Things look different this summer at Josh Turpin’s downtown Overland Park restaurant.
In a typical summer, he said, Brew Lab is a lively place to be — with lots of customers riding their bikes to the restaurant and brewery, or walking over after trips to the farmers market or neighboring businesses.
But this summer, things are quiet — save for the sound of nearby construction.
“We used to have pretty vibrant foot traffic in the area,” he said. “Now there’s nothing at all.”
Turpin is one of several business owners feeling the impacts of ongoing construction on the new farmers market area, which completely took away dozens of open parking spaces under and around the now-demolished pavilion. The new parking restrictions and road closures have introduced new challenges to their businesses.
Plans call for a new pavilion and gathering space
The city broke ground on the new Clock Tower Landing project at the end of 2024.
This season, the Overland Park Farmers’ Market has temporarily moved to the Matt Ross Community Center parking lot.
Due to construction, Marty Street is closed just north of 80th Street, effectively blocking vehicles and foot traffic around Strang Hall and the nearby cafes, bars and businesses to the south from taking a direct path to Brew Lab and Viona’s shared parking lot.
Overland Park Drive and the Clock Tower Plaza and its adjacent sidewalk are also closed to cars and pedestrians — as is the parking lot that previously surrounded the old pavilion.
Since the closures went into effect earlier this summer, the city has taken various measures to address the “significant” impact of the project on surrounding businesses, said Meg Ralph, said Meg Ralph, director of strategic communications for the city of Overland Park.
So far, the city told the Post that some of those measures include:
- Adding new signs to the area directing people to the surrounding businesses and available parking
- Offering shuttle rides downtown on market days
- Ramping up promotion of downtown businesses
A parking lot on the north side of downtown at the former Dyna-Jet car wash site is also still open. (Find all of the area’s public parking here.)
Business owners say traffic is down, and so is business
With newly restricted access to Brew Lab, Turpin said that the restaurant has seen somewhere between a 30% and 40% decrease in revenue this summer, compared to previous summers.
On Saturdays alone this summer, that decrease looks more like 40 to 50%, since farmers market days have historically been busier days at Brew Lab.
To mitigate costs, Brew Lab recently cut its hours to stop offering lunch service on Monday through Thursday.
“Restaurants survive on a pretty small margin as it is,” he said. “We’re trying to up our marketing as much as we can, but unfortunately, when you’re in a position where your cash flows are down, that kind of limits your ability to spend money on marketing.”
Next door, Italian eatery Viona’s Italian Bistro has seen a similar decline of 30 to 40% in revenue compared to previous summers, taking a “major hit” once construction began.
Owner Benny Morina said that, luckily, once the restaurant’s loyal regular customers learned they were struggling, they began showing up even more than usual to help keep Viona’s afloat.
Many of those regulars are willing to walk to the restaurant even if they can’t park, he said — though that will only help them through the warmer months.
“Come winter time, it will be a disaster — we know that for sure, because who’s going to walk a mile to get there in (cold temperatures)?” he said. “If this was only going to be a month or two, we could understand. But running a business like ours for 12 months in this condition is almost impossible.”
Though businesses located along Marty Street — like Brew Lab and Viona’s — are the closest to the construction site, customers of those businesses that are no longer able to park in the lot that surrounded the former pavilion now have to park elsewhere downtown.
For some businesses along 80th Street, that has created a domino effect with less parking than usual near their own spaces.
Clayton Prestwood, owner of bar and eatery The Other Place in downtown Overland Park, said his restaurant (which backs up to the south of the construction site) is one of the businesses feeling that impact.
“At (lunchtime) we’d normally be busy, but people only have X amount of time to go to lunch, and they don’t have time to park and walk two blocks,” he said. “It’s suffocating everyone down here.”
Construction will continue until next summer
Pending construction, the roughly $34 million farmers market project is expected to wrap up and reopen to the public for the 2026 season.
Prior to construction, the project site in downtown Overland Park had 242 public parking spaces. When the farmers market pavilion reopens, said Ralph with the city of Overland Park, 150 of those spaces will return. In the meantime, only 20 spaces are available in the lot across Marty from Brew Lab.
Business owners downtown do largely feel like there’s a “light at the end of the tunnel” with the new pavilion on its way, said Turpin, the owner of Brew Lab.
In addition to bringing back foot traffic in the summer, the new pavilion will also offer a year-round element with its indoor features — which some businesses say could end up being a net positive with higher-traffic weekends all year long.
But still, they say it’s a matter of managing to hold things together until then.
“Our goal is to just hang on,” Turpin said. “We made it through (the pandemic) and hopefully this isn’t as bad as that was, but you gotta do what you gotta do to survive.”
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