According to Smiley Pete, in 1998 two friends named Bruce Drake and Brian McCarty got in a car and drove to thirty or forty restaurants in cities like Atlanta and Chicago. They weren't sightseeing. Their spot at Lansdowne Shoppes had just lost its tenant when Columbia Steakhouse closed, and the two men, one of whom had run Regatta's Seafood Grille and the other A.P. Suggins, needed to decide what came next. They came home convinced Lexington was missing a steakhouse that served prime beef, a grade the USDA reserves for roughly two percent of all beef processed, at a price a regular customer could justify on a Tuesday. Brian named it Malone's. It is still there.
If you live in Lansdowne, you already know Malone's. What you may not know is how close the shopping center around it came to fading the way so many 1970s strip centers eventually do, and what that near-miss says about the very different kind of decision now underway at Lansdowne-Merrick Park, a few blocks away. Both places tell the same story about how this neighborhood actually stays alive. It isn't reinvention. It's repeat use, protected carefully by people who never tried to make either place bigger than it needed to be.
The Shopping Center That Almost Didn't Make It
Lansdowne Shoppes opened in 1969, built by local developers J.W. Davis Jr. and Charles McEachin to serve the new subdivisions they were putting up along what residents still call "the Pike." They modeled the buildings on Colonial Williamsburg and borrowed the name from a plantation in Natchez, Mississippi. The first tenant was Lansdowne Liquors. Big B Dry Cleaners, a Baskin-Robbins, Begley Drugs, and an A&P grocery store filled out the center by the summer of 1970.
For nearly three decades after that, the center did what most shopping strips do: it turned over tenants, weathered a few slow years, and depended on the neighborhood around it rather than drive-by traffic from New Circle Road. That is the part worth sitting with. Lansdowne Shoppes was never positioned to catch a commuter's eye. It sits back on Tates Creek Road, and its survival depended entirely on people who already lived nearby choosing to come back.
Then Columbia Steakhouse closed, and Drake and McCarty made the bet that became Malone's. The restaurant added a piano bar called Oscar's soon after. By 2003 the partners had expanded again, building a two-story structure down the walkway to house Sal's Chophouse, additional Malone's banquet space, and a bar called Harry's, which added a patio in 2007 for anyone who wanted to eat and drink outside. An administrative manager who had worked at the Lansdowne Company since 1966, Barbara Johnson, put it this way in Smiley Pete:
"It's owned and managed by local people. We have some really good tenants, with a mix of chain stores and locally owned businesses."
That mix is still the center's identity today. Malone's, Sal's Chophouse, and Harry's sit alongside OBC Kitchen, known locally for a bourbon list that runs past 350 selections, and Drake's, a separate restaurant despite the name overlap. Fresh Market anchors the grocery end. Old Kentucky Chocolates, The Mad Potter, Old School Coffee, and The Mouse Trap round out the smaller storefronts, alongside a Baskin-Robbins that has been serving the same corner since 1970. None of these businesses is trying to pull customers off the highway. They're built for people who already live within a five-minute drive and plan to come back next week.
Across Tates Creek, a Different Kind of Attention
Lansdowne-Merrick Park sits at 3190 Montavesta Road, and it has never needed the kind of reinvention story that saved the Shoppes. Longtime users describe a walking and jogging trail with exercise equipment spaced along the path, a playground built for both younger and older kids, ballfields, and a small creek and wetland that draws ducks during migration and, according to at least one longtime visitor, a nesting pair of red-tailed hawks. The Hickman Creek Conservancy has also used the park as a teaching example, because it sits near a geological fault line running through the intersection of Tates Creek and New Circle Roads, the boundary between the Inner Bluegrass Plains to the west and the more shale-heavy Eden Shale Hills to the east. Recent plantings in the park favor native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers meant to reflect what grew there before the neighborhood did.
None of that has changed this year. What has changed is the conversation happening around it.
The Park Enters a Master-Plan Moment
In May 2026, the City of Lexington launched Discover Great Places + Green Spaces, a Parks and Recreation Master Plan meant to guide the city's parks system for the next decade. Lansdowne-Merrick Park is one of the parks named in the city's own project tracker as part of that process. The plan grew directly out of a 2024 ballot measure Lexington voters approved called Yes for Parks, which created a dedicated Park Fund for exactly this kind of investment. Parks and Recreation Director Monica Conrad has described the master plan process as one the city repeats roughly every ten years, with new amenities and programming following as a direct result.
The city isn't asking Lansdowne residents to imagine something new. It's asking what to do with what's already there. A Community Conversation was scheduled for August 25, 2026, from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. at the Lexington Senior Center, just off Life Lane, structured as a drop-in session so residents could stop by whenever fit their schedule. The city has also opened an online engagement platform where residents can review the planning process and submit feedback on their own timeline, without needing to attend in person.
Same Logic, Two Different Decades
Here is the thread connecting a 1998 steakhouse decision to a 2026 parks planning session: neither the Shoppes nor the park ever tried to become a destination for people outside the neighborhood. Malone's became part of the Shoppes' story, alongside the neighborhood customers who returned. The park has never needed a marketing campaign, because its value was always the daily walker, the weekend ballgame, the dog getting exercise before work. What the master plan process represents isn't a shift toward growth. It's the city formally asking the people who already use Lansdowne-Merrick Park every week what would make it work better for exactly that use, rather than trying to draw people from somewhere else.
That distinction matters if you live here, because it tells you what to expect next. Lansdowne isn't likely to see a park designed to pull crowds from across the city, in the way some of Lexington's newer amphitheaters or event spaces are built. It's more likely to see the trail resurfaced, the wetland areas better marked, or new shade trees planted along stretches that get direct sun in July, because those are the kinds of improvements a neighborhood asks for when the person answering the survey is the same person who'll be back on that trail the following Tuesday.
That pattern of neighborhood loyalty helps explain why the Shoppes still has a waiting list for retail space nearly three decades after Malone's arrived, even as other Lexington strip centers from the same era have been torn down or rebuilt as something unrecognizable. Neither place ever needed to be everything to everyone. They needed to be reliably good to the people who were already going to show up.
If you're weighing whether to spend a Saturday morning on the Lansdowne-Merrick trail before an afternoon at Sal's or Drake's, that reliability is probably part of why you moved here in the first place, whether you noticed it as a decision or not. It's also, quietly, one of the reasons property in a neighborhood like this tends to hold its character over time. Places built around repeat use rarely lose what made people choose them.
If you're ever curious what that kind of neighborhood stability actually means for a property you own or one you're watching, Horse and Home Estates works with buyers and sellers across Saratoga and the Adirondack gateway who care about exactly this sort of place-driven detail. You can request a Concierge Consultation any time you want a conversation grounded in the same kind of local specifics that keep neighborhoods like Lansdowne worth knowing well.
