The early phases of Erlanger’s Eons adventure park are coming together.
LINK nky joined community members and city leaders this week for a tour of areas that are either complete or near completion, specifically the areas around Houston Road and Sycamore Tree Lane, near the area where the park’s groundbreaking took place in Oct. 2024.
“All the way back to ’07, this was a concrete plant, basically,” said Public Works Director Kevin Quinn. “Now we’ve turned it into something really, really nice, which is going to be our dog park.”
Quinn delivered his remarks at a special meeting of the Erlanger Parks Task Force Tuesday night. The meeting gave the opportunity for interested parties to tour the work completed so far.
The dog park is probably the most visible part of the project from a major road. Grading, drainage and the addition of new sidewalks have already been completed. A concrete pad, which will eventually split off into two dog paddocks, has also been completed. Fencing contractors meanwhile have been chosen, but that work hasn’t started yet.
Students from Dixie Heights High School painted the concrete wall at the back of the park late last year after the Public Works Department cleaned and primed the wall. The students spent about 60 hours in total painting the mural, according to the city. The city is expecting to perform a ribbon cutting for the dog park in the spring.
The area above the dog park is slated to become a pump track, i.e. an area for BMX biking and other cycling activities.
“People can come and do BMX biking and stuff like that, some moguls, some different kind of terrain,” Quinn said.
Networks of biking trails and multi-use paths are a large part of the overall plan for the park. Other possible future amenities include trails on wooden bridges through the tree canopy, a nature playground and a hidden coffee shop that bikers can find when riding the trails, although these projects have not begun yet.
The other part of the project that has been completed has been the integration of multi-use paths along Sycamore Tree Lane and the conversion of the intersection at Sycamore Tree Lane and Houston Road to a one-way out.
Sycamore Tree leads out of the Cherry Hill neighborhood, and the construction has added a four-way and reduced vehicle traffic out of the neighborhood to a single, one-way lane. Concrete islands, sporting lighted poles with the Eons logo, separate the two lanes. The intersection opened up to residents just before Christmas.
City Council Member Tyson Hermes said the point was to “let people know that they’re entering something different, that this is an area where there’s going to be people around.”
Quinn admitted that at this point the work was, admittedly, “bare bones,” although the spine has been sealed up to Turfway Road. Wooden bridges traversing the creek had been constructed at several points, and the city is already making plans to construct an overlook viewing the creek below. People were already using the multi-use paths to jog and walk their dogs when LINK nky visited the site on Tuesday.
The intersection conversion aimed to augment efforts by the city to reduce semi-truck traffic into the Cherry Hill neighborhood, a problem residents have been dealing with for years. The Council set up a task force to monitor the problem and propose solutions, such as extra signage and other road measures. Many of the residents and city leaders believed drivers unfamiliar with the area were being routed through the neighborhood by GPS navigation programs.
When LINK nky first reported on the truck problem in 2023, accidents were actually trending down overall. Public Safety Director Kyle Rader informed LINK nky on Tuesday there had been seven calls about trucks in the neighborhood from the beginning of 2024 to the end of 2025.
One Cherry Hill resident, Julie Estep, who attended the meeting and who had previously expressed frustration with the situation to LINK nky in 2023, said “there’s still some things that I think they could do more to help us.”
She pointed to a sharp turn in Sycamore Tree Lane coming down the hill toward the exit, which she argued was difficult to negotiate for most vehicles. She also expressed a desire for more road repairs along Sycamore Tree.
Sycamore was in the city’s five-year road plan, Quinn said.
“We evaluate all the streets yearly, and we re-evaluate every single year,” said Quinn. “Some move around, but right now it’s within the five-year plan.”
Learn more about the project by reading LINK nky’s previous coverage or by visiting the project’s website, both of which are linked below.