If you've walked or driven the Parkway toward Krug Park anytime this year, you've probably noticed the same thing regulars have been noticing since spring: the fencing near the castle and the old amphitheater is still there, longer than most of us expected. Somewhere in the back of your mind is a memory of hearing this would mostly be finished by now. That memory isn't wrong exactly. It's just missing a chapter.
Back in March 2025, the city and its design team previewed a construction schedule that sounded tidy: the bowl and amphitheater renovated by June, the castle and children's circus area redone by September, the pavilion and Buffalo Boulevard work wrapped by August, all of it landing in 2026. That's the version a lot of Lovers Lane neighbors absorbed, and it's not a bad-faith reading of what was announced. It's just an incomplete one. The same March 2025 presentation that laid out those phase dates also stated the entire project wouldn't be finished until 2027, and reporting from News-Press NOW as recently as April 2026 confirmed that fall 2027 completion date still holds. The individual pieces closest to the park entrance were always supposed to move faster than the whole. What most of us heard was "2026." What was actually said was "2026 for the visible stuff, 2027 for all of it."
That distinction matters if you use this park the way most Lovers Lane and north St. Joseph residents do: as a daily loop, a dog walk, a place to bring out-of-town family in December. It means the fence you're looking at right now isn't behind schedule. It's on the schedule nobody fully repeated back.
The Phases, In the Order They Were Actually Promised
The renovation is being handled by three named firms working together: West 8 as landscape architect, Ellison-Auxier Architects, and E.L. Crawford Construction as the general contractor. Their plan, funded by the half-cent parks sales tax voters approved in 2021, breaks into phases that don't all touch the ground at once.
- Phase 1 covers the lagoon loop, underground utility work, and a full overhaul of the Krug Bowl amphitheater, including a new concession stand. This is the yearlong phase that started construction in June 2025.
- Phase 2 turns the current castle and children's circus area into what the city is calling the Garden Theater and the Concessionaire's Castle, complete with a dining terrace, a kitchen, and new family restrooms. This was the piece originally targeted for November 2026.
- Phase 3 rebuilds the long-dormant Buffalo Boulevard area into the Buffalo Bowl Adventure Playground, with new slides and pavilions on a site the project's own architect described as one that "has not been utilized for a long time."
- Phase 4 reworks the park's entryway and its connection back to the Parkway itself, tying the whole renovation into the walking corridor that eventually feeds Lovers Lane.
Four phases sound sequential. In practice they overlap, and overlap is where a straightforward calendar turns into a fenced-off castle in September of the following year.
What Actually Slowed It Down
The single most specific reason things drifted has nothing to do with budget or contractor delays in the usual sense. In September 2025, crews doing early tree work near the planned maintenance facility found an endangered bat species roosting in the area. Parks Director Jeff Atkins explained it plainly to KQ2 at the time:
"It was discovered that there was an endangered species of bats that was roosting in the area in one or more of the trees, and until they migrate south this fall, we can't do any tree removal work over there, which means they couldn't do any of the work on that new building."
That single pause did more than stall one building. Because the restroom and concession structure's exact placement depended on clearing that hillside first, the design team couldn't finalize where it would sit until the trees came down. And because removing the old amphitheater stage meant disconnecting the transformer that fed it, crews lost power to roughly three quarters of the park during that stretch. Atkins called it "all the unforeseen things that happens on remodel projects." He wasn't wrong. It's just a more specific kind of unforeseen than most of us pictured when we first heard about a park renovation.
Where Things Stand Right Now
The most recent public update came out of an August 2026 city council work session, just a few weeks before this was written. According to project manager Phillip Leimbach, crews are currently setting rocks at the main amphitheater and preparing to start on the side walls and other foundational elements. Over on the barbecue boulevard side, the groundwork is finished and shelter construction is expected to begin later this year. At the castle, the exterior brick restoration is done. What comes next is interior rough-in work, which means from the street it will look like nothing is happening even as the inside gets rebuilt.
None of that reads as "almost finished." It reads as a project in its working middle, past the demolition and early utility phase, not yet into the reveal phase. If you've been checking the fence line expecting a ribbon cutting this fall, this is the honest state of things: real progress, not yet visible progress.
The Hours Changed Before the Landscape Did
One change that's easy to miss if you don't visit often: starting May 1, 2026, Krug Park's operating hours shifted from 5 a.m. to midnight down to 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. That's a four-hour trim on the early end and a three-hour trim at night, a real cut to the window regulars had for early runs or late evening walks. The city tied the change directly to construction, closing vehicle and pedestrian access to the main park areas outside those hours, with additional restrictions around the upper gates near the castle during daytime work.
If your routine has been an early-morning loop before the old 5 a.m. opening, this is worth adjusting for now rather than discovering at the gate.
What Still Works This Fall
For everything under construction, a lot of what makes Krug Park worth using daily is still intact. The lagoon remains open for fishing under standard Missouri Department of Conservation rules, including the catch-and-release window that runs November through January. City officials have been explicit that Holiday Park, the winter light display that's run here for generations, is staying on the calendar through this renovation. Bryan Carter, the city manager who oversaw the early planning, put it directly: the park "can't just close the doors, lock the gate, and say, wait for us to get done." Trails and the wooded sections away from the amphitheater and castle footprint have largely stayed walkable throughout.
So the practical read for anyone who treats this park as part of a daily routine: expect the fencing to outlast this calendar year, expect the visible reopening most people are picturing to land closer to late 2026 and into 2027, and expect the parts of the park furthest from the construction zone, the lagoon, the trails, the holiday lights, to keep functioning the way they always have.
The fence isn't a sign anything went wrong. It's a sign the project is exactly as complicated as the people running it said it would be back in 2025, just spread across more of the calendar than most of us remembered.
We live and work in this part of St. Joseph too, which is why we keep an eye on the things that change the daily rhythm of neighborhoods like Lovers Lane, even when none of it has anything to do with buying or selling a house. If you're curious what else is shifting nearby, or you'd like to know what your own home is worth in the current market, the team at Coder Haggard Lehr Real Estate Group is happy to help. Reach out anytime for a free, no-pressure conversation, or get your instant home valuation to see where you stand.
