A 2003 planning study called Rose Run "the physical, visual and emotional heart of the community." That line still describes the stretch connecting Market Square to the library and the McCoy Center for the Arts, the part of the walk most people picture when they picture New Albany. It stops describing the walk the moment you reach Village Hall. The parking lots on both sides of Village Hall Road are closed to the public right now, fenced off for a project that will not finish until late fall 2027.
This is Rose Run Park Phase II, and if you have not driven or walked past Village Hall Road recently, the closure is easy to miss. The city describes the project as an expansion of Rose Run Park, and while that work is underway, the stretch beside Village Hall is also an active construction zone. Temporary parking for Village Hall and the New Albany Police Department has moved south of Village Hall Road. A contracted tree-care company started removing invasive species and dead or diseased trees from the stream corridor in February, and more visible clearing began in March. Anyone who uses the path between the schools and Market Street will find the usual route changes along this block.
What the Two Acres Used to Be
The land under construction is not new parkland acquired from nowhere. It is two acres donated by The New Albany Company, formerly the site of the old police station and a fuel station, sitting between Village Hall and the current police department building. The site borders Founders Field, the city's first cemetery, and that adjacency is doing real work in the design. The centerpiece of Phase II is a Veterans Memorial that will include a hero's walk, a plaza and a water feature, positioned deliberately next to the ground where New Albany's history is already buried.
The memorial's most specific element is a Gold Star Family statue telling the story of Eleanor Butsko and her son Mike Butsko, New Albany's only Vietnam War casualty. The sculpture is being created by Michael Kraus and fabricated by Travis Cook, and it is scheduled to be unveiled when the park reopens in late fall 2027. That is also, notably, the city's first permanent piece of public art. Rose Run has functioned as connective tissue between the library, the schools and Market Square for years. This phase adds something the corridor did not have before: a fixed, single-purpose memorial rather than another stretch of multi-use path.
The Bevelhymer and Walnut Detour Has Already Ended
The Bevelhymer and Walnut roundabout is the opposite case, a disruption that has already been resolved. New Albany City Council approved utility funding for that intersection in April 2025, and by July the city had restricted Bevelhymer Road to northbound traffic only between Millbrook Farm Drive and Walnut Street while crews widened the road. That restriction is over. The roundabout reached substantial completion in December 2025, and the project came with new leisure trail connections along both Bevelhymer Road and Walnut Street, meaning the intersection that briefly limited access to Bevelhymer Park now feeds it with more paved trail than it had before.
The roundabout matters beyond its own footprint because it sits at the front door of the Fieldhouse and Community Center, a 185,890-square-foot facility rising on the northwest corner of that same intersection, inside the existing 145-acre Bevelhymer Park. The project has had a rocky timeline. It was originally supposed to finish by late 2025 and slipped, with the parks district citing circumstances outside its control. The pace since has been fast enough to make that delay look like a pause rather than a stall. Structural steel was in place by early December 2025. The topping-out ceremony, where staff and board members signed a beam before it went into the building, happened in April 2026. By June 23, 2026, crews had poured the final concrete for the indoor track and court areas, using more than 120 truckloads over three weeks. The parks district's own tracking page still lists the opening as fall of 2026, which puts it on the near side of the timeline compared to Rose Run's 2027 finish.
Where the Walk Is Still Uninterrupted
None of this touches most of New Albany's trail mileage, which is the part that tends to get lost when construction updates dominate the conversation. Several stretches have had no closures at all this year:
- Ratchford Fens, a passive park between the Upper Fenway and Fenway subdivisions, with boardwalks and a pond that make it a quiet option in the Country Club era neighborhoods
- Taylor Farm Park, nearly 100 acres on the northeast side of the city, still building out new trail connections in phases but open for its existing boardwalk loops
- Thompson Park, roughly 59 acres with seven athletic fields, unaffected by either the Rose Run or Bevelhymer projects since it sits on the southern side of the village
- Wexner Community Park, where the loop around the Karr Family Pergola remains open and continues to draw programming tied to the nearby Philip Heit Center for Healthy New Albany
- Swickard Woods, a small forest preserve near the center of town with looping trails through woodland that has not shown up in any construction notice this year
That list matters for anyone planning a fall walk without wanting to think about detour signage. It also underscores something the construction headlines obscure: the disruption is concentrated in two specific, bounded locations, not spread evenly across the system.
How Far the Trail Network Has Grown
The city's current Rose Run Park page puts New Albany's leisure trail network at more than 84 miles. That number is worth sitting with, because as recently as 2022 and 2023, city materials were citing 55-plus miles in the same kind of official language. Two active construction zones have not shrunk the system. They have coincided with a period where the network grew by roughly 30 miles, largely through incremental additions like the Bevelhymer and Walnut trail connections that came bundled with the roundabout project.
That is the part of this story easy to miss if you only track what is currently closed. New Albany's trail system is not static infrastructure interrupted by two projects. It is infrastructure that keeps expanding, and the two closures making news right now happen to be the visible, temporary cost of that expansion rather than evidence the system is standing still. The Village Hall detour will not last forever. When it lifts, in late fall 2027, it will hand back a stretch of path plus a memorial the corridor did not have before, on top of a trail network already dozens of miles larger than what New Albany was advertising just a few years ago.
If you are watching how a specific block of New Albany, from Market Square down through Village Hall to Bevelhymer Park, is changing month to month, that kind of granular tracking is exactly what Greg Giessler at Cam Taylor Realtors does for clients weighing a move into this part of the north-arc suburbs. Reach out if you want a read on how a particular street or trail-adjacent block fits into what is coming next.
