Walk down Ford Parkway toward Cretin Avenue this month and the site still reads like two different projects stitched together. On one side, kids drop into a skate bowl on blacktop that has been open for four years. On the other, chain-link fencing wraps a block where cranes and a half-finished plaza sit behind plywood. Both are Highland Bridge. Neither tells you much about the other.
That gap, between what already works and what is still just a rendering, is the real story of this fall at the old Ford plant site. It has been the story for a while. But this particular September and October, more of the promised pieces are supposed to close that gap than in any season since the site's first grand opening.
The Park That Opened, and the Three That Are Still Mostly Names
In April 2021, the St. Paul City Council approved names for four new parks planned across the former Ford Motor Company assembly plant site, with input from the Dakota community and the Saint Paul Youth Commission. Two of the names are Dakota words: Uŋčí Makhá, which translates to "Mother Earth," and Míča, a shortened word for "coyote." A third, Assembly Union Park, was chosen to recognize the site's industrial history and the Ford autoworkers who built cars there for decades. The fourth is Gateway Park.
Gateway Park is also the only one of the four that has actually had a ribbon cutting. The city opened it on June 14, 2022, with a skate bowl and a skate trail that became the first skate trail in St. Paul and the city's fifth skate park overall, plus biofiltration basins, a stormwater pond, a viewing platform, walking paths, picnic tables, and a bike rack. The city's own announcement at the time called it "the first of four new parks being constructed on the site" and said future opening dates for the rest would come as those parks were finished.
More than four years later, the page the city maintains for Assembly Union Park still reads like a naming explainer more than a finished amenity listing. It tells you why the park is called what it's called and mentions that Gateway, Míča, and Uŋčí Makhá sit nearby. It doesn't describe hours, features, or a grand opening the way Gateway Park's launch materials did. If you've been waiting for the other three to catch up to the one you already use, the wait has outlasted the naming ceremony by a wide margin.
Why the Rest of the Site Went Quiet
The pause wasn't really about the parks. It was about financing the buildings around them. Construction on Highland Bridge's market-rate housing largely stalled around 2022, as rising interest rates and construction costs made new private capital hard to line up, even while senior housing and affordable projects, less dependent on that kind of financing, kept moving.
The unstick came in May 2025, when St. Paul amended its developer agreements with Ryan Companies, the site's master developer, reducing density and height requirements and adjusting the tax increment financing package tied to the project. Within weeks, Ryan broke ground on a new phase: a four-story, 97-unit apartment building with roughly 35,000 square feet of retail, including space for a Tierra Encantada day care, at the corner of Cretin Avenue and Ford Parkway. The listed price tag on that phase alone is $68 million.
What Actually Lands This Season
Here's where the timing gets interesting for anyone who already lives nearby. Several pieces that broke ground over the past year are aimed at finishing in the same few months.
The 97-unit apartment building and three standalone commercial buildings tied to it are targeted for substantial completion by November 2026, with developers still working through lease agreements for the retail spaces as of this summer. A new civic square at Ford Parkway and Cretin Avenue, construction on which started in early June 2026, is expected to finish this fall. It will connect by a diagonal walkway to the site's larger civic plaza and stormwater feature, the curving pond that has become the closest thing Highland Bridge has to a signature landmark. Two large decorative friezes salvaged from the original Ford plant are set to be installed there as sculptural pieces, alongside facade elements already worked into the nearby apartment building known as The Albert.
Two more pieces are just getting started rather than finishing, but they mark real progress after years of nothing. Weidner Apartment Homes, which already built the site's first apartment and retail complex, is expected to break ground in September on a second building nearby with about 170 more units and 2,000 square feet of retail. And in June, the city approved a final plat for M/I Homes, a new development partner at Highland Bridge, to begin building 144 townhomes on land bounded by Woodlawn, Montreal, and Saunders avenues. The first 12 of those townhomes are now cleared to start.
None of this means Highland Bridge wraps up this year. Ryan's own development team has said the full build-out, roughly 35 acres still undeveloped, could take another decade depending on market conditions. But after four quiet years where the most visible activity was a single skate trail and some plywood, having a civic square, an apartment block, and two separate housing starts converge on the same handful of months is not nothing.
What's Already Working While You Wait
It's easy to focus on what's still unfinished and forget how much of the site already functions day to day. The Collection, Weidner's first building at Highland Bridge, has been open since 2022 with Lunds & Byerlys anchoring more than 150,000 square feet of retail and grocery space. A 60,000-square-foot medical office building anchored by M Health Fairview is about 85 percent leased, with tenants including Dermatology Consultants, LifeStance Health, Highland Foot and Ankle Clinic, and RAYUS Radiology. Restoring Waters and Emma Norton, two supportive housing providers, have also opened locations on site, continuing services Emma Norton has run in St. Paul for more than a century.
Just off the site, the neighborhood's restaurant scene has kept adding to what's already there. Altera, an upscale dinner spot with a large bar, opened in December 2024 in the former Agra Culture space on Cleveland Avenue, and it's now settled in alongside longtime Highland Park stops like Highland Grill, Cecil's Deli, and the newer Centro just up the street.
The Old Anchors Still Hold
Whatever finishes or doesn't this fall, the parts of Highland Park that predate any of this are still doing what they always do. The Highland Park Water Tower, which broke ground in 1927, remains the highest point in the city and the traditional spot locals climb toward for a look at turning leaves, usually around the second weekend of October. Hidden Falls Regional Park's river trails and the neighborhood's free disc golf course don't need a ribbon cutting to be worth using. And St. Paul Parks and Recreation has an Annual Bonfire Night scheduled for Highland Park itself on October 8, from 6 to 8 p.m., the kind of small, recurring event that has nothing to do with any developer's timeline.
That contrast is worth sitting with. A neighborhood can have a hundred-year-old water tower and a five-year-old construction fence within a few blocks of each other, and both are just as much a part of what Highland Park is right now. The Ford site will keep arriving in pieces, block by block, owner by owner, for years yet. This fall just happens to be a season where more of those pieces are landing close together than usual.
If you're curious how any of this is showing up in what homes near Highland Bridge are actually selling for, or you just want to talk through what you're seeing on your own walks through the neighborhood, Mitchell Culbreath is always glad to have that conversation. Let's Connect.
