The Lake Trail Beat Its Own Deadline. The Café Down the Road Didn't Even Try.

Forest Hills sits at the quiet southern tip of White Rock Lake, close enough that a walk to the water is a habit rather than an outing. For most of this summer, that habit came with an asterisk. A stretch of the lake trail near Winfrey Point closed in mid-June, and anyone trying to run the full 9.33-mile loop had to turn around, backtrack, or reroute through the streets. That closure just ended, and it ended early. Meanwhile, a mile up Garland Road, a storefront that's been dark since 2025 is still dark, with a new tenant that won't open its doors until November at the earliest.

Same neighborhood, same summer, two very different relationships with a calendar. One project had a construction inspector's cell phone number attached to it and finished ahead of its own estimate. The other has been public knowledge since February and still doesn't have a firm date. That gap says something about how change actually moves through Forest Hills, and it's worth understanding before assuming either project reflects the pace of the other.

What actually closed, and why it took less time than promised

The trail closure traced back to a sinkhole that appeared earlier this year over an abandoned 36-inch wastewater main running beneath Garland Road and the White Rock Trail between E. Lawther Drive and San Rafael Drive. Dallas Water Utilities crews backfilled the hole right away, then scheduled a longer fix: grouting roughly 2,800 feet of the old pipe so the ground wouldn't open up again. Crews mobilized the week of June 15, and the city's construction notice set expectations for a September 2026 finish.

For seven weeks, the outside westbound lane of Garland Road between Lawther and White Rock Creek closed on a Monday-through-Saturday schedule, and the trail segment between Lawther and Winsted Drive shut down entirely. District 9 council member Paula Blackmon flagged the closure to residents in her May 29 newsletter, as the Lake Highlands Advocate reported, warning that there wouldn't be a continuous loop around the lake for the duration.

Then, ahead of that September target, the city announced the closed segment would reopen to the public by Friday, August 7. It did. If you ran the loop this past weekend, you likely noticed the detour signs were gone.

Forest Hills wasn't in the middle of the closure zone, but the neighborhood felt it anyway. The lake's full loop only works as a loop if every segment is open, and for anyone starting from the south end near the Arboretum, that meant either an out-and-back instead of a circuit or a longer detour through side streets for close to two months. The reopening doesn't just restore a segment of pavement. It restores the option to actually finish the lake the way most regulars are used to finishing it.

The plaza is on a much slower clock

A mile up Garland Road, Casa Linda Plaza has been quietly rebuilding its own daily rhythm, and on a timeline that makes the trail project look fast by comparison.

The plaza itself is the oldest shopping center in Dallas, built in 1945 on farmland the Brown family had purchased a decade earlier, with the Spanish Revival tile roofs and arched storefronts that still define the corner of Garland Road and North Buckner Boulevard, according to its history on Wikipedia. Elliott's Hardware has anchored one corner of that history for decades. Albertsons anchors the grocery side. The plaza has always turned over tenants slowly, which is part of why the current wave of change stands out.

The Schlotzsky's that had occupied a unit inside the plaza closed in 2025, and the space sat empty until word broke in February 2026 that Maman, the café brand that started in Soho in 2014, had signed a lease for the spot. Signage went up, renovations were reported to start in April, and the target opening is November 2026, nine months after the announcement and still not locked in. Maman already operates a Dallas location at The Plaza at Preston Center, so this will be its second in the city, but Casa Linda residents have had a long wait between the headline and the actual pastry case.

The plaza has also picked up a second addition. Reporting in July 2026 pointed to Salisbury's Pizza bringing New York-style pies and in-house delivery to Casa Linda, adding another name to a retail mix that already spans the plaza's farmers market, wellness shops, and long-running dining spots.

Here's the contrast laid out plainly:

A city utility crew working under a public roadway, with named inspectors and a hard deadline attached to a press release, finished early. A café buildout inside an existing retail unit, with no permitting drama and no sinkhole to contend with, is taking more than triple the time and still hasn't locked a date. If you've been checking that storefront window every few weeks expecting news, that's not impatience. That's just how retail turnover works here compared to infrastructure with a government timeline attached.

What never stopped

While both of those clocks ran in the background, the parts of Forest Hills that don't depend on either one kept going without interruption.

Tenison Park never closed. The Highlands and Glen courses, split by White Rock Creek, sit just south of the lake on land the Tenison family donated to the city in 1924, making Tenison Glen Dallas's first municipally owned course. Generations of golfers have played there, including Lee Trevino, who developed his game on those fairways according to the Dallas Parks and Recreation history of the course. The Highlands course got a redesign in 2001 from PGA Tour pro D.A. Weibring, and the club calendar hasn't paused for any of the summer's other disruptions. The Club Championship runs August 22 and 23, with the Dallas City Championship following on September 26 and 27.

The Little Forest Hills Neighborhood Association kept its own rhythm too. Its Second Saturday Shoreline Cleanup, run by a volunteer crew the neighborhood calls the Trash Talkers, happened as scheduled on August 8, an hour of picking up trash along the lake before most people were even out for a morning walk. That's alongside the annual White Rock East Garden Tour and the Fourth of July parade that the D Magazine neighborhood guide lists as fixtures of the area's calendar, none of which needed the trail to be open or the plaza to be finished.

And near the center of it all, the Warren Ferris Cemetery, resting place of the man considered the first surveyor of Dallas, still hosts the educational programming that the Forest Hills Neighborhood Association organizes for kids and adults through the Friends of Warren Ferris Cemetery. It's the one landmark in this story that isn't waiting on anyone's construction schedule.

What this actually means if you live here

The lake loop is back to full length as of this week, so if you'd been running an out-and-back for the past two months, you can go back to a real circuit. The plaza's changes are still ahead of you rather than behind you. Maman's November target is not guaranteed, and Salisbury's Pizza doesn't have a public opening date yet, so the storefronts you pass on the way to Albertsons may stay under wraps a while longer. If golf is part of your weekend, the Club Championship at Tenison lands in less than two weeks, and the Dallas City Championship follows in late September. If you want an easy way to give back to the shoreline you just got back, the next Second Saturday Cleanup is worth putting on the calendar.

None of this changes what Forest Hills is. It changes what's currently in motion around it, and understanding which parts move fast and which parts move slow is the difference between checking a storefront window every week out of habit and knowing roughly when to actually expect something new.

If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood this closely, whether you're already living here or thinking about what a move into Forest Hills would actually look like day to day, that's the kind of detail Christi Weinstein and her team pay attention to on every street in central and East Dallas. Reach out anytime you want a read on what's really changing around here, not just what's on the market.