The Missing Kitchen on Ankeny's Busiest Bike Trail

Ride the High Trestle Trail into Uptown Ankeny on a Saturday afternoon and you'll probably end up at Firetrucker Brewery, the old fire station turned taproom that sits close enough to the trail to hear the bike bells. Lock up, grab a stool, order something from the rotating tap list. Then ask for a menu and you'll get an answer that surprises a lot of first-time visitors: there isn't one. Firetrucker has never run a kitchen. It leans on guest food trucks, a rotating cast of local vendors, and whatever partner restaurant happens to be dropping off orders that week.

For a business built almost entirely around trail traffic, that's an odd gap. And it's about to close, not because Firetrucker is finally installing a kitchen, but because the bar next door is building one big enough for both of them.

A Brewery That Never Learned to Cook

Firetrucker opened in 2014 inside Ankeny's former fire station on SW Third Street, and the taproom leans into that history: a converted apparatus bay, a covered patio, a lounge area with rotating local art. The High Trestle Trail runs close enough that regulars describe it as being in the brewery's backyard, along with the parking at AMP, the Ankeny Market & Pavilion, just a short walk away.

What Firetrucker never built was a food operation. Instead, it built a rotation. Guest food trucks show up on weekends, local restaurants send over food-runners, and the brewery leans on the fact that people biking the trail are usually headed somewhere else for a meal anyway, or willing to wait for whoever's parked outside that day. It's worked for over a decade. It also means the most trail-adjacent taproom in Uptown Ankeny has spent that entire decade unable to feed the people who stop there.

The Fix Is Coming From Next Door

Trailside Tap sits at 710 SW Third Street, one lot over from Firetrucker at 716. It's a smaller building, 2,600 square feet, and it has spent the past few years outgrowing itself. Owner Jake Happe has been public about the plan: raze a vacant house on the adjacent lot, and expand Trailside toward nearly 10,000 square feet, adding an enclosed rooftop bar and a new patio in the process.

The part that matters for Firetrucker is buried in the same plan. Once the expansion is built, Trailside intends to extend its own menu to the brewery next door, closing the gap that's defined Firetrucker's food situation since it opened. The two buildings would effectively share a kitchen without sharing a name, walking distance already this close.

Happe hasn't committed to a hard start date. He's described the timing as a business decision more than a calendar one.

"The timing is going to happen when it's right for us to pull the trigger."

The plan has been public for a couple of years now, and Happe has been consistent on one point: construction won't start until it pencils out, and it won't start during Trailside's busy outdoor patio season, which is the same stretch the trail itself is in the middle of right now. As of this summer, the building at 710 SW Third Street is still Trailside's original 2,600 square feet, which means the expansion, and the fix it brings for Firetrucker, is still ahead rather than underway.

The Trail Is Also Getting New Terrain

None of this is happening in isolation. The city has been treating the High Trestle Trail Experience Park, the 14-acre stretch of park land tracking the trail through Uptown, as a long-term project rather than a single upgrade. Last year's phase, roughly a million dollars, added trees, lighting, and a glow trail. This year's phase, budgeted around $300,000, is adding something the trail has never had: a nearly 900-foot flowline path just east of Walnut Street, with small rolling hills built into an otherwise flat rail-trail. It's designed to work for families pushing strollers and kids on bikes as much as for serious cyclists, and it's expected to open by the end of this summer.

A separate piece of the plan calls for an interactive LED light installation under the South Ankeny Boulevard underpass, meant to welcome trail users coming in from the south side of town. Ankeny's economic development director, Derek Lord, has described the broader goal plainly: turn this stretch of Uptown into an outdoor tourism destination, not just a pass-through for commuters and weekend riders.

Taken together, the trail is getting more reasons to stop, at the same time the businesses along it are getting better equipped to feed the people who do.

Five Saturdays Left on the Market Calendar

The other clock running on the same corridor is the Uptown Ankeny Farmers Market, which sets up every Saturday morning at AMP, the same pavilion that doubles as a trailhead. This year's season started May 23 and closes September 26, which leaves five more Saturdays on the calendar from today. On a typical Saturday the market draws an average of 55 local vendors selling produce, meat, eggs, honey, baked goods, and handmade crafts under two permanent, weather-proof pavilions.

The market isn't purely a shopping stop either. Kids ride the Uptown Express train around the grounds, live music runs most weeks, and a program called Market Stories hands out free books to visiting children. It's the kind of recurring, low-key anchor that turns a Saturday morning errand into a habit, and it happens to sit at the exact spot where trail riders, brewery regulars, and market shoppers all cross paths.

Beats & Eats, the city's free Thursday night food truck and music series at the same pavilion, already wrapped its 2026 run in June and July. What's left through September is the market itself, plus whatever the trail brings in on its own.

A Corridor Built to Connect, Not Just Coexist

Look at these pieces side by side and a pattern shows up that's easy to miss if you only hear about them one at a time. The city isn't just adding a trail feature this year. It's adding a feature designed for families and casual riders, not just cyclists logging miles. Trailside Tap isn't just getting bigger. It's expanding specifically to feed the brewery next door, closing a gap that's existed since 2014. The farmers market isn't just continuing. It's doing so at the same trailhead that's about to get new lighting and a new path built around it.

None of these projects reference each other publicly, but they're solving the same underlying problem: getting people who show up in Uptown Ankeny for one reason to stay for a second and third one, without having to leave the block. A cyclist who tries the new flowline once it opens, then wants a beer, will eventually be able to get food at the same stop instead of waiting on a truck. A family that comes for the Saturday market can already walk the same fifty yards to a brewery patio, even if the food itself still depends on who's parked outside that day.

It's worth remembering that this stretch of Uptown wasn't always considered a draw. Polk County assessor data shows property values in the district have more than doubled since 2010, which tracks with a decade of exactly this kind of incremental, connected investment rather than one single project. The trail didn't create Uptown's momentum on its own, and neither did any one restaurant. It's the layering of small, deliberate connections, this trail feature to that patio, this market to that pavilion, that's turned a half-mile stretch of Third Street into the neighborhood's actual center of gravity.

If you're already riding the High Trestle Trail through Uptown, the next few months are worth paying attention to. The flowline should open before the leaves turn. The farmers market has five Saturdays left. And whenever Trailside's expansion finally breaks ground, ordering a beer at Firetrucker will come with something it's never had before: a menu.

If you're watching Ankeny for reasons beyond a Saturday morning market run, whether that's a move you're weighing or a property you're already sitting on, Steward Real Estate Group keeps closer track of these shifts than most. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk through what a corridor like this means for your own plans.