The city calls it Ridgedale Commons. Crews have already planted mature white pines, twenty-five feet tall going into the ground, and poured the footings for the park building. When it's finished, this two-acre park near Ridgedale Center will be Minnetonka's newest, and the fact that it exists at all is worth noticing. What makes it matter is where it connects once it's done.
Minnetonka has never been short on green space. The city maintains 50 parks and more than 1,000 acres of natural public open space, and better than a fifth of the city is wetlands and lakes. What it has been short on, since Ridgedale opened as a mall in 1973, is a way to walk out of that retail core and land on the same trail system that already threads through Purgatory Community Preserve, Lone Lake Park, and Big Willow. Ridgedale Commons is the piece that closes that gap.
What's Actually Going Into The Park
According to the city, the finished park will include a plaza and grassy lawn built to double as event space, a garden room planted with pollinator-focused species, an interactive fountain, and a wooded lounge area tucked along the edge. Winter gets its own footprint too: space is reserved for an ice skating rink, and the park building will house a warming house alongside restrooms and rentable indoor space.
Landscaping crews started with the mature white pines and the building footings, which tells you the project has moved past the planning stage and into the ground. A new picnic shelter with benches and bike racks is part of the same scope of work, built for people arriving on two wheels rather than four.
The Creek Preserve Next Door Is Part Of The Same Project
Ridgedale Commons was never planned as a standalone park. The same project scope includes upgrades to Crane Lake Preserve, the wooded parcel immediately adjacent, where the city is adding improved views of Crane Lake, upgraded landscaping and trails, and stormwater gardens. Pairing a formal event-oriented park with a naturalized creek preserve right next to it is what turns a green space into a connector. One side gives people a reason to be there. The other side gives them somewhere to walk once they are.
Why This Took Fourteen Years To Show Up
None of this is a sudden idea. In 2012, the city commissioned the Ridgedale Village Center Study, which set out to turn the retail center into a walkable mixed-use district, rebuild Ridgedale Drive as a parkway, and improve pedestrian access across the area. Those goals sat on paper for a long time while Ridgedale kept functioning as exactly what it had always been: a car-dependent commercial strip with a freeway on-ramp nearby and few ways to move through it on foot.
The pieces are landing together now instead of one at a time. The Ridgedale Drive and Cartway Lane Improvement project, running through 2026, is repaving and rebuilding curbs, pedestrian ramps, and traffic signals on the same stretch of road the new park fronts. A few blocks over, Marshall's is in the process of relocating out of the aging two-story Bonaventure Shopping Center into a storefront at Ridgehaven Marketplace with direct street visibility, a move expected to be complete sometime in 2026 and the kind of layout newer retail centers are built around rather than retrofitted into. None of these projects reference each other directly in city paperwork, but they are happening on the same corridor in the same year, and together they read like a plan finally clearing the runway after more than a decade.
Where The Rest Of The Trail System Actually Goes
For anyone who already drives to Purgatory or Lone Lake for a trail fix, here is what each of those parks actually offers and how they link up.
Park | Size | What Sets It Apart | Connects To |
|---|---|---|---|
Purgatory Community Preserve | 155 acres | Largest of the city's five community parks; 1.2-mile Inner Loop crosses Purgatory Creek twice through wetland, prairie, and woods | North under Excelsior Boulevard and Highway 7 via a 1920s cattle pass to the Lake Minnetonka LRT Regional Trail |
Lone Lake Park | 146 acres | Built on a former ski hill, so the trails have real elevation change; dock access on Lone Lake | North to Shady Oak Beach; west to the Minnesota River Bluffs LRT Regional Trail |
Big Willow Community Preserve | 95 acres | Trails run directly along Minnehaha Creek | Feeds into the broader creekside trail network on the city's east side |
Purgatory earned its name from a rougher era. Early travelers on the old route to Excelsior hit a stretch of swampy ground and mosquitoes so bad that one reportedly said the trail was worse than hell itself. Someone corrected him: it was purgatory. The name stuck, and the preserve still carries it today, though the crushed limestone paths and paved hill sections make the modern version considerably easier going.
The Regional Trails Underneath All Of This
The reason a single new park at Ridgedale matters beyond its own two acres is that it plugs into two long-haul regional trails that already exist. The Lake Minnetonka Regional Trail runs about 16 miles between Hopkins and Carver Park Reserve. The Minnesota River Bluffs LRT Regional Trail follows an old rail corridor southwest toward Chanhassen and Chaska. Three Rivers Park District rangers patrol both from April through November.
Those two trails are the spine. Purgatory ties into the Lake Minnetonka LRT. Lone Lake ties into the Minnesota River Bluffs LRT. Once Crane Lake Preserve's trail and landscaping work is finished, Ridgedale Commons becomes a third access point sitting right in the middle of the commercial district instead of out at the edge of a residential neighborhood, which is where every other entry point to this system currently lives.
What This Means For A Fall Or Winter Walk
Trails across the city are plowed after two or more inches of snow, so the network stays usable well past leaf season. The city council issued a proclamation in April recognizing May as Bike Month, citing Minnetonka's trail system and cycling community as part of the reasoning, which suggests the investment in connected paths is a stated priority rather than an afterthought.
Ridgedale Commons is still under construction, and the city has not posted a completion date. What's confirmed is the scope: a park built to work in winter as much as summer, tied to a creek preserve getting the same season of attention, on a corridor that is also getting new sidewalks, curb ramps, and a retail anchor moving into a more walkable storefront. The white pines are the first thing in the ground, and they're the clearest sign of how far along the build actually is.
If you've been curious about what else is shifting around Ridgedale, or how a project like this tends to ripple into the surrounding blocks over time, Anne Rybarczyk Gray is always glad to talk through what's changing in the neighborhood you already call home. Let's Connect.
