For almost two years, if you rode the Greenbelt Trail west from Walnut Creek toward Campbell Recreation Area, you hit a dead end at the Interstate 80/35 bridge and had to detour up onto city streets to get around it. For about three months this spring, if you drove past 11101 University Ave, you saw a dark building where Painted Tree Boutiques used to be, its parking lot empty except for a few contractor trucks. Neither closure had anything to do with the other. One was a highway interchange project run by the state. The other was a national retail chain's bankruptcy. But both of them ended within about 18 hours of each other on July 30 and 31, and that timing is worth sitting with for a minute, because it says something about how this city actually functions when things break.
Two Closures, Two Very Different Clocks
The trail closure started with a construction schedule. On October 1, 2024, the Clive Greenbelt Trail closed at the I-80/35 bridge over Walnut Creek so crews could build a new interchange at Hickman Road, a project run by the Iowa Department of Transportation with the Waste Reclamation Authority also working nearby. That kind of closure runs on a public infrastructure timeline: permits, contractor schedules, weather delays, coordination between agencies that don't answer to the city of Clive at all. The city's own parks department could only post detour routes and wait.
The University Avenue closure started with a phone call nobody in Clive saw coming. Painted Tree Boutiques, a national chain that leased booth space to small vendors at well below market rent, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in April 2026, and every one of its roughly 60 locations across the country shut down at once, Clive included. Jenni King, who ran Simply Stella Rose out of six Painted Tree locations including the one in Clive, described scrambling to pull merchandise out of all six stores within three days. That closure ran on a completely different clock: a legal filing, not a construction calendar, and it left the building's owner, Knapp Properties, holding an empty storefront with no advance warning.
One disruption took 22 months to resolve because it depended on state road work. The other took three months because it depended on a property owner deciding what to do next. They landed on the same weekend by coincidence, but the coincidence is useful precisely because it puts two different repair speeds side by side in the same small stretch of the city.
What Actually Reopened on the Trail
The city announced the Greenbelt Trail would reopen at the I-80/35 bridge on Friday, July 31, at 5:00 p.m., and it did. City Manager Matt McQuillen called it the restoration of a critical link in the Des Moines Metro regional trail system, and the description isn't an exaggeration. The Greenbelt runs 11.3 miles total, connecting all the way from a starting point at 73rd Street and Walnut Creek in Windsor Heights, threading through Clive along the north bank of Walnut Creek, and continuing toward Waukee near Lions Park by Eason Elementary. During the closure, anyone trying to get from the east side of the trail to the west side, or vice versa, had to leave the path entirely and pick up a street detour that started at Campbell Recreation Area on the west end and NW 100th Street on the east.
If you're heading back out, a couple of things carried over from the closure that are worth knowing. Construction vehicles are still working near the bridge, so the city is asking trail users to stay alert even though the path itself is open. And this isn't the only trail work touching Clive right now. A separate project along Little Walnut Creek, running through Waukee, Clive, and Urbandale, is affecting trail segments and green space near the creek as crews handle sanitary sewer work and eventually widen Alice's Road. The Greenbelt reopening closes one gap. It doesn't mean every trail segment in the area is finished being worked on.
What Actually Reopened on University Avenue
The same week, Eleven101 Collective opened its doors at 11101 University Ave, in the exact building Painted Tree vacated. Knapp Properties, the building's owner, tried first to find another outside operator to take over the marketplace model. When that search didn't produce the right fit, Costa and his team decided to run it themselves, which marks the first time the real estate company has operated a retail business rather than simply owning the building it sits in.
The new collective kept some of what worked before. It hired the same manager and assistant manager who ran Painted Tree, and it's structured the same way: small vendors rent individual storefronts inside one building rather than signing their own commercial leases, and staff handle the day-to-day sales and operations so vendors can stock their booths without staffing them personally. What changed is the backend. Knapp updated the point-of-sale system so vendors can track their own sales and receive payment more reliably, added a vendor kiosk for shoppers trying to find a specific booth, and upgraded the security cameras so vendors can check on their space remotely.
By the July 28 count, ahead of the Thursday and Friday soft opening, the collective had recruited about 200 of the roughly 300 vendors who'd operated out of the Clive Painted Tree before it closed. Rose Ann Jordison, who runs Ivy Rose and is one of the vendors returning, put her finger on the difference that mattered most to her: under Painted Tree, vendors never had a face to put to ownership. Costa has said the new model is built around local decisions instead of ones made at a corporate level somewhere else.
Why the Timing Actually Matters
Here's the piece that's easy to miss if you think of these as two unrelated news items. The trail reopening happened because a public agency finished a multi-year construction project on its own schedule. The marketplace reopening happened because a private, local property owner chose to absorb the risk of running a retail business rather than wait for the market to solve the problem for them. Different mechanisms, different timelines, same weekend.
For a resident, that convergence means late July 2026 functioned like a small reset for this corner of the city. Two things that had quietly become part of the background frustration of daily life, the trail gap you routed around without thinking about it anymore, the dark storefront you stopped noticing, both cleared at once. It's not that Clive fixes things fast. The trail took nearly two years. It's that the city has both kinds of repair available to it: the slow, publicly funded kind that eventually catches up to its own deadline, and the faster, privately funded kind where someone with a stake in the building decides not to leave it empty. Most towns only reliably have one of those working at a given time. Clive, this particular weekend, had both land at once.
What to Watch Next
If you use the Greenbelt regularly, expect construction equipment near the bridge for a while longer even with the path open, and don't assume the rest of the trail network is finished being worked on given the ongoing Little Walnut Creek project. If you're a vendor or a regular Painted Tree shopper, Eleven101 Collective is still filling out its roster past the soft opening weekend, so the mix of shops may keep shifting over the next few months as more of the original 300 vendors decide whether to come back.
Either way, both stories are worth knowing if you live here, not because they change anything about buying or selling a house in Clive, but because they're the kind of local detail that tells you how a place actually works when something goes wrong. This one went right twice in the same weekend.
If you're watching Clive for reasons that do involve a move, whether you're weighing a home near the Greenbelt or just keeping an eye on how the west side of the metro is holding up, Marc & Jill Lee know this corner of the market block by block. Get Moving With Marc & Jill Lee.
