The Boulevard Is Open in Plymouth. Most of It Still Isn't.
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
If you've picked up a rotisserie chicken or grabbed lunch from the food hall at Coborn's Market & Table on Bass Lake Road, you've probably filed The Boulevard away as done. It has a grocery store, a clinic, restaurants under one roof, and apartments leasing next door. That's a fair read from the parking lot. It's also only about a third of the story.
The 75-acre site at Interstate 494 and Bass Lake Road, formerly Prudential's corporate campus, is being built in phases that run on genuinely different clocks. Some of it opened months ago. Some of it opens this fall. Some of it doesn't open until 2027, and one piece hasn't broken ground at all. For anyone who lives near enough to hear the construction, knowing which phase you're actually looking at on any given drive-by is more useful than the general sense that "something's happening over there."
Two pieces of The Boulevard have been operating long enough to have regulars.
Summit Orthopedics opened its 80,000-square-foot clinic at the corner of Bass Lake Road and I-494 in October 2025, offering surgery, therapy, imaging, and urgent care under one roof. It's been open just under a year.
Coborn's Market & Table opened March 12, 2026, and it's not a standard grocery run. The store is built around what Coborn's calls a "grocerant" concept, a full-service grocery paired with a genuine food hall. Twin Cities chef David Fhima, who also runs Fhima's Minneapolis, Maison Margaux, and Vagabondo in Excelsior, developed three fast-casual concepts for the space: Basta Pasta, Abuela's Mexican Kitchen, and Brother's Burgers, the last one using grass-fed beef from Thousand Hills in Becker. Alongside Fhima's concepts sits a third location of The Buttered Tin, the bakery and cafe run by James Beard-recognized chef and Food Network "Cupcake Wars" winner Alicia Hinze. There's also Penny Horse Parlor, an ice cream counter built around Coborn's old penny-horse ride and stocked with Kemps scoops, and a seating area that hosts live music in warmer months. The store also handles dry cleaning drop-off and pickup through a partnership with Mulberry's Garment Care, which is a small detail but the kind that changes how you route your errands.
The detail that explains why Coborn's built something this elaborate here, rather than a standard store, is worth sitting with. Before designing the store, Coborn's ran focus groups with people who live within a few miles of the site and asked what they actually wanted from a grocery trip. What came back wasn't a request for more aisles. It was a version of the same problem every household running on a weeknight schedule already knows: some nights you cook, some nights you want a quick bite, some nights you'd rather just sit down and order. Coborn's president Emily Coborn Wright has described that as the "mealtime dilemma," and the store's layout, with a full market on one side and three restaurants and a bakery on the other, is a direct answer to it rather than a generic feature.
That's a useful thing to know if you've wondered why a grocery store in Plymouth has a bar-adjacent food court instead of just a deli counter. It didn't happen by accident, and it didn't happen because grocery chains are suddenly doing this everywhere. It happened because this particular neighborhood said that's what it wanted.
Here's where the "it's basically done" read starts to break down.
The Belterra apartments, the first residential phase, began leasing this fall. The building includes 207 units, from studios to three-bedrooms, with amenities that include a sky deck, a sauna, a cold-plunge room, and a golf simulator. About 20 percent of those units are reserved for households earning up to 60 percent of the area median income. But leasing started doesn't mean move-in day has arrived for everyone. Look for the building itself to open in early 2027.
That's roughly the same timeline as several other pieces still working through construction:
Add it up and the total residential plan for the site runs as high as 925 units once every phase is finished. Right now, between Belterra and Melrose, roughly 419 of those units are leasing or under construction. That's less than half.
Plymouth Mayor Jeff Wosje described the ambition behind the site at its 2024 groundbreaking as building "a city within a city," with restaurants sitting on the water and a network of walking paths tying the whole thing together. That's a real plan with real permits behind it. It's just not this year's plan. What you can walk to today is groceries, a clinic, and a food hall. What the mayor described is still mostly rendering and construction fencing.
If you live within a few miles of Bass Lake Road, the practical takeaway isn't "wait until it's finished," because "finished" is a moving target that stretches into 2027 and possibly beyond. The useful move is matching your expectations to the current phase.
Right now, that means: grocery pickup or delivery from Coborn's, a sit-down lunch from Basta Pasta or Abuela's without driving further into Minneapolis, orthopedic appointments a few minutes closer than they used to be, and dry cleaning that doesn't require a separate stop. It does not yet mean a waterfront park to walk the dog around, a Jersey Mike's sub on the way home, or a finished streetscape connecting all the pieces on foot. Those are next year's neighborhood, not this year's.
It also means the housing story here is more mixed than a single glossy apartment rendering suggests. Between Belterra's income-restricted units and Melrose's full building of affordable housing, a meaningful share of what's being built at The Boulevard is aimed at price points beyond luxury market-rate, which matters for anyone tracking what kind of neighbor mix is actually forming around the development, not just what kind of restaurant is opening next.
The honest version of "what's happening at The Boulevard" isn't a single answer. It's four or five answers on four or five different timelines, and the difference between "open," "leasing," "under construction," and "not yet started" is the whole story if you're planning your next year of errands, dinners, or walks around it.
If watching a development like this unfold has you thinking more broadly about what's changing in your corner of Plymouth, or whether now's the right time to make a move of your own, Michael and Sadie McGregor know this stretch of the western suburbs well enough to talk through it plainly. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
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