Perhaps to be clear, the agenda for a special city meeting scheduled July 14 that included Cedarhurst update stated in part that, “a quorum of the Council may be present after the formal meeting, but no City business will be taking place.”

That said, there was an update on the Cedarhurst Mansion development plans. Meeting July 14 at the River Oaks Golf Course and Event Center, City officials heard updates on several topics, including an affordable housing development project by Bethesda Lutheran Communities at 6961 East Point Douglas Road, a 31-unit three-story apartment building on a plot on Harkness Avenue South, and last but not least, the Cedarhurst Mansion property currently up for redevelopment at 70th Street and County Road 19.

With no Council meeting held for the first half of July, the special meeting on July 14 with no City business conducted was nonetheless informative. As per the diagram in the packet, there is still quite a lot of “impermeable” parking space. Cedarhurst, once a working farm of many hundreds of acres, is now in danger of being swallowed up in the future through surrounding development just as much of rural Cottage Grove township was sixty years ago—the question now being whether or not the Mansion could/would/should be preserved long-term.

“It depends on what the people want,” Jeremy Novak of Three Sixty Development previously said at a June 3 gathering with easels and notepads in the City Hall Training Room. “Do they want the Mansion preserved or not?” Contained implicitly in the July 14 update is the news that while the Mansion might be preserved, it won’t come without a cost. So what’s the investment?

Not just money. Merging farm and city will involve a leveraging of land as such, most of what remains around the Mansion, in fact.

In the first place, a lot of parking lots. Add to this a 63-unit mixed use apartment building, two three-story townhomes of 12 and nine units respectively, a 72-unit four-story apartment building with 84,0000 square feet, along with a combined 81,000 square feet of commercial space split unevenly between three buildings plus an additional 230 to 240 parking spaces.

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In the meantime, we can report on a semi-related front that the historic Thompson Grove Country Club and pool center that once formed the heart of modern Cottage Grove as it got started in the 1960s is now no more. For those wishing to see the evidence of change, a ground’s eye viewing of Google Earth at the intersection of Granada Avenue South and 85th Street South will reveal the shift to new development, just as a drive-by will confirm the Club’s present absence.

The online County GIS map for Washington County, meanwhile, stubbornly retains the distinctive O and T said pool shaped depressions that once graced the site, the Thompson Grove development begun by Orin Thompson. The on-site reality, meanwhile, is something else entirely.

Will Cedarhurst escape a similar fate? You can help decide!

Now taken over with new development, this corner at Granada and 85th Street in the Thompson Grove neighborhood once hosted hundreds of parties and summer swimming at the Thompson Grove Country Club. Photo by Joseph Back

The above Cedarhurst development update as prepared by ISG Architects was given to City officials at a meeting July 14 at the River Oaks Golf Course and Event Center at 11099 Highway 61, beginning at 5:30 p.m. No official city business was transacted at the meeting. Image from meeting packet.