Walk the paved stretch of Papermill Run that curls along the Fox River in Kimberly this month and you're standing on ground that was fenced off from the public for more than a hundred years. It belonged to the paper mill. Then the mill closed, and for a while the riverfront sat behind chain link while the rest of the village went about its business on N. Main Street. Now there's a trail, a park, and a scenic overlook built into the old dam wall, and all three finished years before most of the housing meant to surround them did.
That's the part about Kimberly's Cedars district that's easy to miss if you only pass through it occasionally. Usually redevelopment works the other way. Rooftops go up first, amenities trail behind them as the tax base justifies the spending. Kimberly built its public river access, its park, and its event space ahead of the private construction, which is why the riverfront already feels like an established part of the village even with residential phases still filling in around it.
The Trail That Unlocked a Century-Old Fence Line
The Papermill Run segment is part of Loop the Locks, the 13.1-mile trail network that finished stitching together Appleton, Combined Locks, Kaukauna, Kimberly, and Little Chute after a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Sunset Park on June 5, 2024. Kimberly's own contribution to that network is about 1.8 miles of concrete trail, built in pieces since 2018 with support from the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region. Small compared to the full 13.1-mile loop, but it's the segment that did something none of the others could: it opened Fox River frontage on the old NewPage mill site that the public hadn't been able to reach in more than a century.
Village administrator Maggie Mahoney put it simply when the first riverfront condo project cleared the village board: the new development "really sort of fills out the riverfront piece." The trail came first. The filling in is still happening.
The Overlook Finished Before the Houses Around It Did
Just off that trail sits the Cedars Historic Overlook, an indoor space built into the dam structure with river views, seating for two dozen people, a kitchenette, and its own restroom. The Village of Kimberly secured a $250,000 grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation back in 2019 to build it. Phase one wrapped in 2021. Phase two was penciled in for 2025 on the village's own project page. Today it's listed on Kimberly's recreation site as a bookable facility, available to residents for private gatherings the same way you'd reserve a shelter at any other village park.
That's a fully operating piece of civic infrastructure sitting on a site where the housing plan was still measured in phases as recently as 2023, when the village approved Blue at the Trail, a condo project slated to add 45 owner-occupied units in its first building alone, ranging from 800 to just under 2,000 square feet. The full build-out on paper runs to 180 multi-family condo units, 58 townhomes, and 16 single-family homes, arriving roughly every six months as each phase gets built. The overlook didn't wait for any of that. It opened its doors while the housing around it was still working through permitting.
Sunset Park Is Running Two Concert Series at Once, and Both Close Out This Month
If you want proof that the public side of the Cedars is already fully alive, look at what's happening at Sunset Park right now. Two separate organizations run free outdoor concerts there every summer, and this month both of their seasons wrap within days of each other.
- The Kimberly Community Band plays Sunset Park on Wednesday evenings, and its final 2026 date lands on August 12.
- The Kimberly Amphitheater board runs its own Sunday evening series at the same park, and its 2026 season closes on August 16 with Forte & the Pianissimos, described by the amphitheater's own board as the last show of the summer.
That's not a coincidence built into the calendar on purpose. It's two independent groups, a village-supported nonprofit and a community band, both choosing the same finished stage and closing out the same week almost by accident. It only happens because the park itself has been done long enough to host that much programming without anyone thinking twice about it.
A few blocks over on N. Main Street, Clubhouse Wine Bar is running its own small calendar the same week: Puppy Yoga on August 12, a Cousins Maine Lobster food truck stop on August 23, Speed Dating on August 30. None of that depends on the riverfront finishing its build-out either. The wine bar, like the park, is simply open and running.
What's Still Catching Up
None of this means the Cedars is finished. The housing side of the project is still very much a work in progress, arriving in the staged pattern the village and its developers laid out years ago. That's a normal part of how a redevelopment this size plays out over a decade. What's unusual is that the public half, the part residents actually use day to day, got built first and has been running at full capacity for a while now.
For someone who already lives in Kimberly, that means the walkable, social pieces of the neighborhood you'd expect to wait years for are already working. You don't have to time your visit to the overlook around when the next condo phase wraps. You don't have to wait for the last townhome to close before the trail feels like part of your routine. The park and the river access got finished on their own schedule, and this August is a good, specific week to notice it: two concert series wrapping within four days of each other, a wine bar three blocks away running its own calendar, and a stretch of riverfront that spent a hundred years behind a fence now hosting all of it.
If you're weighing what a move into the Cedars or anywhere else along the Fox River in the Heart of the Valley would actually look like, the agents at CENTURY 21 Ace Realty know this stretch of Kimberly block by block, including which phases are finished and which are still on the way. Reach out any time you're ready to talk through it.
