The decades-long plan to bring Grand Park to life is starting to become a reality. This fall, the first phase will open to the public.
"Grand Park is our favorite urban legend in Frisco," Mayor Jeff Cheney wrote on Facebook, adding that residents will finally be able to experience trail networks through a section of the park. Mayor Cheney also posted the above map.
Grand Park will be located along the Dallas North Tollway between Legacy Drive and Stonebrook Parkway.
When completed, the park will eventually be over 1,000 acres, which, as Mayor Cheney likes to put out, will make it bigger than New York's Central Park–and help the park live up to its grand name. Planners are taking influences from parks all across the country in hopes of creating something special that could include art installations, an arboretum, a world-class child play area and more.
"When talking about this park, you couldn't experience all of it in a single day, maybe even a single week," Mayor Cheney previously told CBS DFW.
As Frisco Enterprise reports, voters approved $22.5 million for initial development back in 2006. The park has been slow to become a reality because of the former Exide Technologies battery recycling plant and the necessity to clean up the soil and water. In 2012, the city of Frisco reach an agreement with Exide: Frisco purchased the surrounding land and Exide was supposed to clean up its mess.
But the clean-up effort dragged on. Frisco finally got complete control of the clean-up and the Exide site in October 2020. "If Exide was left responsible to clean up the property, I think they probably would have cleaned it up to the version that my teenagers think the room is clean," Cheney previously told CBS DFW. "I always said well we want to make sure mom thinks the room is clean. That is the analogy that I use."
While the effort is not finished, now that the city of Frisco has been in charge, things certainly appear to be moving faster. The entire park project, Community Impact explains, will be built over the span of decades, incorporating community feedback along the way.
"I said it had become an urban legend," Mayor Cheney added. "People almost stopped believing that it would ever happen." This fall, that starts to change.
