Walk south on SW 3rd Street from the High Trestle Trail trailhead and you pass two doors that regulars treat as one stop. Firetrucker Brewery sits in the old brick fire station, pouring craft beer to riders coming off the trail. A few steps down, Trailside Tap serves the food. Between them sits a vacant house that neither business owns free and clear of the other's plans, and that house is the reason both places are still smaller than the neighborhood around them has become.
This isn't a story about one bar getting bigger. It's about two businesses that have spent a decade solving half a problem each, and a single lot that could finally let them solve the whole thing.
The Kitchen Firetrucker Never Built
Firetrucker opened in 2014 inside Ankeny's old fire station, the building the city sold off when Uptown was still, by most accounts, a quiet stretch of Third Street with little foot traffic. The brewery built its identity around that history and around the trail running through its backyard along with AMP Park's parking. What it never built was a kitchen. Regulars have always known to bring food in or order from nearby, and the taproom leans on nearby restaurants and food trucks to fill the gap. It's a workable arrangement for a Tuesday happy hour. It's a harder sell on a Saturday when a Lake Country Cyclists ride ends there and two hundred riders want dinner with their pint.
Trailside Tap, one door down, has the opposite problem. It has a kitchen, and a growing reputation for turning out solid bar food, but the building itself tops out at about 2,600 square feet. Owner Jake Happe has described watching the crowds outgrow the space, telling Business Record the bar simply "can only fit so many people in the building." Between the two of them, Uptown's trailhead block has enough beer and enough food to serve the crowd the trail brings in. It just doesn't have both in one place yet.
The Plan on the Table
The fix, as described in Business Record's reporting on the project, involves razing the vacant house that sits on the lot between the two businesses. Happe bought that property specifically to clear it, and the plan calls for expanding Trailside Tap to nearly 10,000 square feet, close to four times its current footprint, with an enclosed rooftop bar and an open patio added to the existing space.
The part that matters most for anyone who splits their evening between the two bars is what happens once the house comes down. The expansion is designed to connect the two properties directly, giving Trailside Tap the room to run a menu over to Firetrucker and giving customers an easy walk between the two without circling back out to the sidewalk.
"It really gives three spaces," Happe said of the plan, "and opens the doors to do some more fun stuff."
Two Years and Counting
Here's the part worth knowing before you plan a night around it. Business Record first reported this plan more than two years ago, and at that point Happe was already framing the timeline in conditional terms, saying construction likely wouldn't start until fall so it wouldn't disrupt the summer patio season. No fall came and went with a groundbreaking on record. The delay has come down to the ordinary friction of small commercial projects: clearing the vacant house, satisfying the city's permitting requirements, and getting the construction costs to pencil out before committing.
None of that means the plan is dead. It means the project has moved at the pace small, self-financed expansions actually move at, which is slower than a press mention makes it sound. If you've been waiting for the rooftop bar to show up, the honest answer is that nobody, including the owners, has put a date on it yet.
The Block Already Acts Like One
What makes the eventual connection feel less like a leap and more like a formality is that customers already treat this stretch of Third Street as a single circuit. Every March, Firetrucker teams up with a handful of neighboring bars for an Uptown pub crawl that turns the block into one continuous tab:
- Firetrucker Brewery
- Mullets
- The Waiting Room
- The Yankee Clipper
- Uptown Garage
- On The Hook Fish & Chips, brought in for the day to fry up line-caught fish
That's not a marketing gimmick built from nothing. It's an acknowledgment that people already walk this stretch door to door on a Friday night, ordering a drink at one stop and dinner at the next. Firetrucker's own fall calendar keeps the pattern going without the crawl format. The taproom hosts a weekly Lake Country Cyclists ride that ends there with extended happy hour pricing, and this year it's serving as the start and finish line for the Iowa Brewery Running Series' 5K on September 27, the kind of event that only works because people are comfortable moving between businesses on this block rather than parking at one and staying put.
Why the Empty Lot Matters More Than It Looks
None of this makes Third Street unique in the sense that plenty of Iowa main streets have a cluster of bars within walking distance of each other. What makes this one worth watching is that Uptown's entire revival has happened the same way, lot by lot, rather than through one master plan. The fire station becoming Firetrucker, the empty city lots across the street becoming a three-story building, AMP Park going up in 2015 as the trailhead for the High Trestle Trail and home to the Ankeny Farmers Market: each of those was its own small decision that added up over roughly a decade into the district regulars know now. A single vacant house holding up a kitchen expansion fits that same pattern. It's not a citywide project. It's one owner clearing one lot, and the neighborhood is watching because it's learned that these small moves are how Uptown actually changes.
If you're a regular at either bar, the practical takeaway is simple. The rooftop bar and the shared menu are real plans with real permits in motion, not rumors. They're also not imminent. The next time you're grabbing a Firetrucker pint and thinking about walking down for food, you're doing exactly what the expansion is designed to make easier eventually. For now, it's still two doors and one empty house between them.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this looks like to actually live in, not just visit for a Saturday ride, that's a longer conversation, and it's the kind Scot Bergman has with Ankeny buyers and sellers every week. Reach out when you're ready to talk through it.
