If you drive S James Street on the south side of Grimes, you probably got used to routing around it. For a long stretch of the past year, that road has been some combination of torn up, cordoned off, or down to one lane, first for a creek regrading project, then for the water main, then for the road widening that came after. It became one of those detours you stopped noticing consciously, the kind that just gets folded into how you get to the South Sports Complex or Waterworks Park without thinking about it.
Then sometime this summer, the barrels came down. Lions Park reopened with a new playground, pickleball courts, a restroom building, and a pedestrian bridge over the creek that started this whole thing. There's also a lion statue standing near the entrance. The city installed it, then asked residents to help name it. That's the detail that tells you something true about how Grimes actually operates right now: the infrastructure took the better part of a year of engineering and construction crews. The naming contest took one social post.
What the Detour Was Actually For
Lions Park had been a straightforward 4.8-acre neighborhood park for years, with an open shelter, a couple of grills, picnic tables, ball fields, and a soccer field. The problem the city needed to solve first wasn't cosmetic. Crews regraded the creek that runs through the park specifically to handle more stormwater and keep the park from flooding, and that work had to happen before anything else could go in. Only after the drainage was fixed did the playground, the pickleball courts, and the restroom building get built.
That sequencing explains why the closure dragged on so much longer than a typical park refresh. It wasn't just landscaping. It was a hydrology fix wearing a playground as a disguise. By June 2026, the city's own project updates confirmed the park was fully reopened, with the shade structures, playground, and courts finished and the pedestrian bridge in place.
If you haven't been back since it reopened, here's what's actually there now that wasn't before:
- A rebuilt playground
- New pickleball courts, split for beginner and advanced play through the city's summer leagues
- A dedicated restroom building
- A pedestrian bridge over the regraded creek
- The lion statue near the entrance
The City Asked Everyone to Name a Lion
The statue itself became its own small event. Once it was installed, the city posted a simple question: what should we name him. It's a minor thing, but it's also the fastest-moving piece of the entire Lions Park project. The creek regrading took a construction season. The statue got a nickname crowdsourced in a news post.
That contrast is worth sitting with if you've been frustrated by how long some of these road and park projects take. The slow parts are slow because they're genuinely complicated engineering work happening under a growing town. The fast parts, the parts that make a place feel like it belongs to the people using it, don't take nearly as long once the underlying infrastructure is actually in place.
Two Blocks Over, Main Street Got Something It's Never Had
While Lions Park was working through its drainage and construction phases, a different kind of project was happening on SE Main Street, closer to downtown. In 2025, the city, the Grimes Chamber, and the Iowa Economic Development Authority ran a Downtown Assessment of the area known as the Governors District, gathering input from more than 200 residents, business owners, and students. The recommendations that came back were mostly small and tactical: define the district's identity, add benches and bike racks, improve alleyways, install public art.
The first of those recommendations to actually get built was a mural, and it went up on the side of a building at 210 SE Main Street this spring. The artist is Courtney Garcia, a Dallas Center-Grimes graduate who worked with the high school's art department and took input from the community while developing the design. It's the block anchored by Uptown Bar & Grill at 201 SE Main, the kind of long-running neighborhood spot where regulars go for the Reuben and the patty melt, and it now has a piece of public art that Grimes simply didn't have before.
Assistant City Manager Alex Psaltzgrass framed it as a starting point rather than a finished product:
"It's one of those iconic pieces that people are going to want to visit our downtown for."
Allison Kupka, the business owner who agreed to have the mural painted on her building, put it in more personal terms, saying the project was about investing in a community she's raising her own family in. Whether or not a mural on one building changes how a two-block downtown feels day to day, it's the first tangible result of a planning process that otherwise consists of reports and council presentations. Benches, plantings, and wayfinding signs are still coming, but they're the kind of additions you might not notice until they're already there. A mural you notice immediately.
The Other Grimes, a Mile Down the Highway
Main Street isn't the only commercial stretch in Grimes, and it's not the one getting the most outside attention. That's happening along E 1st Street, closer to the Highway 141 corridor, where Destination Grille has spent the past couple of years building a reputation well beyond the city limits. The Des Moines Register included the restaurant in a January 2026 roundup of hidden-gem dining across the metro, praising its travel-inspired menu, its gluten-free options, and a multi-level space that works for both a date night and a bigger gathering. Destination Grille has also shown up at the Iowa State Fair every year since 2024, expanding its presence there each summer.
That's a different kind of growth than the Main Street mural. It's not the outcome of a city planning process. It's a single restaurant building a following one fair booth and one newspaper mention at a time, in a part of town built around newer retail rather than a historic downtown block. Grimes doesn't have one commercial identity right now. It has at least two, growing at different speeds, for different reasons, and both are worth knowing if you actually live here and are deciding where to eat this week rather than which one represents the "real" Grimes.
What This Adds Up To This Season
None of this happened because someone decided 2026 would be the year Grimes finished things. It happened because the city's 2025 special census counted 17,809 residents, up 15.7 percent from 15,392 in 2020, and a town adding that many people in five years ends up running several infrastructure and planning projects at once out of necessity, not coordination. The creek under Lions Park needed fixing regardless of the mural timeline. The Downtown Assessment was already underway before anyone knew when the park would reopen. They just happened to cross the finish line in the same stretch of the same year.
What that means practically, if you live here, is that the excuses you've been making for avoiding certain parts of town are starting to expire. If you've been steering clear of the south side because of the S James Street detours, that reason is gone. If you haven't walked down Main Street in a while because there wasn't much reason to, there's a mural there now that wasn't there in the spring. If you've been meaning to try Destination Grille because you keep seeing it mentioned, the write-ups are stacking up.
Grimes spent a year being under construction in ways that were mostly invisible until they weren't. The lion still needs a name, as far as we know. Everything around him is finished.
Marc and Jill Lee track this kind of change across Clive, Grimes, and the rest of the western suburbs because it's the texture that makes a neighborhood feel different from a listing sheet. If you're curious about what else has shifted in Grimes or any of the communities they cover, Marc & Jill Lee are always glad to talk through what's actually happening on the ground.
