Water Street will fill in by Friday evening. Vendors will line both sides between Third Street and Lake Street, the Modus Advisors Beer Garden will open at the center of it, and somewhere in that crowd, someone will point toward the lake and mention the old carousel from the amusement park. It is one of the most repeated stories on this stretch of Excelsior, and it has not been true since 1976.
That does not make Apple Days any less worth showing up for. It just means the story locals tell about this weekend is older and stranger than the one that usually gets repeated, and worth getting right if you live close enough to hear it every September.
The Amusement Park Excelsior Actually Had
Before there was an Apple Days, there was a 10-acre amusement park on this exact shoreline. Fred W. Pearce opened it on Memorial Day weekend in 1925, on land leased from the Twin City Rapid Transit Company, and for 48 summers it ran a wooden roller coaster called the Cyclone, a fun house, boat rides, and a hand-carved carousel built by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company. Danceland Ballroom sat across the street and booked acts that included Tommy Dorsey and the Rolling Stones. The park closed for good on September 16, 1973, done in by a site too small to expand and a changing entertainment market.
What happened next is the part most people skip. The land was redeveloped into condominiums and a restaurant that still operates today: Maynard's, which has faced Excelsior Bay since 1947 and now sits on the literal footprint of the park it outlasted.
Where the Carousel Actually Ended Up
The carousel did not stay. When the park's owners sold several rides to the operators of a new park being built in Shakopee, there was enough local resistance to the carousel leaving that it had to be disassembled at night, with individual horses hidden around the Twin Cities so no one could block the move. It shipped out anyway. Valleyfair opened in 1976 with that same Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel positioned near its entrance, and it is still there, still running, forty-eight antique horses and all, according to Valleyfair's own ride page. It has been fifty years since it turned in Excelsior.
If you have heard someone at Apple Days describe a vintage carousel still spinning a short walk from the festival grounds, they are thinking of a different ride, or a different decade.
What's Actually Older Than the Festival
The thing that is genuinely still here, and genuinely older than anything happening on Water Street this weekend, is the streetcar.
The Minnesota Streetcar Museum operates the Excelsior Streetcar Line on a short restored section of the old Minneapolis and Saint Louis Railway right of way, boarding from a platform at Third and Water Street, next to the Excelsior Public Library. The car in service is 1907 Twin City Lines streetcar No. 1239, and a second car from 1913 sits in the carbarn under active restoration by museum volunteers. It runs on select days from May through October, weather permitting, which means the same weekend Apple Days marks 91 years since Excelsior first held it in 1935, a streetcar built two decades before that first festival is parked three blocks from the beer garden.
That is the kind of detail a downtown keeps quietly, without putting it on a festival flyer.
The Weekend Itself
Apple Days runs across three days in 2026, and the hours shift each day in a way that is easy to miss if you are used to a single festival schedule:
- Friday, September 18: 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
- Saturday, September 19: 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
- Sunday, September 20: 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
The festival footprint runs along Water Street from Third Street to Lake Street, the same blocks where the streetcar boards. Saturday morning brings the Historic Water Street Walking Tour at 11:00 a.m., an organized walk through the town's development from its days as a steamboat landing. The Apple Pie contest, which is both a baking competition and a separate pie-eating contest, draws entries from serious home bakers and tends to be the most fiercely contested event of the weekend. Paradise Charter Cruises runs complimentary community cruises on the lake during the festival, and the Happy Apple Kids Corner keeps younger kids occupied while adults work the vendor booths and the Modus Advisors Beer Garden.
Parking, Since There's No Shuttle
The Excelsior-Lake Minnetonka Chamber of Commerce does not run a shuttle for Apple Days, which means getting a spot close to Water Street takes some planning if you are arriving Saturday afternoon. Public options include the parking ramp on One West Drive, the Excelsior East Lot behind Excelsior Brewing, and Mount Calvary Lutheran Church on Saturday only. Paid street parking fills in around all of it. If you live within walking distance, this is the one weekend a year it is worth using that fact.
Where to Eat Once You've Seen the Line for Pie
Three restaurants sit close enough to the festival grounds to matter, and each solves a different part of the weekend.
Maynard's, at 685 Excelsior Blvd, is the choice if you want the closest thing to eating on the old amusement park's site, since it occupies the same waterfront land the Cyclone and the fun house once stood on. It has been open since 1947, faces the water directly, and the walleye and Minnesota fish specials are why locals keep going back rather than treating it as a tourist stop.
Lolas on Lake Minnetonka, at 294 Water St, sits almost inside the festival footprint and works best as a lunch stop between vendor rows, with a lakefront patio and a menu built for moving in and out quickly.
Sunsets Restaurant, at 700 Excelsior Blvd, is the better call for Saturday dinner, but the lake-facing patio fills fast on festival weekends, so a reservation ahead of time is worth the five minutes it takes to make one.
The Pattern Worth Noticing
None of this changes what Apple Days is. It is still a free, three-day, community-run festival that has marked the end of summer in Excelsior since 1935, and it will still close Saturday night with a street dance, the kind of thing that has mostly disappeared everywhere except small towns that decided to keep it. What changes is what you know walking into it. The amusement park is gone. The carousel left decades before most current residents moved to this side of the lake. The streetcar, quietly, is the one piece of that older Excelsior still doing exactly what it did a century ago, three blocks from where the beer garden opens on Friday.
That is usually how it works in a town this old. The story people repeat is close to true, and the actual detail sitting underneath it is more interesting than the version that gets passed around. If you have lived near Lake Minnetonka long enough to hear the carousel story more than once, this weekend is a good excuse to walk past the library, check the streetcar schedule, and see the older thing for yourself.
If you are weighing a move within the Lake Minnetonka corridor and want the kind of neighborhood-level detail that does not show up on a listing sheet, The Petersen Team has spent decades working these towns block by block. Request a Home Valuation when you are ready to talk specifics.
