Drive down West 78th Street on a Tuesday evening and you will hit a detour sign before you hit a parking spot. Orange cones have replaced the diagonal spaces outside what used to be the Chanhassen Cinema. A chain-link fence now wraps the old Country Inn & Suites lot. If you have lived here more than a year or two, your instinct is probably to grumble about construction season and keep driving toward whatever restaurant is easiest to reach without a U-turn.
Here is what that instinct misses. The businesses filling in around the edges of that construction site right now are not a coincidence. They are a preview, and if you know how to read them, they tell you almost exactly what is going to open on that corner in about four months.
The corner that used to be a cinema
The four acres at West 78th Street and Market Boulevard sat mostly empty for two years. The Chanhassen Cinema closed for good in April 2023. The Country Inn & Suites next door followed not long after. What is rising there now is a Roers Companies redevelopment split into two buildings, Harlow to the east and Bennett to the west, connected by a new extension of Laredo Drive that cuts through the site.
The two buildings are not identical, and the differences matter if you are trying to figure out what is coming and when.
| Harlow | Bennett | |
|---|---|---|
| Location | 78th Street & Laredo Drive | 591 West 78th Street |
| Residential units | 126 | 184 |
| Ground-floor retail | 3,029 sq ft (two storefronts) | 11,853 sq ft |
| Target opening | December 2026 | September 2027 |
Harlow sits closest to completion. The five-story building backs up to the existing Venue Apartments and the Aldi on West 78th, and its ground floor is carved into two retail spaces facing the street, with a residential lobby opening onto the new stretch of Laredo Drive. Bennett, the larger of the two, is still roughly a year further out, with nearly four times the retail square footage and its own rooftop lounge facing City Hall.
Parking was clearly a point of negotiation. Between the two buildings there are 467 stalls, most of them enclosed, but the city also secured shared arrangements nobody would think to ask about unless they had sat through the planning meetings: 25 spaces south of Harlow on the old cinema parcel reserved for residents, and 103 spaces in the Southwest Transit ramp available to guests on nights and weekends. That kind of detail rarely makes it into a press release, but it tells you the city was thinking about the exact problem you are living through right now every time you circle the block looking for somewhere to park before dinner.
The project carries real financial weight behind it too. Roers secured an $89.6 million construction financing package for the two buildings, arranged through Marcus & Millichap Capital Corporation, with the bulk of it coming from a single senior lender. That is not the kind of number attached to a speculative side project. It is the kind of number attached to a bet that downtown Chanhassen can support this much new retail and this many new residents on a corner that sat vacant for two years.
Your Thursday nights got rerouted, and that was on purpose
If your summer felt slightly off in a way you could not quite name, the Market Boulevard construction is probably why. The Thursday evening concert series that usually sets up downtown has been running out of Lake Ann Park instead this year. The Saturday market held its ground at City Center Park. The Fourth of July parade ran a quieter route than usual, working around the same fencing and access restrictions that have rerouted your dinner plans all summer.
None of that is neglect. It is a city trying to keep people showing up for downtown businesses while a four-acre construction zone sits in the middle of the block everyone used to walk through without thinking about it. City Center Park itself is mid-renovation as part of a Civic Campus project that will add a new pavilion, stage, splashpad, and playground once finished later this year. The expectation is that the concert series and the parade route return downtown once that space is ready to hold them again.
So the pattern this year has been: move the routine, keep the routine alive, wait for the permanent fix. That is a different story than a downtown quietly declining, and it is worth knowing the difference before you assume the construction fencing means something is wrong rather than something is coming.
The restaurants already answered the question
Here is the part that most updates about this redevelopment skip entirely. While the framing and the financing were happening on that corner, a wave of new food and service businesses opened within a few blocks of it, and every one of them is effectively a test case for whether downtown Chanhassen can support more of exactly what Harlow's two ground-floor storefronts are built to hold.
Moe's Char House opened with a lodge-style dining room and has built a weekly rhythm around it, with half-price Jumbo Wings every Wednesday afternoon and evening and a Friday-Saturday meat raffle that has turned into enough of a local habit that people show up early for dinner just to stay for it. Mo' Bettahs Hawaiian Style Food landed nearby serving kalua pig and teriyaki steak plates, the kind of concept that would have felt out of place in Chanhassen a decade ago and now draws a steady crowd. Red's Savoy Pizza, the St. Paul chain that has been expanding steadily since the 2000s, picked Chanhassen for one of its two newest Southwest metro locations. Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa opened a new location at 858 West 78th Street, adding a service-based tenant to a stretch of downtown that has mostly been food and retail.
None of these businesses are inside Harlow or Bennett. They opened in existing storefronts scattered around the same few blocks, which is precisely the point. A developer and a lending group just put $89.6 million behind the bet that five new ground-floor spaces on that corner can find tenants and hold them. The businesses already testing that same appetite in the surrounding blocks are the evidence the bet is a reasonable one, not a hopeful one.
What this actually means if you live here
If you are downtown this fall, expect the detours to continue through the end of the year. Expect Thursday concerts to stay at Lake Ann until the city confirms City Center Park is ready. Expect parking near West 78th and Market to feel tighter than it used to, right up until Harlow's structured parking and the shared Southwest Transit ramp spaces come online alongside its December opening.
What you should not expect is for this to be a quiet year followed by nothing. Two ground-floor retail spaces at Harlow are set to open within the next several months, on a corner that has already shown it can support a lodge-style restaurant, a Hawaiian plate lunch spot, a regional pizza chain, and a spa within a few blocks of each other. Bennett's much larger retail footprint follows less than a year after that. Whatever fills those five combined storefronts will not be a guess. It will be a continuation of a pattern that has already been running in real time around the construction fencing all summer.
That is the useful way to think about a downtown mid-rebuild. Not as something paused, but as something rehearsing its next act in full view, one new restaurant lease at a time.
If you are watching how these changes ripple into what a home is worth on the west side of downtown, or you just want a straight read on where Chanhassen is headed next, Jen Azure has spent two decades tracking exactly this kind of local detail. Let's Connect.