Drive from the Saturday farmers market on McKenna Avenue to dinner at Marrow near Tiburon Golf Club and you will cover more ground than downtown Gretna itself has ever spanned. That is not a metaphor. It is a fact about where this town has decided to put its money over the past two years, and it changes how a resident should think about where the "center" of Gretna actually is.
Three things are happening at once this fall: a wave of new sit-down restaurants has clustered almost entirely in Gretna's western growth corridor, the historic downtown along McKenna Avenue is holding onto its own separate rhythm of markets and festivals, and the city's new $33 million civic building is rising nowhere near Main Street at all. Individually, each of these is a nice-to-know. Together, they describe a town splitting its gravity in two, and that split is worth understanding if you live here.
The New Restaurants Skipped Main Street Entirely
Ask anyone in Gretna about the town's food scene two years ago and you'd have heard about drive-through stops off the interstate. That has changed, but not on McKenna Avenue. The new restaurants opening in Gretna have landed almost exclusively in the newer commercial pockets on the west side of town:
- Basil's Italian, at 16918 Morgan Ave, doing scratch sauces and build-your-own pizza rather than trying to reinvent the category
- Marrow, near Tiburon Golf Club at 17870 Oakmont Drive, from the same team behind Omaha's Timber and Pasta Amore, built around rotisserie and fire-to-fork cooking
- Hawaiian Bros, in the Southpointe development at 16131 Stevens Point Circle, open since March 2024 and now a fixture of the lunch rush
- Red Door Woodfired Grill, not yet confirmed but showing up on updated commercial plat maps next to Hy-Vee on 192nd Street, between Culver's and Citizens Bank. The Kansas City brand already runs seven locations across that metro, so a Gretna plat listing is a meaningful signal even without a press release.
None of these sit downtown. They sit in the retail corridor that has grown up around Highway 6/31 and 192nd Street, the same stretch where Gretna's rooftops have multiplied fastest. The dining boom isn't diffusing across town. It's concentrating in the part of Gretna that didn't exist twenty years ago.
Downtown Still Runs on Its Own Calendar
Meanwhile, the original downtown keeps its own schedule, and it hasn't moved. The Farmers Market of Gretna runs Saturdays from June 6 through September 12, 2026, 8:00 a.m. to noon, right on McKenna Avenue. There's exactly one gap in that run: no market on July 25, because that Saturday belongs to Gretna Days, the town's long-running summer festival with its own parade and foundation behind it.
That single blacked-out Saturday tells you something. Downtown Gretna isn't competing for foot traffic with the new corridor. It's protecting a slower, older civic rhythm, one built around a weekly market and an annual festival rather than a rotating slate of new restaurant openings. If you've been assuming downtown was fading because you don't see new storefronts there, that assumption misreads what downtown is actually for right now.
Here's the split laid out plainly:
| Downtown (McKenna Ave) | Growth Corridor (Hwy 6/31, 192nd St, Southpointe) | |
|---|---|---|
| Anchors | City Hall (current), farmers market, Gretna Days | Basil's, Marrow, Hawaiian Bros, Hy-Vee, Tiburon Golf Club |
| Weekly rhythm | Saturday market, June–September | Daily lunch and dinner traffic |
| What's arriving | Nothing new announced | Restaurant wave, possible Red Door |
| What's leaving | City Hall and both libraries | Nothing, this is where growth lands |
City Hall Is About to Leave Main Street
The clearest evidence of where Gretna's civic weight is shifting is the Community Complex itself. This is a 60,000-square-foot, $33 million building going up near Jansen Drive and Highway 6/31, immediately west of Gretna Crossing Park, not downtown. When it opens, it will combine Gretna's city hall with its main and children's libraries and a community center under one roof, with a teaching kitchen, a maker space, and both indoor and outdoor gathering areas.
Mayor Mike Evans described the project at groundbreaking as more than a building: "we're planting a seed for the next generation." Construction has moved fast since. By January 2026, the project was nearing topping out. By August 10, 2026, the Omaha World-Herald toured the site with city administrator Paula Dennison, documenting finished second-floor meeting rooms, a children's library reading nook, and city offices ready for fit-out. The most recent public projection has the complex opening at the end of February 2027, meaning Gretna's city hall and both libraries are on track to relocate from their downtown home to a site next to Gretna Crossing Park within the next several months.
That is a genuine civic center of gravity moving. The building that houses your library card, your council meetings, and your permit office is packing up and heading west, landing a few minutes from the same corridor where Basil's, Marrow, and Hawaiian Bros already sit. Main Street keeps the market and the festival. The corridor gets the food and, soon, the government.
What Changes for You This Fall
A few practical notes if you're planning your weekends around town.
The road disruption that shaped early summer should be behind you by now. The city's citywide concrete panel reconstruction started June 8 and ran roughly six weeks, and Schram Road's bridge replacement and repaving between 186th and 189th Street ran from late May through early August. Both timelines have closed out, so if you've been rerouting around either project, you can likely go back to your normal path.
Looking ahead, Trick or Treat on the Trail returns Saturday, October 24, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Lincoln Place Park, with local businesses, candy, and games set up along the trail. It's a small, specific date worth putting on the calendar now rather than discovering it the week of.
And the farmers market has three Saturdays left in its 2026 run before it closes out on September 12. If downtown McKenna Avenue is where you want to spend a Saturday morning before the season turns, that window is closing.
The Two Gretnas Are Going to Coexist, Not Merge
None of this means downtown is losing. It means Gretna is running two separate town centers on two separate clocks, and residents will end up choosing between them depending on what they need. Want a Saturday market, a parade, a sense of the town's original footprint? That's still McKenna Avenue. Want dinner reservations, a library card renewed in a new 60,000-square-foot building, or a maker space to use on a Tuesday night? That's the corridor by Gretna Crossing Park.
Most towns this size settle into one center over time. Gretna is building two on purpose, at the same time, and the restaurant openings, the market's own separate calendar, and the Community Complex construction schedule are all evidence of the same underlying decision. Understanding that split is a better way to plan your fall than treating any single headline as the whole story.
If you're watching Gretna's growth closely enough to wonder what it means for a specific street or a specific home, Skyler Bauer tracks these shifts as part of working this market every day. Reach out to schedule a showing or get a free home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
