The McCordsville Summer That Doesn't Require Leaving Town
July 9, 2026
July 9, 2026
For most of the last decade, a McCordsville summer meant driving somewhere else. Fortville for ice cream and the library. Fishers for a Saturday market. Geist for water. The town's population went from about 1,100 in 2000 to more than 11,000 by last year, and the amenities never quite kept up with the rooftops. That gap is what makes this summer different.
Mid-2026 is the moment McCord Square stops feeling like a promise and starts behaving like a downtown. The second floor of the NineStar Connect building switches on, the parks that were being renovated last summer are finished, and the recurring events that used to live on a flyer now have a real footprint to gather around. If you already live here, the practical result is that the number of Saturdays you need to leave town drops sharply.
The three-story building at Mt. Comfort Road and Main Street opened its first floor last October, and if you've only been in for a scoop, you've seen a fraction of what the building is meant to do. The 34,600-square-foot building was announced in August 2023 with an estimated price tag of $10 million. NineStar occupies most of the first floor, with Libby's Ice Cream and Gifts occupying the remaining first-floor space and expanding its menu beyond ice cream. That menu expansion alone is worth a return visit if you filed Libby's under "kids' after-dinner stop" and moved on.
The bigger change lands upstairs. Vernon Township Public Library anticipates the McCordsville space will open in mid-summer 2026. The new branch will occupy 3,000 square feet on the second floor of the NineStar Connect building, while the library's Fortville location will remain open. It is a second location, not a replacement, and it is designed to do things the Fortville branch cannot. The McCord Square location is set to include an innovation lab, STEM kits, sensory kits for neurodivergent children, study rooms, collections of books the library is not able to stock in the Fortville location, and a StoryWalk trail that will be between the NineStar building and the McCordsville Police Department building.
Read that last part slowly. A StoryWalk between the library and the police station means the walk itself becomes the program. You park once, get ice cream downstairs, take the kids up to the innovation lab, and end at a picture-book trail that loops back through Civic Green. That is a completely different Saturday than driving to Fortville for a single errand.
For years the town's parks conversation was about what was coming. That framing is out of date. The parks now consist of Old School Park (newly renovated and open September of 2025), Town Hall Park and McCord Square Park (opened October 2024).
Old School Park in particular is worth a second look if the last time you were there was before the renovation. Old School Park has two playgrounds, one for ages 2-5 and another for ages 5-12 with new rubber playground surfacing, plus a new shelter, bathroom facility and two revamped basketball courts. It sits at 6030 W. 750 N., across the street from the McCordsville I.O.O.F. Cemetery. A separated toddler playground with a real restroom is the small detail that turns a fifteen-minute park stop into a two-hour one, and it is the kind of change parents notice immediately and out-of-town visitors do not.
McCord Square Park is the newer piece, and it is meant to work with the buildings rather than as an errand of its own. McCord Square has over 15 acres of green space, and the town is connecting trails through it. Civic Green sits between the future town hall parcel and the police station, which is why the library's StoryWalk lands where it lands. The green space is the connective tissue, not the destination.
The parks department's public program list gives the summer its rhythm. These are the recurring McCordsville-run events to know:
None of these are novel individually. What is novel is the density. A resident who plugs three of them into a single summer no longer has a reason to drive to Fishers or Noblesville for the same experience.
Not every 2026 story is an opening. The town's own comprehensive plan is direct about the road work. The town is widening CR 600W from Main Street to Vail Road in 2026, and the roadway widening will include widening the CSX crossing to improve traffic flow and reduce the queuing currently occurring at the nearby intersection of CR 600W and W Broadway.
Two practical points for residents. First, that is the corridor most people use to reach McCord Square from the west side of town, so expect the same summer that finally makes the square worth visiting to also be the summer the approach is under construction. Second, the widening is a mid-term fix rather than the endgame. Ultimately, the town intends to seek grade separation of the roadway from the CSX railroad, and a cost estimate for the dual underpass option to separate the railroad and road grades at Broadway and the CSX railroad was completed in 2021. Translation: the train will still stop you this summer, and the real fix is years out. Plan a five-minute buffer into any trip that crosses the tracks and you will feel better about the visit at the other end.
There is a version of this post that could have been written in 2024 or 2025. It would have said the same things about growth and included the same list of parks. The reason to write it now is that three things line up for the first time.
Town manager Tim Gropp has described 2026 as a "packed year" with the most capital projects the town has had, including a five-year master plan for the parks department, capacity improvements at Broadway and County Road 600 West, and a traffic light in front of McCordsville Elementary School. The library's mid-summer opening is the piece that shifts McCord Square from "a nice apartment building with an ice cream shop" to "a place with a reason to spend an afternoon." The park across the street from the cemetery is finally finished. And the road work is a temporary inconvenience layered on top of a permanent upgrade, not the other way around.
If you have lived here for more than a couple of years, the useful move this July and August is to treat McCord Square as the default plan rather than the novelty. Walk the StoryWalk once it opens. Take a book upstairs. Get a cone downstairs. Sit through a Live at McCord Square set. The town has spent a decade catching up to its own growth, and the catch-up is what this summer actually feels like.
If you are thinking about whether the neighborhood you already own in still fits the way your household uses a weekend, or whether the household is outgrowing the house itself, I am always happy to talk through what is happening on your street and in the broader Central Indiana market. Reach out to Carly DeFazio any time. Let's Connect.
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