If you've walked past Erie and Edwards lately, you already know Parkside is moving into the corner storefront MexCantina closed out of in December 2025. A few blocks over, chef Jared Bennett has been building out Jarrido's in the old Dutch's space. Neither of these moves needed a zoning hearing, a referendum petition, or a scale model at City Hall. That's the part of the Hyde Park Square story that keeps getting buried under the headline fight over the $150 million redevelopment project: the Square's actual, physical turnover isn't waiting on anyone's vote.
For two years now, the biggest news out of Hyde Park has been about a single site that hasn't broken ground. Meanwhile, the storefronts residents actually walk past every day have kept changing hands, block by block, on their own schedule.
Two Storefronts, No Approval Required
Parkside is the 48-seat restaurant that's been serving Hyde Park at 2637 Erie Ave. Owner Trevor Snowden, who also runs Mount Lookout's Delwood and Guardia, plans to keep that original location open through construction while building out the new spot, with a target opening in spring 2027. No rezoning, no coordinated site review, just a lease on a corner that had already gone dark.
Chef Jared Bennett, who has cooked at Branch, Metropole, and Maplewood Kitchen over the years, picked the former Dutch's space at 3366-3378 Erie Avenue for Jarrido's, a meal-prep, catering, and pop-up concept that was targeting a spring opening earlier this year. And on Edwards Road, Dovetale Bakery opened in early April, started by local residents Laura Houston and Ellie Wells, bringing laminated pastries and sourdough to a stretch of the neighborhood that didn't have a dedicated bakery before.
None of this required the kind of public process that's tied up the Square's biggest corner since 2024. It just required an empty space and someone willing to sign a lease.
The Fight That Won't Move
The project everyone actually argues about is the mixed-use development proposed for Hyde Park Square itself, led by PLK Communities. The original plan included a hotel and drew enough opposition that thousands of residents signed a petition to force it to a public vote. Faced with the referendum, the developer withdrew the application rather than let it go to the ballot.
What happened next is the detail most coverage skips. At an August 25, 2025 meeting brokered by city council members, the community signaled it could actually accept a five-story residential building with a 25 percent height bonus over current zoning. That offer came from the developer's own side of the table, and then the developer pulled it back. The compromise that might have ended this two years ago existed for one meeting and then didn't.
The version filed in June 2026 drops the hotel entirely, trims the maximum height by 10 feet from the prior design, and reroutes residential parking access from Edwards Road to Michigan Avenue to keep traffic away from Hyde Park School. Development spokesperson Jay Kincaid told WVXU the team had spent roughly $500,000 reworking the plan to address neighborhood concerns.
Here's the number worth sitting with: the new design increases total residential square footage while reducing the number of units. Nick Lingenfelter, PLK's Chief Development Officer, explained it to WVXU as a way to "still cover the same costs, but lessen the number of people and impact to the area." Fewer, larger units on more total square footage is a different building than what critics were originally fighting. Whether that satisfies Save Hyde Park Square's stated goal of a five-story cap remains open. The parking garage underneath is now planned for somewhere between 235 and 362 spaces depending on how deep it ends up going, a range wide enough that the final number is still being engineered, not decided.
The Hyde Park Neighborhood Council hasn't taken a position on the new filing yet. Sarah Ott Lautar, chair of HPNC's Zoning Committee, called it a chance to look at the project "with fresh eyes and start from square one." The city's Department of Planning and Engagement is now collecting public feedback, and the project still needs a new coordinated site review before anything moves forward.
A Plan That Outlasts Any Single Project
While that fight has dragged on, Hyde Park quietly finished something more durable. In April 2026, city council adopted Plan Hyde Park, the neighborhood's first comprehensive plan in more than 40 years, according to Sean McGrory of the Hyde Park Planning Committee, who helped write it. McGrory told WCPO the plan is organized around four sections: quality of life, how people move, the built environment, and Hyde Park Square itself.
The plan doesn't approve or block any specific project. What it does is give the next developer, and the one after that, a written reference for what residents actually want, including improvements to crosswalk technology, expanded traffic calming, and better connections to Wasson Way. It's the kind of groundwork that doesn't make for dramatic headlines but changes how the next fight starts.
That's the real thesis buried in two years of Hyde Park Square coverage. The mega-project keeps stalling because it's the one type of change that requires everyone's sign-off. The bakery, the relocated restaurant, the meal-prep kitchen taking over Dutch's old lease, none of that needed a plan, a petition, or a scale model. It just needed a landlord and a tenant. If you're trying to read where Hyde Park is actually headed day to day, watch the storefronts, not the site plan.
What's Actually Happening On The Square This Month
If you want to see the day-to-day version of Hyde Park in action rather than read about it, the Square has two things going right now:
- The DORA district lets you carry a drink from participating restaurants and walk the Square freely, daily from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. for guests 21 and up. It's been running long enough that most regulars already know which spots pour into the official cups.
- Flood the Square with Love, the neighborhood's sidewalk sale, returns on Saturday, September 12. It's the kind of event that turns the park at the center of the Square into what it was built to be: a place to sit, not just pass through.
Neither of those depends on what happens with the corner lot at Erie and Edwards. They're both proof that the Square residents actually use is the one open for business right now, sidewalk sale and all.
If you've been watching the redevelopment coverage and wondering what it actually means for the block you walk every day, the honest answer is that the small stuff has been moving the whole time. That's usually where a neighborhood's real character shows up first.
If you're curious about what any of this means for property values, timing, or your own plans in Hyde Park, Laura Zembrodt knows this Square block by block. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
