Tonight, Downtown Park fills with pony rides and pioneer-era games for Pleasant Grove's Heritage Festival, the kind of evening where kids run handcart obstacle courses and the Daughters of Utah Pioneers lead museum tours between food truck lines. Three miles away, off the interstate, a Chicken Salad Chick that opened in June is still the newest thing on a block where a LongHorn Steakhouse sign just went up. Both are Pleasant Grove. Neither one is waiting for the other to finish.
That's the actual story of this fall here. Not that the city is choosing between its historic Main Street identity and its newer commercial corridor along I-15. It's that both are still actively under construction, on separate timelines, and this October is the first stretch where you can watch them expand in the same week.
The Old Calendar Just Added a Root Beer Garden
Pleasant Grove's Viking Day Festival started small. Back in 2021, a resident named Kasey Jackson noticed the city had no event honoring Leif Erikson Day and pitched the idea to the city council, pointing out that Scandinavian immigrants made up roughly a third of Pleasant Grove's population in the early 1900s, settling a stretch of town once known as Little Denmark. The first Viking Day ran a single afternoon in Downtown Park.
Five years later, it's a full-day production. This year's Viking Day Festival lands on Saturday, October 10, opening with a Viking 5K at 8 AM, followed by the main festival from 10 AM to 5 PM with a strongman and axe-throwing competition, local vendors, food trucks, and live music. New this year is a root beer garden, and the day closes with Valhalla After Dark, a glow dance from 7 to 8 PM. None of that existed in the original 2021 version. The event keeps adding programming rather than repeating the same format year over year, which is a different thing than a tradition simply continuing.
Boo Bash, the city's Halloween event formerly known as Haunt on Main, is doing something similar in its own lane. It still delivers the basics, free trick-or-treating with local businesses and city departments, but this year it's adding a sensory-friendly silent hour at the start, aimed at guests who benefit from a quieter environment and accessible pathways. That's a small addition, but it's evidence the city keeps iterating on an event that could have stayed static.
Layer in the Pleasant Grove Invitational, a ballroom dance competition returning October 23 and 24, and Heritage Festival tonight, and you get a Main Street calendar that isn't just old, it's actively being rewritten every year.
Three Miles Away, a Different Kind of Construction Is Still Happening
Valley Grove is the other half of this story. It's a 130-acre mixed-use development off Interstate 15 and Pleasant Grove Boulevard, built by St. John Properties, with a total build-out cost expected to reach $1.2 billion and more than 1.5 million square feet of office, retail, and hospitality space once finished. Right now it includes Grove Tower, a six-story building with nearly 190,000 square feet of office space, along with Valley Grove I, II, and III, three more multi-story office buildings. The land used to be a sod farm.
What makes Valley Grove worth watching isn't the total size. It's how recently the tenant list has kept changing. In December 2023, MilkShake Factory, Shamrock Coffee, and Club Pilates signed on for an early 2024 opening. By the following August, five more names joined, Feather Hat Bar, MassageLuXe, Melty, Panera Bread, and Royal Suits, adding to nine retailers that had already arrived in the months before that. Then in June of this year, seven more tenants signed leases at once:
- Chicken Salad Chick, opening its first Utah location on June 9 with a grand opening event
- LongHorn Steakhouse
- Columbia Bank
- Stella's Ice Cream, which had already opened by the time the lease announcement went out
- quickgreens
- Mrakki Brow Bar
- Only Crowns, a dental crown specialty practice
Rylan Mills, who co-owns the Chicken Salad Chick location with his father Michael, said at the opening that the brand's culture "immediately resonated with us" and that the family couldn't wait to meet their Pleasant Grove guests. It's worth noting that a national fast-casual chain chose Pleasant Grove for its entire state debut, not Salt Lake City or Provo. That's a signal about foot traffic and visibility that a lot of national retail chains take seriously when they're picking a first Utah address.
The tenant mix already open includes names most residents recognize on sight: Café Rio, Slim Chickens, Jersey Mike's, R&R BBQ, The Great Greek Mediterranean Grill, Wildside Bowls, Da Cloud Boba Shoppe, Village Baker, and a 34,000-square-foot Tesla dealership. Chick-fil-A signed a ground lease for a pad site with an opening planned for fall 2025. None of this reads like a finished shopping center. It reads like a development still filling in its own blueprint three years after ground broke.
A Tuesday Doesn't Wait for Either Calendar
Not everything worth doing in Pleasant Grove is an annual festival or a grand opening. Grove Station runs a weekly Tuesday Trucks and Trivia Night, a low-key gathering that has nothing to do with either the Main Street tradition calendar or the Valley Grove leasing pipeline. It's just a standing Tuesday plan, the kind of thing that doesn't show up in press releases but shows up in people's actual weeks.
That's worth naming because it's easy to talk about a city's calendar only in terms of its biggest single days, the festivals and grand openings that make headlines. Pleasant Grove's daily rhythm includes those, but it also includes recurring, ordinary nights that don't need an anniversary to justify themselves.
What the Split Calendar Actually Means If You Live Here
The takeaway isn't that Pleasant Grove has a lot going on this fall, though it does. It's that the city is running two genuinely separate build-outs at the same time, and both are incomplete by design. Viking Day has expanded every single year since 2021 because it started as one person's pitch to a city council and has been treated as a living event ever since, not a fixed tradition frozen at its original scale. Valley Grove has expanded in leasing waves roughly every six to twelve months since 2023, with no indication the tenant mix is close to final given the development's stated target of 1.5 million square feet against what's built today.
If you already live here, that means this October gives you an unusually direct way to watch both processes at once. You can run the Viking 5K on the morning of October 10, and that afternoon pick up lunch from a chain that didn't exist in Utah four months ago. You can trick-or-treat at Boo Bash with a kid who has sensory sensitivities for the first time this year, and the same week walk past a LongHorn Steakhouse sign that wasn't there last spring. Neither timeline is waiting on the other. Neither one is finished.
That's a more interesting fact about Pleasant Grove than any single event on the calendar. A town that's still actively adding to both its oldest traditions and its newest commercial corridor, in the same season, is a town that hasn't settled into a final shape yet.
If you're watching Pleasant Grove for reasons beyond this fall's calendar, whether that's a first home, a move up, or land nearby that might make sense for a build, Bybee + Co Realty knows this stretch of Utah County block by block, from Main Street to the Valley Grove frontage. Contact us when you're ready to talk about what's next.
