Drive down Mission Avenue past Erwin's Jewelers this month and you'll hit orange barrels before you find a parking spot. That's new. For four years, "the Frontier District" has meant a rendering of a four-story apartment building that never got built. What's actually going into the ground in Olde Towne this summer isn't glamorous at all. It's a sewer line, and it's the first thing about this long-promised revival that residents can actually watch happen.
What's Actually Torn Up Right Now
Work has begun on Bellevue's Olde Towne streetscape project after years of planning, with the first phase of construction expected to take about 13 weeks. The project will upgrade utilities and storm drainage beneath the street, while also bringing angle parking, raised crosswalks, and new landscaping aimed at making the area more walkable. This isn't a cosmetic repaving job. The city says it will replace the aging sewer system, add wider sidewalks and more parking to make Mission Avenue more pedestrian and business friendly.
The city has been careful about how it's doing this to longtime shop owners. Bellevue has acknowledged concerns about construction chasing away business, and says the project will proceed block by block so there should always be access to businesses in the area. That matters on a street where the businesses have deep roots. Erwin's Jewelers, a family-owned business, has been in Olde Towne Bellevue since 1958, and owner Rebecca Zurcher said the neighborhood has long needed this kind of investment.
"We've always been here and so we have definitely seen a lot of ups and downs, changes, all the good and the bad," Zurcher said. "The infrastructure here is obviously very very old, regardless of any new development it would need to be fixed."
Down the block, the reaction is cautiously hopeful too. Tracey Colgrove, manager of Lighthouse Cafe and Coffee off Mission Avenue, said he's looking forward to the changes coming to Olde Towne and thinks it will be good for local businesses to make the area more pedestrian-friendly. He's also realistic about the cost of getting there. Colgrove said that with it being a year-long process, it could be difficult, and he's encouraging neighbors not to forget about the small businesses that count on local people to help out.
There's a reason the city keeps calling this a gateway rather than just a road project. Public Works Director David Goedeken pointed out that Bellevue hosts festivals down at American Heroes Park, so Mission Avenue functions as a kind of gateway into the community, and the work is meant to make that entrance look better.
The Building That Still Isn't There
If you've followed Olde Towne's redevelopment story since 2022, you might assume the street work is a footnote to the real headline: the Bridge Flats apartment building. It's the opposite. The building is the part that stalled. The street is the part that's real.
Mayor Rusty Hike unveiled the plans during a ground-breaking ceremony in August 2022, along with a new branding for Olde Towne called the Frontier District, centered on a four-story building between Washington and Jefferson Streets that would cost $12.3 million. The building was designed to hold 53 luxury apartment units and 18,000 square feet of retail space. The optimism at the time was loud. Hike said at the groundbreaking that it was going to be a game changer and would make the area look a whole lot different. The site was even left open that weekend so the neighborhood tradition could go on as scheduled. Fencing was set to go up around the site, but it was kept open for that Saturday's Arrows to Aerospace parade.
Five months later, the first crack showed. By January 2023, one construction partner had pulled out of the project, though officials with the developer said the project was still on and that they were working with other entities to ensure Bridge Flats anchors a renovation of downtown Bellevue. The explanation given was familiar to anyone who watched construction costs during that stretch. Rising interest rates and construction costs, which also delayed numerous other projects nationally, had prompted the development team to explore design changes.
By the spring of 2024, the gap between announcement and reality had become the story itself. Local reporting noted it had been nearly two years since the groundbreaking, and while officials and developers had hoped to turn the vacant lot into a multi-million dollar mixed-use building, the developer had even claimed the entire project would be complete by that spring. Instead, since the groundbreaking, the only visible change was a fence and some weeds. Hike's comment at the time was blunt. "The city can tee it up for them, but they have to hit the ball," he said.
There's no public reporting of the Bridge Flats building breaking ground since then. Which is exactly why the sewer line matters. It's the first piece of the Frontier District promise that's shown up as an actual crew with actual equipment, not a press conference.
The Timeline Already Slipped Once
Worth knowing before you plan your fall around this: the schedule has already moved once. When the city announced the reconstruction in August 2025, it estimated the project would cost around $7 million, start August 18, and last through the fall of 2026. By June 2026, reporting described the project very differently. The first phase of construction was expected to take about 13 weeks, after which more significant work would begin, with construction expected to continue into 2027.
That's not a small adjustment. A project pitched as wrapping by this fall is now framed as stretching into next year. If you route through Mission Avenue on a regular basis, plan for this to be part of the neighborhood's texture through at least next spring, not something that clears up before the holidays.
What Else Is Happening This Month, Construction Or Not
The street work doesn't pause the rest of Bellevue's calendar, and late August has more going on than usual.
- Saturday, August 15: The Kiwanis-Offutt AFB Arrows to Aerospace Parade returns to Washington Park. It's the same event that ran right past the old City Hall site back in 2022, when the Frontier District fencing was held off specifically so the parade could proceed as planned.
- Saturday, August 15, 2:00 p.m.: The Tallgrass Prairie Songwriter's Festival takes over Falconwood Park.
- Saturday, August 22, 11:00 a.m.: Chaka Festival Nebraska lands at Falconwood Park. It's an all-ages event, with children under 8 admitted free.
- Every Saturday through September: The Bellevue Farmers' Market runs Saturday mornings from May through September in Washington Park, a few blocks from the construction zone.
Two festivals, a parade, and a weekly market all landing in the same few weeks that Mission Avenue is torn up for utility work says something about how this city actually functions right now. The infrastructure underneath Olde Towne is old enough to need replacing block by block, and the community calendar around it hasn't slowed down to wait.
What This Actually Tells You
The lesson here isn't that Bellevue's downtown revival failed. It's that the visible part and the promised part were never the same thing. The Bridge Flats renderings sold a finished building. What residents are getting instead, at least for now, is a longer, less photogenic process: new sewer lines, wider sidewalks, angle parking, and a streetscape that a jeweler who's been on that block since 1958 says was overdue regardless of what gets built on top of it.
If you live near Mission Avenue, that's useful to know before you plan your commute or your Saturday morning coffee run around a building that may or may not show up next to it. If you're watching Bellevue from the outside, it's a more honest read on the city's pace than any rendering has offered so far.
Missy Ruff spends a lot of time in Gretna and Elkhorn, but she keeps an eye on what's changing across the whole Omaha metro, including the corners of Bellevue that don't show up in a builder's press release. If you've got questions about how a neighborhood's infrastructure, growth, or local development actually plays out over time, not just what gets announced, Missy Ruff is glad to talk it through.
