With nearly 2,500 cars driving on the east-west corridor every day, Lake Harbour Drive has become one of the Northside’s busiest thoroughfares.
The road is a major retail hub for the city of Ridgeland and a chief connector to Spillway Road and the Ross Barnett Reservoir.
But when Mayor Gene McGee first moved to Ridgeland in 1971, the longtime public servant said Lake Harbour Drive was merely a quiet country road.
In fact, the road that is currently considered one of the city’s most important arteries wasn’t entirely paved until the 1980s.
“When it left Highway 51, Lake Harbour went for about a mile and a half past Wheatley Street and turned into dirt,” McGee said in a 2008 Sun article. “It picked back up again later.”
Once the road was connected, however, business began to pick up. In 1993, a third lane was added to accommodate mushrooming traffic.
“We’ve gone through two widenings,” McGee said. “It was two lanes after we got rid of the dirt, and we widened it to three.”
McGee said that later it became obvious to city officials that, “since it’s a major transportation corridor, it needed to be four lanes with a turn lane as you go east and pass Old Canton Road for development to occur.”
In the decades following that decision, the road connecting U.S. Highway 51 to the Ross Barnett Reservoir has been transformed from a rural road lined with trees to a major hub for retailers and shoppers.
Following Hurricane Katrina, Gulf Opportunity Zone (GOZone) Grants also contributed to the area’s commercial growth. The street is now home to several mom and pop shops, a few strip shopping centers and an office complex.
“We’re seeing more and more development along the corridor,” McGee said. “We’ve got Mug Shots, a new Slim Chickens. Since all (the improvements) happened, we’ve got new restaurants such as Buffalo Wild Wings, and it’s helped connect Old Canton Road.”
(Old Canton Road begins at Interstate-55 in Jackson and stretches north through Ridgeland up to Hoy Road in Madison. North Old Canton picks up east of where Old Canton ends on Hoy Road, and runs north to Green Oak Lane.)
As traffic picked up over the years, so did business.
As a result, Ridgeland has benefited. New developments along Lake Harbour have meant hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales and property tax revenue.
What’s more, the city is already in the major development phases of constructing Lake Harbour Drive extension, which will connect Lake Harbour from Highway 51 to Highland Colony Parkway.
“We’re getting excited about that extension. It’s going to bring traffic to Highland Colony, the Renaissance, and back over to Northpark Drive and Northpark mall.”
The project will cost approximately $20 million.
“The shopping centers (on Lake Harbour) have several businesses that have done really well,” McGee said. “As you go in front of Kroger, you have Applebee’s, The Armory (a new gun store), Planet Fitness, and a new Subway. There are several things in that strip shopping center where Planet Fitness is, so a lot has occurred.”
Several years ago, Planet Fitness used to be a pizza buffet and arcade restaurant called Gatti Town.
“That was built several years ago, and didn’t do so well,” McGee said. “Now you have Planet Fitness, which has done well.”
Located behind Planet Fitness and the strip shopping center is a small, three-street neighborhood called Montrachet.
Before Lake Harbour became more developed, woods used to cover the land from the small neighborhood east on Northpark Drive to Lake Harbour. Now the strip-shopping center backs up to the homes.
But McGee said the homeowners have not contested the city’s development on the major thoroughfare.
“We’ve worked very closely with the homeowners association and let them know what’s going on and that what goes on will complement the subdivision,” McGee said. “We worked with (the homeowners) board to be careful that what’s done is done tastefully and enhances their property values.”
Currently, city officials are preparing to improve Lake Harbour Drive from Northpark Drive to Breakers Lane.
The project will include a mill, overlay and restripe, as well as traffic signal upgrades.
“It’s (a little more than) a mile of four lanes with a center turn lane,” said Mike McCollum, Ridgeland public works director.
McGee said the improvement project will further invite business and commercial development.
“You have to keep infrastructure in good condition. We evaluate streets and try to fix them before they’re in a shape they don’t need to be in. As we work to keep (our roads) in standard condition, businesses want to locate there because they know we’re doing the job to keep them up to par.”
