Eden Prairie Center Turned 50 This Year. The City's Second Act Is Playing Out Somewhere Else.

"We set out to build a community," Elizabeth, co-owner of Fat Pants Brewing Co., told City Lifestyle.

That's how Elizabeth, whose family runs Fat Pants Brewing Co., described the plan behind the taproom on Crystal View Road when it opened in 2019. Seven years later, the line reads less like an aspiration and more like an explanation for the city Eden Prairie has quietly become.

Eden Prairie Center turned 50 this year, and most residents heard about that milestone. Opened March 3, 1976, the mall has cycled through a long line of anchor tenants in its north wing and a Kevin Smith movie shoot that, as Eden Prairie Local News reported, put it on the pop culture map. What fewer people have tracked closely is what's happening at that same north end right now: an empty department store building, a redevelopment plan still at the concept stage, and a legislative clock that runs out at the end of this year. Meanwhile, restaurants and a brewery are hosting gatherings as the mall's north-end proposal remains under consideration.

Eden Prairie Center at 50

The mall's anniversary story is genuinely good material. Danny Kurtz was 14 when Eden Prairie Center opened in 1976, part of a crew of local teens who cleaned the common areas and waxed the floors overnight for less than $2 an hour. He'd go on to work the food court and cook in the restaurant inside the old Powers department store. That kind of continuity, one resident who watched a cornfield become a regional mall, is part of why locals still call the place their downtown even though it was never built as one.

The film connection helps too. Mallrats was shot there in 1995, and the movie's 30th anniversary last year brought a fresh round of nostalgia that the mall leaned into. But the harder number is the property tax line. In 2020, the mall and its four anchor stores paid $4.4 million in property taxes. By 2024, that had fallen to about $2.5 million. It climbed back to just over $2.7 million this year, a modest recovery, but still well below where it stood five years ago.

The old JCPenney building is one major change at the mall's north end. The store closed for good in 2024 after a fire and the water damage that followed, and the space has sat empty since, leaving an anchor-sized hole even as Von Maur and the 248,000-square-foot Scheels store on the south side keep drawing traffic. Inside, some of the departed national chains have been replaced by small local operators like Umi's Boutique and Evaladiva, a quieter kind of reinvention happening storefront by storefront while the north-end redevelopment remains at the concept stage.

The Mall's North-End Redevelopment Plan

That plan first went in front of the Eden Prairie City Council on March 18, 2025, during a workshop where staff walked through parcels around the city being eyed for redevelopment. The concept for the mall's north end, developed through months of talks between city staff and mall owner MetLife Insurance, would replace the vacant JCPenney building and its parking lot with roughly 750 apartment units, a hotel, offices, and ground-floor retail, with underground parking built in. Between 5 and 15 percent of the units would need to be affordable under the city's Inclusionary Housing Policy, and the whole package was framed as a fit for the Aspire Eden Prairie 2040 comprehensive plan. Mayor Ron Case even floated adding solar panels to the project's roof space to support the city's 2050 climate goals.

The financing piece is where the clock starts ticking. State lawmakers approved a narrowly written tax change last year making it easier for Eden Prairie to use tax-increment financing on the mall site, the same tool the city used to help fund the entertainment wing and AMC theater back in the early 2000s. That provision expires at the end of 2026. As of the city's own year-end review published December 31, 2025, the redevelopment concept was still described as early-stage, with no hotel operator identified and no formal application filed. A financing window with a hard deadline, an apartment count that's still a concept, a hotel with no name attached: that's the state of the mall's next chapter as of the most recent reporting available.

The Town Center That Already Exists

While that plan waits on financing and a hotel partner, a different kind of downtown has already assembled itself, one restaurant and one event at a time.

Fat Pants Brewing Co. is the clearest example. Since opening in 2019, the taproom has grown into an event space that turns out roughly 750 barrels of beer a year and now hosts everything from trivia and karaoke to comedy shows and private parties. This June, Fat Pants partnered with the Eden Prairie Chamber of Commerce and First Western Bank to launch Taste of the Prairie, a restaurant showcase held in the brewery's own parking lot on June 12 from 4 to 8pm. Tickets ran $35 in advance or $45 at the door, with proceeds benefiting Chamber programming, and the lineup included T.J. Hooligan's, Pizza Lucé, and Kona Grill among other local restaurants and drink makers. By the brewery's own account, it was the first event of its kind in the city in close to two decades.

A few of the businesses on that lineup tell their own version of the same story:

• T.J. Hooligan's, a Prior Lake pub open since 1983, expanded into Eden Prairie by taking over the former Campiello space, a fine-dining Italian restaurant that had run nearly 30 years before closing at the end of 2023.
• The Hearth opened in October 2025 in the former Woody's location on City West Parkway, the first permanent address for a wood-fired pizza food truck that had spent more than a decade working county fairs, breweries, weddings, and private parties around the metro.
• Smith Coffee & Cafe, which started inside a historic Eden Prairie farmhouse, announced in April 2026 that it's opening a second location in Edina's 50th and France area this fall, its first expansion outside the city that raised it.
• Haraz Coffee House, a Yemeni coffee chain that opened its first Minnesota location in Minneapolis, has a second location planned for Eden Prairie later this fall.

The local businesses took a different path from the proposed mall redevelopment, involving a brewery willing to host a festival, a food truck willing to sign a lease, and a farmhouse cafe opening a second location outside the city.

Two Clocks, One City

Eden Prairie's mall redevelopment and local business activity are unfolding on different timelines. The mall's redevelopment remains at the concept stage. It matters, and if the north end eventually becomes 750 apartments with ground-floor retail and a hotel, that will reshape the area around Prairie Center Drive in ways worth watching. The timing of any redevelopment remains uncertain.

The other clock is the one residents have actually been living on: a festival that filled a brewery parking lot in June, a pizza place that finally got a real address last fall, a coffee shop opening a second location outside the city this season. The mall itself isn't going anywhere, and Von Maur, Scheels, and the AMC entertainment wing still anchor a lot of daily life here. The next Taste of the Prairie lineup will offer one way to follow local restaurant activity in Eden Prairie.

If you're weighing what a neighborhood's daily rhythm says about the long-term value of a home here, that's exactly the kind of local reading worth having a conversation about. Jim Schwarz works this corridor closely enough to know which changes are signal and which are still just concepts on a zoning map. Schedule a private consultation to talk through what's actually happening in the neighborhoods you're considering.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.