Drive north on Dixie Highway between Buttermilk Pike and Beechwood Road any evening this September and you will pass three arguments the city is having with itself in public. One is about a 26-acre construction site where the Drawbridge Inn used to be. One is about how wide a sidewalk should be. One is quieter, and it is about which restaurants still define this stretch of road forty years after they opened.
None of these are new. What is new is that all three come to a head this fall, at roughly the same time, on the same two miles of pavement. If you live here, this is the season the corridor stops being a plan and starts being a job site.
Behind The Fence At Buttermilk Pike
The site everyone drives past without quite knowing what to call it now has a name: Fort Mitchell Gateway. It is a 26-acre parcel where the Drawbridge Inn stood from 1970 until it closed in 2012 and came down in 2014. Since then it has been the largest empty thing on the corridor.
That changes this fall. Brandicorp, the Bellevue-based developer leading the project, has said vertical construction is expected to begin in fall 2026, with development on both sides of Royal Drive once utility work wraps. The total planned investment exceeds $200 million. The anchor is The Ormsby, a seven-story senior living community with 203 residences and a 48-bed health center, built with St. Elizabeth Healthcare and Dallas-based Greenbrier Development, and designed by Perkins Eastman. Two St. Elizabeth medical office buildings and additional restaurant and retail pads are part of the same plan.
For residents, the most immediate change is not a building but a road. Royal Drive closed on December 13, 2024, and has been fully removed, relocated, and reconstructed. It is now scheduled to reopen and take pressure off the surrounding grid so the rest of the site can move. The state's response to the traffic that the completed development will generate is a double-diamond interchange redesign at Buttermilk Pike, because a site fronting an interstate with nearly 20,000 vehicles a day cannot lean on the existing geometry.
On July 25, 2026, the city took the next procedural step. Council approved an interlocal agreement with the Kentucky Bond Development Corporation, which lets the Kentucky League of Cities act as a conduit issuer for tax-exempt bonds on the project. Fort Mitchell is the sponsoring city but, as Mayor Greg Pohlgeers has emphasized, bears no financial liability on the bonds themselves. If you want to see the paperwork move forward in real time, the next council meeting is August 17, 2026, at 6:30 p.m. at 2355 Dixie Highway, and it is open to the public.
The Sidewalk Argument Nobody Expected To Have
While the Gateway is the loud story, the more revealing one is quieter and runs down the west side of Dixie.
The current sidewalks along the highway were poured, for the most part, in the 1950s. They are five feet wide in places, cracked in others, and they are what a growing number of Beechwood students walk on twice a day because the district does not run buses. Mayor Pohlgeers has been open about the pressure that puts on a corridor that was never designed for foot traffic at that volume.
The city has an 80/20 grant to build multi-use sidewalks along Dixie Highway, which was formally designated as part of Northern Kentucky's multi-use path network roughly five years ago. If the project started fresh today under county subdivision rules, it would require 12-foot sidewalks. The grant-funded version would come in at 8 feet. Pohlgeers has argued that if the city widens now, the state's eventual full reconstruction of Dixie is unlikely to tear out recent work. Some residents have pushed back at council meetings, and the design is far enough along that the engineering has been authorized.
Layer this on top of the KYTC reconfiguration project that was paused in February 2026 after community backlash, and the picture gets clearer. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet's District Engineer, Bob Yeager, said publicly that the pause was to reopen conversation. George Betas, who owns Greek to Me Street Gyros on the corridor, told Fox19 the plan would hurt his business. What looks from the outside like a resurfacing debate is really a reconfiguration of how the road works for the people who use it every day. That conversation is still open.
What's Actually Different On Your Friday Night
Construction schedules are one clock. The civic calendar is another, and it does not slow down for a job site. The rhythm of a Fort Mitchell fall still runs through Beechwood Road, and the dates worth putting on the fridge are these:
- Beechwood Tigers home football. The Fall 25-26 varsity schedule is on MaxPreps. Home games at 54 Beechwood Road are the closest thing this city has to a Friday-night town square.
- Veterans Day Parade — Wednesday, November 11, 2026, 9:30 a.m. Line Beechwood Road from the Beechwood Swim Club at 247 Beechwood Road down to Beechwood Schools. Veterans are asked to gather at the Swim Club at 9:00 a.m.
- Beechwood Bands Holiday Craft Fair — Saturday, November 29. The traditional first-weekend-of-the-holidays market, run by the band program.
If you have lived here five years, you already know two of the three. The point is not the calendar. The point is that the corridor keeps its neighborhood clock even in a year when the biggest single site on it is turning over.
The Rooms That Anchor The Corridor
There is a reason the Gateway pitch to future retail tenants leans on the phrase "strong retail market." The corridor's dining rooms have been holding their ground for a long time.
Oriental Wok has been at 317 Buttermilk Pike since Helen and the Wong family opened it in November 1977, which puts it a year away from its 50th anniversary the same year The Ormsby is scheduled to cut a ribbon. Greyhound Tavern is up the road with breakfast Monday through Saturday from 8 to 11 a.m., a Sunday brunch buffet built around fried chicken and goetta, and a bourbon dinner series that treats the corridor like a destination. Fort Mitchell Public House and BRU Burger Bar round out the immediate mile. Camporosso, Sanctuary Social, and Behle Street by Sheli are close enough that residents count them in the same mental map.
The tell is what the Gateway plans are missing. The 26-acre site is drawing a health system, a senior community, and pads for national retail. The rooms people already care about, the ones with fifty-year backstories and a booth their family has been sitting in since the Nixon administration, are already here. The redevelopment will add. It is not going to replace.
Why This Fall Matters
If you live in a house off Grandview or on Highland or up on Beechwood Road, the fall of 2026 is when Fort Mitchell's next twenty years stop being renderings and start being framing. Royal Drive reopens. Vertical work begins at the Gateway. The sidewalk debate resolves into a design. The Veterans Day parade steps off on the same route it always uses. Oriental Wok pours the same tea it has poured since 1977.
The thesis, if the corridor has one this season, is that a small city can be under construction and still be itself. That is not always true. Watching whether it stays true here is worth paying attention to.
Stay In The Loop
If you want a calm read on what this corridor's changes mean for the homes around it, whether you own on Highland, are eyeing a move into Beechwood's walk zone, or are watching the Gateway build out from a distance, Rebecca Weber is a full-time, dual-licensed Kentucky and Ohio Realtor with Comey & Shepherd who spends her days on these blocks. Let's Connect.
