In 1889, the Village of Wayzata took James J. Hill to court. The town had passed an ordinance ordering the railroad to move its tracks 300 feet north, away from the shoreline and the business district. Hill ignored it. When the fight over track placement got ugly enough, he tore down the original depot near Broadway Avenue and built a new one anyway, closer to the lake than the city ever wanted, in the spot where the Wayzata Depot still sits today.
That depot, the one Hill built specifically because the town couldn't stop him, is now the most photographed building in Wayzata and the anchor of the festival that bears his name. James J. Hill Days runs September 11 through 13 this year, its 52nd edition, and it draws something in the neighborhood of 75,000 people to three blocks of downtown over three days. The town spent a century turning a corporate power play into its favorite weekend of the year. That's worth knowing before you plan around it, because this year the festival timing collides with something else worth knowing about: downtown Wayzata just got the busiest run of new restaurant openings it's had in years, and the festival weekend is the wrong three days to actually enjoy any of them.
What the Depot Actually Remembers
The depot Hill built in 1906 was, by his own account, the "handsomest" station on the entire Great Northern line. Architect Samuel Bartlett designed it in English Tudor Revival style, with a stucco facade, gabled porticoes, and lead glass windows that are still in place. It had indoor plumbing and hot water heat, which counted as showing off in 1906. Trains kept regular stops there until 1958, then ran as a flag-stop service until 1971, when Amtrak took over national passenger rail and Wayzata's line went quiet for good.
Burlington Northern donated the building to the city in 1972. It landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981. Today it houses the Wayzata Area Chamber of Commerce and a small museum run under the Lake Minnetonka Historical Society, with the original waiting room benches, the stationmaster's desk Hill himself sent to the building, and a garden railroad out back that started as a temporary display during the 2006 Hill Days festival and became permanent enough that the city approved it as Minnesota's first public garden railroad in 2009.
During Hill Days, the museum opens to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with the model train running through the afternoon, which means the same building the city once dragged Hill into court over now spends the festival weekend welcoming the public in his name, on the shoreline he refused to move away from.
The Three Days Themselves
The festival itself is not subtle about scale. Free entertainment runs all weekend on the Sandvold Stage at Minnetonka Avenue and Lake Street. The dachshund races happen Saturday at the dedicated JJHD Dog Park, alongside a Doggy Olympics event Sunday. Panoway Plaza hosts a log-rolling pool where anyone willing to get wet can try it in whatever they showed up wearing. The Street Market runs Friday through Sunday with more than 150 vendors covering everything from arts and crafts to nonprofits, and the Rails & Ales Craft Beer Festival sets up at the Depot on Friday evening. The parade, sponsored by Davey Tree, closes things out Sunday at 3 p.m. down Lake Street.
Carnival tickets go on presale in August at a discount and sell at full price during the festival itself at Lunds & Byerlys and the on-site ticket booth. None of this is a secret to anyone who has lived here more than one September, but the scale of it is the point: 75,000 people funneling through the same three or four blocks that also happen to hold this year's newest restaurants.
Three New Tables, One Crowded Weekend
Downtown Wayzata has added three notable restaurants in the past year, and each one changes what a weeknight or a Saturday brunch downtown can look like.
Belle & Grey opened at The Hotel Landing in May, positioned as a lakehouse gathering place with Chef de Cuisine Tsu-Hung Liu running the kitchen. The menu leans into dishes like wagyu beef tartare, lobster pot pie, and pan-roasted walleye, with a smaller, quieter dining option called The Library tucked inside for anyone who wants the food without the room's full energy. Weekend brunch there draws a crowd on its own, festival or not.
Eloise, from Grocer's Table owner Lindsay Pohlad, took over the space next door to her original restaurant in the same Broadway building. She named it after her husband's grandmother and built the room around a collected, mismatched-chair aesthetic meant to feel less like a restaurant and more like eating dinner in a friend's dining room. It runs a shorter week, Tuesday through Saturday evenings, which matters if you're planning around it.
Parcelle, the fast-casual organic cafe chef Kamal Mohamed built into a following at his Minneapolis flagship, confirmed plans back in January for its first suburban location on the Wayzata lakefront, an 800-square-foot grab-and-go space aimed at a spring opening. It's built for picking up food before a walk along the lake or a seat on the patio, not a sit-down destination in the way the other two are, and by late summer it should be settled into its regular rhythm downtown.
Three different kinds of restaurants, three different reasons to go, and all three sitting inside the same few blocks that James J. Hill Days turns into a pedestrian crush for three straight days.
Why the Festival Weekend Is the Wrong Weekend
| Sept 11–13 (Festival Weekend) | The Following Week | |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown parking | Street closures, festival lots, plan to walk | Normal downtown parking returns |
| Restaurant wait times | Long, especially Friday and Saturday evening | Back to a normal reservation window |
| Best use of the weekend | Street Market, parade, Depot Museum, carnival | A quieter dinner at any of the three new spots |
| Great Lawn concerts | Wrapped for the season in August | N/A, series already ended |
If the plan is to actually sit down at Belle & Grey or get a table at Eloise without a wait built around festival foot traffic, the smarter move is the week before or the week after, not the festival weekend itself. Save the festival days for what they're built for: the parade, the Street Market, the Depot Museum's extended hours, and the kind of chaos that only happens once a year. Save the new restaurants for a Tuesday or Wednesday when Broadway is just Broadway again.
The Great Lawn's Sunday Music in the Park series, an 8th annual run of free concerts in front of The Hotel Landing, wrapped its schedule in August, and the Wayzata Rotary Club's Music by the Lake series at Depot Park finished its six-Wednesday run around the same time. Both series close out just as Hill Days opens, so there's no overlap to plan around there. What's still ahead this fall includes the 5th Annual Wayzata Charity Car Show on September 19 at Wayzata Community Church, benefiting local scholarships, and the Wayzata Oktoberfest on October 3, a family-friendly event with no general admission charge.
What This Weekend Actually Is
The town Wayzata is now didn't happen despite the fight with Hill. It happened because of it. The depot he insisted on building against the city's wishes turned out to be the exact kind of civic anchor a small lakeside town needs a century later: a place to run a model train, house a chamber of commerce, and give 75,000 visitors somewhere to gather once a year. The irony is worth knowing even if it changes nothing about your weekend plans. But the restaurant math is worth acting on. Go enjoy the festival for what it does best, and go enjoy Belle & Grey, Eloise, or Parcelle on one of the other 362 days of the year, when the only crowd you're competing with is the regular Wayzata dinner rush.
If you're already keeping half an eye on what's happening in this town beyond the festival calendar, whether that's a new restaurant, a shift in a neighborhood's character, or the timing of a move, that kind of local attention is exactly what Avenues & Acres Home Team brings to every conversation about Wayzata and the Lake Minnetonka corridor. Request Your Free Concierge Consultation whenever the timing is right for you.
