A Union Township fall used to mean driving to three different corners of the township on three different weekends. Football wraps up at Clepper Park. The last cornhole tournament closes out at Veterans Memorial Park. Somewhere in between, Mt. Moriah Cemetery holds its one quiet evening of the year and everyone who knows about it goes, and everyone who doesn't, doesn't. The calendar was full. It just didn't have a center.
This fall does. Four Saturdays in a row, from September 19 through October 17, point toward the same stretch of the township, and a building that sat empty for years finally has people walking in and out of it.
Four Saturdays, One Stretch Of Road
Start with the dates, because they're the part most residents will actually use.
| Date | Event | Location | What To Expect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sat, Sept 19 | Mt. Moriah Cemetery Lantern Lighting Ceremony | Mt. Moriah Cemetery | 5 to 7:30 p.m., free, a quiet evening of lantern light through one of the township's older grounds |
| Sat, Sept 26 | Union Township Fireworks Celebration | Eastgate South Drive | Live bands, Touch-A-Truck vehicles, a block party, and a fireworks show from Rozzi's Famous Fireworks, in partnership with RJ Cinema Distillery & Taproom, Jungle Jim's International Market, and Crossroads East Side |
| Sat, Oct 10 | Police Department Open House | 4312 Glen Este-Withamsville Road | Noon to 4 p.m., station tours, a grill-out, and a chance to meet the K-9 unit |
| Sat, Oct 17 | Sip & Shop | Civic Center campus | Noon to 4 p.m., local artisans, produce, and baked goods from area farmers |
Individually, none of these is new. The township has run some version of a fireworks night and a farmers market for years. What's different this year is the sequencing. Four community events, four weekends, almost no gap between them, and three of the four sit within a short drive of the Eastgate corridor rather than spread evenly across the township's three parks the way they used to be.
The Building That Sat Empty Is Finally Open
The other half of the story is what's now standing at the roundabout where Eastgate Boulevard meets Ferguson Drive. For most of the past two years, that lot held nothing. Township trustees approved a proposal there in January 2025 for a roughly 16,000-square-foot mixed-use building, and the plan called for retail on the ground floor, a drive-through bay for a restaurant or coffee shop, and office space above. It broke ground later that year.
It's open now, operating as The Cove, and it's positioned itself as something the corridor hasn't had much of: options that aren't a drive-through chain. One resident review left on the development's own site put it plainly, calling the change overdue after years when Eastgate's food and retail options had settled into a predictable run of chains. Whether or not every resident agrees, the sentiment lines up with what's actually different about this fall's calendar. The fireworks celebration on September 26 routes foot traffic past Jungle Jim's and the newer restaurant and taproom names on Eastgate South Drive, not just past the parking lots residents have driven by for years.
The Parks Quietly Caught Up
While the commercial side of the township was filling in a long-vacant lot, the park system was doing its own version of catching up. Clepper Park added a splash pad with more than ten water features, open seasonally from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and the township announced a new playground going in between the sand volleyball and basketball courts, with the existing playground staying open during construction so nobody loses access mid-summer.
Ivy Pointe Walking Trail is worth a mention too, mostly because of where it sits. It's an eight-acre, pet-friendly loop with a paved path and a pond, and it's built to be encircled by the same business district that's growing up around it. As that district fills in, the trail becomes less of a stand-alone amenity and more of a connective piece, a place where someone working at one of the newer offices near Ivy Pointe can walk a dog on lunch without leaving the corridor.
None of these upgrades made headlines on their own. Together with the fall event lineup and The Cove's opening, they point to the same conclusion: the township has spent the last year investing in one part of itself more than the others.
Why This Corridor, Specifically
This isn't an accident of scheduling. Union Township used a financing tool called a Tax Increment Financing district, or TIF, to help fund The Cove's development at Ivy Pointe. In plain terms, a TIF lets a township redirect new property tax revenue generated by a development back into public improvements tied to that same footprint, rather than letting it flow into the general fund the way it normally would. The township adopted the resolution creating that TIF district in May 2025.
Around the same time, trustees also reauthorized the Mt. Carmel Revitalization Grant Program, a separate mechanism aimed at the neighboring Mt. Carmel area within the township. Put those two tools next to each other and the pattern becomes easier to read: when a township wants growth concentrated in a specific place instead of spread thin across its whole footprint, financing tools like these are how it happens. That's a big part of why Eastgate and Mt. Carmel are where the new restaurant, the new splash pad, and four Saturdays of programming are landing this fall, rather than everything getting evenly distributed across Clepper Park, Veterans Memorial Park, and the older neighborhoods further out.
A Note On What's Still The Same
None of this means the rest of the township went quiet. Veterans Memorial Park still hosts its own slate of events tied to its 25 acres of tennis, basketball, soccer, and baseball facilities, and Mt. Moriah's lantern ceremony remains what it's always been: a smaller, quieter evening that doesn't compete with anything else on the calendar. The change isn't that Union Township suddenly became a different place. It's that one corridor of it picked up a density of activity, and a resident who hasn't been down Eastgate South Drive since spring is going to notice the difference on September 26 whether they meant to or not.
The Short List
If you're deciding which of the four Saturdays to actually put on the calendar, here's the order that matches how much has changed since last fall:
- September 26, Fireworks Celebration on Eastgate South Drive, for the fullest sense of what's new along the corridor
- October 17, Sip & Shop at the Civic Center, for a slower, market-style afternoon
- October 10, Police Open House on Glen Este-Withamsville Road, especially useful if you haven't been inside the station or met the K-9 unit
- September 19, Mt. Moriah Lantern Lighting, if you want the one evening on this list that hasn't changed at all
Union Township has always had a full fall calendar. What it's had for the first time this year is a stretch of road where you can watch the change happen in real time, from a building that used to be empty to a trail that used to be a stand-alone loop to a fireworks show that now routes past a market and a taproom instead of just a parking lot.
If you're already living here, none of this requires you to do anything but show up. But if you've been watching Union Township change and find yourself wondering what it might mean for your own next move, whether that's buying your first home in the area, selling one nearby, or just understanding what a corridor like this does to property values over time, Lori Williams has been tracking this market long enough to talk through it in plain terms. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
