Fourteen months ago, if you wanted a night of bowling and laser tag, or a slide park big enough to wear out a six-year-old, or a proper golf lesson from someone who does this for a living, you got in the car. Maple Grove had the slides. Brooklyn Center had the golf bays. Somewhere else entirely had the bowling lanes. Woodbury had golf courses of its own, plenty of them, but the entertainment that goes with that lifestyle lived somewhere else on the map.
That stopped being true this month. On August 3, Main Event opened at 540 Bielenberg Drive, its first Minnesota location, sitting almost next door to a Topgolf that opened at 560 Bielenberg Drive last October. A few minutes away, Slick City Action Park opened its second Minnesota outpost in February. A PGA Tour Superstore had already opened the summer before that. Four grand openings, one stretch of road, and the practical effect is that a resident can now spend an entire Saturday on entertainment errands without leaving a couple of miles of Woodbury.
Four Openings, One Stretch of Road
Here is the timeline, laid out plainly, because the sequence matters more than any single opening does:
| Venue | Opened | Address | Built mainly for |
|---|---|---|---|
| PGA Tour Superstore | June 14, 2025 | 1555 Queens Drive | Club fitting, lessons, gear |
| Topgolf | October 30, 2025 | 560 Bielenberg Drive | Group play, corporate outings |
| Slick City Action Park | February 24, 2026 | 587 Settlers Ridge Parkway | Kids' parties, family days |
| Main Event | August 3, 2026 | 540 Bielenberg Drive | Bowling, laser tag, arcade |
None of these are small footprints. Topgolf's Woodbury venue runs three levels with 102 outdoor, climate-controlled hitting bays and Toptracer technology that tracks every shot's distance and path. Main Event's building covers roughly 48,000 to 50,000 square feet and holds bowling lanes, an arcade with more than 100 games, laser tag, virtual reality bays, and a full-service restaurant. Slick City's Woodbury location is about 10,000 square feet larger than its first Minnesota park in Maple Grove, with 14 slides, two sports courts, an "acrobat alley" with trapeze and zip line, and an arcade room with 67 games installed for its opening.
That is not a strip mall filling in vacancies. That is four separate companies, none of them competing with each other for the same dollar, deciding within the same 14-month window that this particular stretch of Woodbury was worth building on.
The Drive These Openings Replaced
Before this cluster existed, the nearest comparable options sat outside city lines. Topgolf's only other Minnesota location opened in Brooklyn Center back in 2018. Slick City's first Minnesota park opened in Maple Grove in early 2025, and the Woodbury park that followed it was already working its way through city approval that same spring. If you lived in Woodbury and wanted either experience, you were driving west to get it.
Woodbury's own city planner made the intent behind closing that gap explicit when Topgolf was still under construction. Assistant community development director Eric Searles told reporters that Woodbury had been "actively pursuing more recreation and play-type uses in the community," and that Topgolf and Main Event together were expected to "engage community members and attract visitors from across the region."
Mayor Anne Burt put it more directly at Topgolf's ribbon cutting last fall, describing the moment as a turning point for how the city sees itself.
"Woodbury has been working for a long time to become a destination," Burt said. "We have a new destination market for Woodbury and with that we want to bring more and more people to this community to enjoy all the great things we have."
That word, destination, is doing real work in that sentence. Woodbury has spent years as a place people commute out of for entertainment. The city's own language around this corridor suggests it is trying to flip that direction, and the four venues that landed here in 14 months are the clearest evidence yet that the flip is underway.
The Corridor Wasn't an Accident
The golf cluster specifically makes sense once you look at what already existed nearby. PGA Tour Superstore's Woodbury general manager, Ron Gornick, pointed to the metro's golf density as the reason the company chose Woodbury for its second Minnesota store, following an original location in Minnetonka that opened back in 2016.
"This is a booming golf market," Gornick said when the Woodbury store opened. "With 95 golf courses in the area, the metro Twin Cities are an obvious expansion market for us."
That is not a coincidence layered on top of another coincidence. A golf retailer picks a market with 95 courses already in reach. A golf entertainment company picks the same stretch of road less than a mile and a half away. The corridor is being built around an activity Twin Cities residents were already doing, just adding places to do more of it closer to home.
The employment numbers attached to these openings tell a similar story about scale. Topgolf Woodbury alone is expected to employ 350 to 400 people. Main Event's original city filings projected roughly 200 employees for its Woodbury location, and the company has been actively hiring servers, bartenders, hosts, line cooks, and games and bowling attendants throughout the summer. These are not seasonal kiosks. They are full staffing operations built for a venue the companies expect to run at volume, year-round.
What Comes Next
The corridor is still filling in. A golf-simulator restaurant called ParT Barn was in the works about two miles east in Lake Elmo as of last year, part of the same wave of recreation-focused development pushing through this part of the east metro. Whether it has opened yet or is still finishing construction, its presence in the pipeline says the pattern isn't finished. Companies keep looking at this stretch of road and deciding it's worth a building.
For anyone who already lives in Woodbury, the practical takeaway is simpler than any of the development math behind it. A Saturday that once meant picking one activity and driving somewhere to get it now means picking from four, most of them within a few minutes of each other off Bielenberg Drive. Topgolf and Main Event share a corner. PGA Tour Superstore sits about a mile and a half south. Slick City is a short drive away in the same city. None of it requires leaving town, and depending on the week, none of it requires much planning at all.
That is the actual shift here, not four openings treated as separate news items, but one stretch of road that quietly became the default answer to "what are we doing this weekend" for a city that used to send its residents elsewhere to find out.
If you're weighing what a move to this part of the east metro looks like day to day, not just what a listing says, Set Apart Realty knows Woodbury well enough to walk you through it street by street. Reach out and we'll talk through what your weekends could actually look like here.
