Today, chef Lona Luo Powers and her partner Pierce Powers III are cutting a rice-paper ribbon at 612 W. Woodbine Avenue, opening the second location of Lona's Lil Eats a block from St. Louis Community College's Meramec campus. It's a milestone for a business that started as a stand at Soulard Farmers Market back in 2008 and grew into a Fox Park restaurant with three James Beard semifinalist nods along the way.
Walk a few blocks north and east from there and you land in the middle of Kirkwood's other big opening story. At 150 W. Argonne, 4 Hands Brewing Co. and Peacemaker Lobster & Crab have taken over the old Down by the Station gift shop, complete with a mothballed red caboose out front and a back lawn where, as 4 Hands co-founder Kevin Lemp put it, kids can throw a ball and run around while the grown-ups eat. Across the street at 159 W. Argonne, father-and-son team Kevin and Luke Beattie opened Fox's Finest Meats, Seafood & Marketplace in a building constructed in 1875 that once served as Kirkwood's own community grocery store. A few blocks south, Perennial on the Trail has moved Perennial Artisan Ales and Common Ritual Whiskey into the old Pedego Electric Bikes storefront at 801 S. Holmes Avenue, sitting almost exactly where Grant's Trail's Kirkwood trailhead begins.
Here's what's easy to miss if you only read the openings as a food story: those two clusters, the Argonne corridor and the Holmes Avenue trailhead, are about a mile apart, and there is no trail connecting them. Just city sidewalks and street crossings. The city has spent years and a few million federal dollars trying to close that gap, and this summer it finally told residents when the work will start.
Two Restaurant Booms, One Missing Mile
It's worth sitting with how deliberately the new openings sit on either end of a route that doesn't exist yet. The Argonne corridor, home to 4 Hands + Peacemaker and Fox's Finest, sits a block from the Kirkwood Farmers' Market and the Kirkwood Performing Arts Center. The Holmes Avenue end, home to Perennial on the Trail, sits at the actual physical start of Grant's Trail as it runs today. If you want to bike from the trail to dinner on Argonne, or walk from the farmers market to a beer at Perennial, you're doing it on regular streets, the same way residents have for years.
That's not a complaint about the restaurants. It's a fact about the infrastructure they've opened next to. The businesses got there first.
What the City Actually Approved
In early June, Kirkwood's Public Services Department held an open house at the Kirkwood Community Center to walk residents through the Grant's Trail Extension, a project that would finally connect the existing Holmes Avenue trailhead to downtown along a route that passes the Farmers' Market on Argonne and the Kirkwood Performing Arts Center.
"When this project is completed, there will be a connection from Grant's Trail near Interstate 44 to Downtown Kirkwood near the Kirkwood Farmers' Market," Public Services Director Chris Krueger told residents. "So, residents and visitors will be able to enjoy a safe bike ride or walk to the trail."
The route runs on top of a rail line the BNSF Railway Company no longer uses, and once built, it will also open pedestrian and bike access to the historic Kirkwood Train Station, a renovated 1893 depot that still handles nearly 80,000 Amtrak passengers a year, and to The Magic House nearby.
Here's what's actually locked in so far:
| Detail | What we know |
|---|---|
| Total project cost | About $8.5 million |
| Federal funding secured | About $6.8 million, roughly 80% of the total, awarded in two rounds through the Transportation Alternatives Program in 2023 and 2024 |
| Length | Nearly a mile of paved, mixed-use trail |
| Route | Connects the Holmes Avenue trailhead to the Farmers' Market on Argonne, passing the Kirkwood Performing Arts Center |
| Future ownership | The City of Kirkwood, separate from the rest of Grant's Trail, which Great Rivers Greenway operates |
| Construction | Phase 1 slated for late 2027, Phase 2 to follow a year later |
The funding source matters here. Federal Transportation Alternatives Program money, awarded through the East-West Gateway Council of Governments in coordination with the Missouri Department of Transportation, doesn't get handed out twice to the same local project without a real design in hand. Two separate award rounds, in 2023 and again in 2024, is a sign this has cleared more scrutiny than a typical municipal wish-list item.
Funded and Designed Is Not the Same as Built
As of that June open house, design and engineering work was described as nearing completion. That's genuinely good news for anyone hoping the gap closes soon. It's also worth being honest about what it doesn't mean.
Nothing changes on the ground this year. Nothing changes next year, either. Phase 1 construction isn't scheduled to begin until late 2027, with Phase 2 following roughly a year after that. So if you're picturing a paved connector by next summer's Farmers' Market season, or even the one after, that's not the timeline the city has laid out. The honest read is a multi-year runway between "the money and the design exist" and "you can actually ride a bike from Perennial to the Farmers' Market without touching traffic."
That gap between funded and finished is exactly the kind of detail that gets flattened in a quick summer roundup. It shouldn't be. If you're planning around this trail, whether that's a daily commute, a weekend habit, or just curiosity about what's coming to your block, the honest timeline is 2027 at the earliest for the first stretch.
Why the City Is in a Hurry Anyway
Part of the urgency traces back to a piece of city-owned land that hasn't performed the way Kirkwood hoped. According to 2024 reporting from the Kirkwood Gadfly, a local blog that tracks the city's development decisions closely, the Kirkwood Performing Arts Center, the same venue the new trail extension would connect directly to downtown, had lost an average of about $108,000 a year over the prior three years, with another projected loss near $111,000 for that year. The seven-acre site around KPAC is large enough that city officials have discussed putting more of it toward what one planning rationale described as a more productive, complementary use.
That same 2024 reporting also flagged seven townhomes proposed for 507 S. Holmes Avenue, right where the trail extension would tie back into the existing Grant's Trail. Under the site's zoning, which caps density at fourteen homes per acre, seven units was close to the maximum the roughly half-acre lot allows. Whatever that particular proposal's status today, it was an early signal of the kind of infill the city expected once a genuine walking and biking connection existed between the trailhead and downtown.
None of this changes what's happening on Argonne and Holmes right now. It does explain why the city has treated the trail gap as more than a paving project. The businesses that opened this year assumed a connected corridor before the corridor technically existed. The extension is the city catching up to that bet.
What's Already Working While You Wait
None of this means downtown is standing still for two years. The Downtown Kirkwood Summer Concert Series still runs Thursday nights at Station Plaza, with Lost Dog playing August 20, Mike Mattingly's Music for Wishes benefiting Make-A-Wish Missouri & Kansas on August 27, The Dog's Breakfast on September 3, the Kevin Babb Trio on September 10, and Captain Bulkhead and the Portholes closing things out on September 17 after a June postponement. The next Night Market on Argonne, an evening extension of the Farmers' Market with live music and vendor stalls, is set for September 25 from 4:30 to 8 p.m.
Over at the Kirkwood Performing Arts Center, STAGES St. Louis is running Guys and Dolls this month, the company's third production of the show at that venue. A month of evening performances two blocks from the new restaurant cluster is already sending a pre-show and post-show wave of diners toward Argonne, trail or no trail.
That's really the point. The demand for a walkable link between downtown and the trailhead already exists. The businesses betting on it have already opened. What's still missing is the mile of pavement that would make the walk official instead of improvised, and that mile is now funded, designed, and scheduled, even if it's not scheduled soon.
If you're weighing what a corridor like this could mean for a home search in Kirkwood, whether that's proximity to the eventual trail connection or just a read on where the city is investing next, Drew Behrens tracks these kinds of local shifts closely and is happy to talk through what it means for your particular block. Let's Connect.
