The Same Stretch of Legacy Drive Is Rewriting Your Walk and Your Weeknight Dinner

Have you noticed the survey stakes near the Teel Parkway trailhead lately, or wondered why the old Jasper's space at Shops at Legacy suddenly has a different sign? Two separate things are happening on the same road right now, and if you live in Heritage Lakes, both of them touch your week more than the neighborhood's own gate, golf course, or lazy river ever will.

Heritage Lakes sells itself on what's inside the guard shack. The clubhouse, the nine-hole practice course threaded across the lake islands, the tennis academy membership that comes bundled with your HOA dues. All of that is real and all of it stays the same. But the parts of daily life that actually change year to year, where you walk the dog before dinner and where you end up eating that dinner, both run along Legacy Drive outside the gate. And this year, both ends of that corridor are under construction at the same time.

The Trail That Currently Stops Short

The Cottonwood Creek Greenbelt is the trail most Heritage Lakes residents already use without thinking much about it. It runs from Teel Parkway under the Dallas North Tollway toward Wakeland High School, close to two miles of paved path through wetlands and ponds with fishing platforms along the way, and it won a statewide park design award back in 2018. The nearest major intersection to the trailhead is Legacy Drive and Teel Parkway, a few minutes from the neighborhood.

Here's what most people walking that trail don't know: it currently dead-ends. The paved path stops well short of connecting across the tollway toward the rest of Frisco's trail network, which means your loop options have been limited to doubling back rather than continuing on.

That's changing. Frisco's City Council approved a $368,003 amendment to its design contract for the Cottonwood Creek Trail Extension, Phase 2, at its February 3, 2026 meeting. The original contract, signed back in August 2022 for $290,500, only covered a trail segment between Frisco Street and the BNSF railroad. This amendment does two things: it redesigns that alignment, and it adds a new 1.3-mile federally funded segment that wasn't part of the original scope at all. Once built, the extension will run under the tollway along the Cottonwood Branch to the intersection of All Stars Avenue and Frisco Street, creating roughly 3.3 miles of continuous trail from North County Road all the way to Teel Parkway. Buried in the project description is a detail worth knowing on its own: this segment includes Frisco's first off-street, grade-separated crossing of the BNSF railroad, meaning walkers and cyclists will pass under the tracks rather than waiting at a crossing.

None of this is finished yet. The February vote covers design services and construction administration, not a ribbon cutting. But it's the clearest sign yet that the short loop Heritage Lakes residents have been walking for years is about to become part of something considerably longer.

Six Minutes Down the Same Road

Drive south on Legacy Drive from Heritage Lakes and you land at The Shops at Legacy, the dining and shopping strip that's been the default answer to "where should we eat" for this pocket of Frisco for two decades. It's also been going through its own rough patch and its own recovery, on a timeline that runs almost exactly parallel to the trail work.

The rough patch was 2024. Craft and Vine closed. So did the Angelika Film Center. Toasted Coffee and Kitchen shut its doors too. For anyone who'd built a routine around those spots, that was three fewer reasons to make the drive.

The recovery started with Truluck's moving into the old Jasper's space, a swap that traded one steakhouse landmark for another rather than leaving the storefront empty. Then came a wave of new leases reported in early 2025: Le Beef Steak & Frites, a roughly 2,670-square-foot French steak-and-frites concept; Lelo's Coffee Co., a McKinney-based coffee shop that targeted a summer 2025 opening in a compact 1,079-square-foot space; Wagyu House, a 6,844-square-foot Japanese-style barbecue concept built around all-you-can-eat wagyu, aiming for a winter 2025 opening; and Legacy Social Club, a 19,154-square-foot private members-only space that targeted mid-to-late 2025. The developer behind Legacy North summed up the shift plainly.

"There's recently been a lot of improvements."

That's not marketing copy. It's an accurate read on a shopping center that spent a year losing tenants and is now spending the next one gaining them back with more square footage and more ambition per lease than what it lost.

Here's the closure-to-arrival scorecard so far, based on what's been publicly reported:

That's not a one-for-one trade. It's more square footage, more distinct concepts, and a private club that didn't exist in that footprint before.

Why This Is One Story, Not Two

Treat the trail extension and the dining turnover as separate news items and you miss what actually connects them. Both are investments in the exact same stretch of Legacy Drive that already defines how Heritage Lakes residents spend their evenings, whether that's a walk after work or a table at seven. The neighborhood's marketing has always centered on what's behind the gate. The lived reality, the version residents actually experience week to week, runs along the road outside it.

That matters for a simple reason: neither project waits for the other, and neither shows up in the neighborhood's own materials. The HOA newsletter covers casino nights and pool hours. It doesn't cover a city council vote on trail funding or a shopping center's tenant roster. You'd have to be watching both threads separately to notice they're moving at the same time, on the same road, in the same direction.

What to Actually Watch For This Fall

A few concrete things worth tracking if you're in Heritage Lakes:

• The trail extension is still in design and construction administration as of the February 2026 vote, so don't expect a finished path this year. Watch for construction activity near the Teel Parkway trailhead and along the tollway frontage as the next visible sign of progress.
• Truluck's is already open in the former Jasper's location, so that one's settled if you haven't tried it yet.
• Le Beef Steak & Frites, Wagyu House, and Legacy Social Club were all targeting openings through the back half of 2025. If you haven't driven past Legacy North recently, it's worth a look to see which storefronts are now lit up.

None of this changes what Heritage Lakes is at its core: a gated, lake-threaded community built around a practice golf course and a lazy river that most residents chose it for in the first place. But the version of daily life that plays out beyond the gate, the walk and the weeknight dinner, is being rebuilt in real time along one road, and it's worth knowing that before the barrels come down and the new signs go up for good.

If you're weighing a move within Heritage Lakes, curious what a home near this stretch of Legacy Drive is actually worth right now, or just want a broker who tracks this kind of local detail before it shows up anywhere else, Craig Kooken is a longtime North Texas broker who follows Frisco's neighborhoods this closely for a living. Let's Connect.