Drive along South Broadway near Toll 49 this fall and you'll pass a fenced lot that used to be a small playground inside the Village at Cumberland Park. A bulldozer and an excavator sit behind orange construction fencing. A faded banner on the chain-link still promises a Dave & Buster's is coming. That banner has been making the same promise since permit filings first surfaced in December 2024.
For Oak Creek residents who use this stretch of Broadway for dinner, a movie, or a Saturday walk through Bass Pro Shops, the story here isn't really about an arcade that hasn't opened. It's about how much of the corridor changed shape while everyone waited on the one project that kept slipping.
Eighteen Months Between the Permit and the Bulldozer
The paper trail on this project is unusually well documented, which makes it easy to see exactly how far the timeline has drifted from what was originally filed.
- December 2024: A filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation showed plans for a roughly 23,000-square-foot Dave & Buster's on South Broadway, with an estimated construction cost near $4.5 million. The filing penciled in work starting by the end of March 2025, with a target opening in January 2026.
- Sometime in 2025: Signage appeared at the site announcing construction was "coming soon," though local news coverage at the time noted that no firm groundbreaking date had been disclosed.
- December 2025: The shopping center's existing children's playground on that same lot was closed, with vinyl banners citing the future Dave & Buster's construction. That same month, reporters confirmed the location would mark the first Dave & Buster's in East Texas, but the January 2026 opening target had already quietly passed without an update.
- May 2026: Heavy equipment finally showed up on the lot. Bulldozers, an excavator, and portable toilets appeared, along with orange fencing, more than a year after the permit's own paperwork said dirt would start moving.
As of this writing, no opening date has surfaced since. The lot that was supposed to be serving arcade tokens and burgers by January 2026 was, as recently as this spring, still being cleared.
What Filled In While the Lot Sat Empty
None of this means the corridor stood still. The rest of the Village at Cumberland Park kept moving, and moved faster than the one project everyone was watching.
Bass Pro Shops opened on April 16, 2025, a full nine months before Dave & Buster's was originally supposed to be serving its first customers. The store was designed as a custom tribute to East Texas's outdoor heritage rather than a standard-issue big box, which is part of why it's become a genuine destination rather than just another anchor tenant.
The fenced construction lot itself sits across from two businesses that have been open and running the whole time: Studio Movie Grill and Urban Air. Planet Fitness anchors another side of the same block. None of these needed a permit delay to explain their presence. They were simply already there, doing the job a shopping corridor is supposed to do, while the marquee project kept resetting its own clock.
For anyone in Oak Creek weighing whether a trip down Broadway is worth it, the honest answer has had nothing to do with Dave & Buster's for over a year. Dinner and a movie at Studio Movie Grill, an afternoon at Urban Air, or an hour wandering the boat and firearm departments at Bass Pro Shops have all been available the entire time the fenced lot sat empty.
A Free Amenity Traded for One Still Unbuilt
The detail that's easy to miss in the coverage is the playground itself. It wasn't phased out or relocated. It was closed in December 2025, with signage explaining the closure was to make way for construction, and then the lot sat mostly untouched until bulldozers arrived nearly five months later.
That gap matters if you were one of the families who used that small park as a stop before or after a shopping trip. For most of 2026, that specific free amenity simply hasn't existed, and nothing has opened yet to take its place. The trade being made on that lot is a real one: an existing, no-cost playground for a large-format entertainment venue that, as of the most recent reporting, still doesn't have an opening date to point to.
The Trail at Your Entrance Still Ends at Gresham
There's a second, quieter version of this same pattern happening a few minutes away, on the trail system that runs right past Oak Creek's own entrance.
The Legacy Trail's first phase begins at the Three Lakes Parkway trailhead near FRESH by Brookshire's, the same access point named in Oak Creek's own subdivision materials as the neighborhood's connection to the trail system. From there, the 4.5-mile paved path runs south along the old Cotton Belt rail bed, past Toll 49, toward Gresham and on toward Flint. It's been open since a ribbon-cutting in July 2019 and hasn't extended any further north or south since.
In January 2026, the city opened a second phase of Legacy Trail, a separate two-mile stretch running from the future Stewart Park site through Winters Park to Peete Elementary. It's a real addition to Tyler's trail network, but it sits across town and isn't connected to the segment that starts at Oak Creek's doorstep.
City planning documents describe the eventual goal as linking the two phases into one continuous system. The connector piece, however, is tied to the Old Jacksonville Highway widening project, which will take the road from four lanes to six. Earlier city reporting in 2024 estimated that widening would begin in 2026. The Tyler Area Metropolitan Planning Organization has since pushed that construction back to 2030, four years later than the timeline city officials were describing when Phase II was still in the design stage.
Practically, that means the trail accessible from Oak Creek's entrance functions today exactly as it has since 2019: a straight run south toward Gresham, not a link to the rest of the city's growing trail network. Anyone hoping the January 2026 opening of Phase II signaled an imminent connection has at least a few more years to wait.
Both stories on this side of Tyler follow the same shape. The small, already-open things, a movie theater, a trampoline park, a stretch of paved trail that's been there since 2019, keep doing their job without fanfare. The bigger, promised things, an arcade, a highway widening, a trail connector, keep resetting their own timelines. Neither story is really about waiting for something new. It's about noticing what's already reliable while the bigger projects catch up.
For now, the surest bet on this stretch of Broadway remains what's already open: the fishing and hunting departments at Bass Pro Shops, a movie at Studio Movie Grill, an afternoon at Urban Air. The arcade will open when the lot is ready, not when the permit said it would be.
If you're curious about what else is shifting around Oak Creek or the rest of South Tyler, The Agency Tyler keeps an eye on these corridors from downtown Tyler and is always glad to talk through what we're seeing block by block.
