Drive past the north end of Shadow Pines on a weekday evening and you'll see paddle bags leaning against a chain-link fence where a fairway used to be. A few miles away on Penfield Road, a dining room that spent years as Guacamole Tacos and Margaritas now serves tacos made with a traditional nixtamalization process under a different name. Neither of these is new information if you happened to be paying close attention. But strung together, they point to something Penfield residents haven't quite named yet: the town spent the last two years closing out a backlog of half-finished plans, and this is the season most of them crossed the finish line at once.
A Former Fairway, Two Years In
Shadow Pines used to be a golf course. In 2018, Penfield voters approved the town's purchase of the land through a town-wide referendum, and for years afterward it sat as what the town called "passive recreation," mostly untouched trails on a former back nine. That changed slowly, then all at once. The Town Board approved a formal site plan in March 2024, Genesee Construction broke ground that spring, and by October 8, 2024, the north seven acres of the property had become something else entirely: ten pickleball courts, two of them built to ADA specifications, two inclusive playgrounds, a picnic area, an open-air pavilion, walking trails, restrooms, and parking off Whalen Road near the historic Alpheus Clark House.
The project cost $3.5 million, and state Senator Samra Brouk helped cover part of it with a capital grant. At the ribbon-cutting, she put the reasoning plainly:
"I am proud to have secured a capital grant to fund the creation of new recreational spaces for our residents."
What's easy to miss, almost two years later, is how ordinary the space has become. It isn't a ribbon-cutting anymore. It's just where people play now, on a Tuesday, without anyone announcing it.
The Same Story, a Mile Down the Creek
Something nearly identical happened at Channing H. Philbrick Park, and it happened on the same rough timeline. The 19-acre park along Irondequoit Creek has always been one of Penfield's better-kept secrets, a place where the creek drops 90 feet over the course of a mile and forms small cascades most residents have never heard of, let alone hiked to. But the wooden footbridges that carried hikers over the water had aged out. In January 2025, the town closed most of the trail system to replace three separate wooden crossings with one continuous elevated walkway, a 500-foot structure built on an embedded pile system.
The closure also cut off, temporarily, the informal trail connection between Penfield and Perinton that hikers have used for years. By fall 2025 the new bridge was open, and the town held a ribbon-cutting to mark it. The practical result is a park that's now easier to get into and out of, particularly for anyone who found the old wooden crossings unstable after rain. If you haven't walked the Philbrick trail since before last winter, the middle of it looks different than you remember.
Meanwhile, the Restaurants Turned Over Too
The same pattern shows up in Penfield's dining scene, just with a shorter memory span. Mamitas Mexican Cuisine opened at 1778 Penfield Road, in the space that spent years as Guacamole Tacos and Margaritas. The new operation runs a weekly Taco Tuesday built around fresh tortillas made through a nixtamalization process, the traditional method of treating corn that most fast-casual Mexican spots skip.
A few minutes north at BayTowne Plaza, three more restaurants filled space that had been either vacant or occupied by something else entirely. Get Thai'd Up serves Thai and Lao food and, somewhat unexpectedly, has a bank of claw machines near the counter. Sendu opened next door with an Asian fusion menu built around sushi tacos, crispy nori shells standing in for the usual tortilla, plus a full bar and a dining room with a more polished look than the plaza's exterior suggests. Old Pueblo Grill Cantina rounds out the group as the brand's first location with table service and a liquor license, though most of its food is still cooked on the same food truck the business ran before it had a dining room, a detail that says something about how these places actually grow around here.
Here's the piece of local trivia that trips people up: BayTowne Plaza carries a Webster zip code, but the plaza itself sits inside Penfield. Anyone searching for these restaurants by town name alone might miss them entirely.
Not Everything Is Finished Yet
Not every project in this cycle has closed out. A Chick-fil-A location is still under construction on Fairport Nine Mile Point Road, on the site of a former gymnastics training center just north of Route 441. The company announced the Penfield location in March 2026 as part of a broader New York expansion expected to bring roughly 600 jobs across several regions. The site went through a zoning board hearing first, and a community group called Preserve Penfield raised concerns about traffic before the board approved the changes needed for construction to proceed. There's no confirmed opening date yet, which puts it in the same position Shadow Pines and Philbrick Park occupied a year or two ago: approved, under construction, and not yet part of daily life.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall
Underneath the bigger projects, the town's routine fall business is also lining up. None of it is glamorous, but it's the kind of thing that's easy to forget until the week it happens:
- Saturday, September 19: Household Hazardous Waste Collection at the Penfield DPW
- Friday and Saturday, September 25 and 26: the town's fall drop-off and recycling event
- August 18 (already behind us this month): the town's new GovWell platform went live, replacing the older system residents used for building permits and applications
That last one is a small thing, but it fits the pattern. Even the paperwork side of Penfield spent this window catching up to itself.
The Part That's Easy to Miss
None of these projects are dramatic on their own. A park bridge, a set of pickleball courts, four restaurants changing hands, a permitting system getting a rebuild. Individually, each is the kind of update a resident notices for a week and then stops thinking about. But taken together, they describe a town that spent about two years working through a backlog of plans that had been sitting on the books since 2018 or earlier, and finished most of them inside the same short window.
If you've lived in Penfield through this stretch without connecting the dots, that's normal. Nobody experiences infrastructure as a single story. You notice the new bridge because you happened to hike Philbrick again, or the new courts because a neighbor mentioned pickleball, or the new tacos because you were driving down Penfield Road and the sign had changed. What's actually true is that the town looks and functions differently now than it did in 2023, not because it grew, but because it finally finished what it had already started.
If you're curious what any of this means for property values, trail access, or which parts of town are seeing the most change up close, Laura Freimuth knows this stretch of Penfield well enough to walk you through it. Let's Connect.
