open in December 2026. The west building, Bennett, follows nine months later, in September 2027. Together they add close to 15,000 square feet of ground-floor space for restaurants, retail, and services, with about 310 market-rate apartments stacked above and roughly 408 underground parking stalls tucked beneath. A new stretch of Laredo Drive will cut through the site, something the block has never had before, giving downtown an internal street where there used to be one long uninterrupted lot.

Why One Building Opens Before the Other Even Starts to Matter

The staggered timeline is not an accident of construction scheduling. It changes what a Chanhassen resident should actually expect walking into 2027. If you are hoping to grab dinner at a new storefront on that corner by the holidays, Harlow is the building to watch, and even that opening will land with only a fraction of the site finished. Bennett, the building closer to Market Boulevard itself, will not be ready until nearly a year later. Anyone picturing a single ribbon-cutting where the whole corner reopens at once is picturing something that will not happen. This is a two-phase reopening, and the first phase is smaller than the renderings make it look.

The site plan also carries some texture worth knowing if you park downtown out of habit. Two mid-block pedestrian paths, called paseos in the planning documents, will connect customer parking behind the buildings to the storefronts facing 78th Street. Storefronts, walk-up townhomes, and building lobbies will all face the public sidewalk, while the service areas and structured parking sit behind or below. It is a more urban layout than the strip-and-surface-lot pattern much of downtown Chanhassen has used for decades.

What Happened to the Prince Wall

If you knew the old Chanhassen Cinema at all, you probably knew it for one thing beyond the movies. After Prince's death, the side of the building carried a mural in his memory, a detail tied directly to the fact that Paisley Park sits inside city limits. That mural did not survive the demolition. City planning records from when the project first went through approvals noted that losing the mural was one of the specific concerns residents raised during the public hearing process, right alongside worries about traffic and the loss of the hotel that Chanhassen Dinner Theatres patrons used to book. The building is gone. What replaces the tribute, if anything does, has not been part of the public record so far.

The Parade That Didn't Come Back This Year

Downtown construction touches more than one corner. City Center Park has spent this year as a staging ground for Civic Campus Phase 2, and that project ate enough of the park's usable space that the city made a call it had not made before: the Grand Parade did not run in 2026. Fourth of July weekend still happened, with music, fireworks, and family activities across July 2 through 4, but the parade route and staging area were simply unavailable in a form the city was willing to run. For anyone who has built a summer tradition around watching that parade from the same curb every year, this was the year it broke, not because anyone canceled the holiday, but because the ground underneath it is being rebuilt.

That is the pattern worth noticing across downtown Chanhassen this year. Nothing closed for good. Things kept moving, but around construction rather than through it, and the calendar this fall reflects that same logic in a different building entirely.

The Curtain Call Is Timing Itself Around Construction Too

Chanhassen Dinner Theatres is not part of the Roers redevelopment, but it sits close enough to the construction zone that its own fall programming reads like another version of the same staggered-timeline story. Guys and Dolls, the main stage production that has run since February, closes September 26. Annie opens to previews October 2, giving the theater almost no dark week between its two biggest shows of the year.

President and Artistic Director Tamara Kangas Erickson has a personal reason for bringing the show back now. She appeared in the theater's first production of Annie in 1983, at age twelve, and has said the experience shaped her entire career.

"I also feel like this is the best time to be bringing it back for our audiences because Annie, the little orphan who's had more than her fair share of hard knocks, is just so full of hope and optimism."

The theater itself has weathered its own version of downtown's construction disruption. When the Country Inn & Suites came down as part of the Roers project, it took out a hotel that Chanhassen Dinner Theatres patrons regularly booked for out-of-town visits. The venue has kept running full seasons anyway, eight performances a week across its main stage lineup, the same rhythm it has held since 1968.

What This Actually Means for Your Next Dinner Downtown

None of downtown's businesses have closed because of any of this. That is worth saying plainly, because the fencing and detour signage can make it look otherwise. The Market Boulevard corridor has been through roadway resurfacing, utility upgrades, trail work, and railroad crossing improvements this year, and the reroutes that come with that kind of work have shifted where people park to grab dinner on a given block. But the restaurants are still open, the dinner theater is still running two productions back to back, and the newer casual spots are leaning into the disruption rather than around it.

Moe's Char House, the newer steakhouse and bar downtown, is streaming Chanhassen High School Storm football games on four televisions this fall, two in the restaurant and two in the bar, an easy option if you want to watch the game somewhere that isn't your own living room. The same spot has a Hay Acoustic set booked for Saturday, September 26, from 7 to 10 p.m., which happens to land on the exact night Guys and Dolls closes across town. It is a small coincidence, but it says something about how downtown Chanhassen is choosing to run its fall calendar around a construction zone rather than waiting it out.

The corner at West 78th and Market Boulevard will look different by this time next year, and different again the year after that once Bennett opens. For now, the honest way to think about it is two buildings, two finish lines, and a downtown that has decided to keep its restaurants, its theater, and its Friday nights running in the meantime.

If you are watching this corner of Chanhassen change and wondering what it means for property values, timing, or whether now is the right moment to buy or sell nearby, Michael McGregor can walk you through what the redevelopment is likely to mean for the neighborhood around it. Schedule a consultation to talk through what you're seeing on the ground.