Jim Gleason started site preparations this week for the new Northfield KFC in the development known as Bridgewater Commons, across from Target. (He reportedly had some other guys helping him.) According to a March article in the Nfld News, the restaurant’s owner is Gary Tiedeken of Faribault and will open sometime this fall.
Does anyone know what happened with the access issues from Highway 3? Perhaps I’m misremembering, but wasn’t this the site for which there was talk about the oak tree?
In any case, this was upsetting to see. It would seem everything on South Highway 3 from Woodley out to Cannon City Blvd is just one enormous planning disaster. You go from downtown through the former rural-commercial strip (Central Valley Co-op area) to get to the suburban-commercial strip from Heritage-110th. There’s no human scale. It’s not walkable or bikeable.
I’m tempted to say it’s like the strip development in Apple Valley or Lakeville, but it’s actually quite a bit worse: I wouldn’t really want to walk on Cedar Ave or Dakota County 42, but at least there are sidewalks and shared-use trails that hug the road closely for both. Nothing like that can be said for South Highway 3.
And the serious moral issues with KFC? Icing on the cake, I guess.