Main Street Closes for One Saturday. This Year, Downtown Jenks Has Something to Prove
You're headed down Main toward First Street on a Saturday morning in September, coffee in the cupholder, and the road just stops. Sawhorse barricades, a police cruiser idling sideways, someone in an orange vest waving you toward A Street. If you've lived in Jenks more than a year, you already know what this is. The Main Street Bash and Car Show closes the street every fall, and every fall a few hundred people mutter about the detour before parking over at Commons Park and walking in anyway.
This year the closure means something different, and it has nothing to do with the cars.
The basics first, because if you live here this is the part you actually need. The Main Street Bash and Car Show runs Saturday, Sept. 18, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closing the Main Street corridor to through traffic for the day. Tulsa Chevy Classics runs the car show side of things, handing out trophies for best of show, best paint, best interior and best engine, plus a Mayor of Jenks trophy and a Jenks Chamber of Commerce trophy. Entering a car costs $20 at the gate, no advance registration required.
A few things worth knowing before you plan around it:
None of that is new. The Chamber launched this event in 2021 as its first annual Main Street Bash and Car Show, and it's back on Main Street again this year. What's new is what's sitting on either end of the closure this year.
For years, a September closure on Main meant blocking off a corridor of antique storefronts and a couple of restaurants that had been there long enough to feel like furniture. That was fine for a car show. Nobody expected the street to function as a destination on its own between events. You came for the cars, maybe grabbed lunch, and left.
That's not quite the street anymore. Since October 2025, two new businesses have anchored opposite sides of the 100 block: Jenks Coffee Co. at 103 E. Main and Pure Kitchen and Market directly across the street at 102 E. Main. Then this year, two more openings landed at the far ends of the corridor, close enough together that the whole stretch changed shape.
| Stretch of Main | Fall 2024 | Fall 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| East end, 100 block | Jenks Coffee Co. and Pure Kitchen and Market didn't exist yet | Both open since October 2025, facing each other across the street |
| 212 E. Main | Vacant, former KFC that closed in 2024 | Laurannae espresso bar and bakery, open since mid-July, 60-seat covered patio |
| 418 W. Main | No quick-service dinner option on Main | Slim Chickens drive-thru, open since January 30 |
That table is the whole argument in miniature. A car show closure used to shut down a street with one real reason to be there. This one shuts down a street with four.
Laurannae is the bigger shift, mostly because of what it replaced. The building at 212 E. Main sat empty after its run as a KFC ended in 2024. Owner Kimberly Cronkhite, who built her original Laurannae into a fixture of Broken Arrow's Rose District after starting the business as a cupcake side project in 2012, spent months gutting the space to feel like her original location. What she added that Broken Arrow never had is room. The Jenks patio seats 60 people under cover and opens onto a lawn large enough for events. Cronkhite has weekend live music, movie nights, trivia, and pop-up markets planned, with line dancing classes, yoga sessions and cake classes likely to follow.
"That's kind of the heartbeat of Laurannae," Cronkhite told the Tulsa Flyer around opening week. "We're very community-focused."
Farther west on Main, Slim Chickens opened a much smaller footprint at 418 W. Main in late January, the tenth Slim Chickens location in Oklahoma and the 16th for its operator, AP Restaurant Group. It's a drive-thru chicken chain, which sounds like the least interesting fact in this whole piece until you notice the address. A national quick-service brand chose Main Street over a pad site out by the turnpike, which is a bet on foot and weeknight traffic rather than drive-by convenience.
Put those two openings next to Jenks Coffee Co. and Pure Kitchen and Market, and Main Street picked up a coffee-and-breakfast anchor, a full-bar dinner option, a dessert-and-patio hangout, and a quick weeknight meal, all within an easy walk of each other along Main. That's not a coincidence of timing. That's four separate business owners independently deciding the same stretch of Main was worth the investment inside of a year.
Here's the part that has nothing to do with the car show and everything to do with why the closure lands differently this year. In March 2026, the City of Jenks Planning Department ran a ten-day pilot, blocking parking spaces between 1st and 2nd Street on Main with small trees and landscaping while keeping the driving lanes open. Businesses along that block used the extra space for outdoor dining and shopping. The pilot came directly out of feedback the city collected during its Downtown Master Plan process, where most public input favored reduced parking, or a different form of it, along parts of Main.
The Jenks Planning Commission has since approved that master plan, which as of this spring sat with the city council awaiting a vote. Not everyone downtown is sold. Arwen Roark, whose family runs Roark Acres on Main, told KJRH the renderings look nice but questioned whether they're practical. Brian Smith, a downtown insurance agent, told the station, "I'm for it. I'm for the look of it," before naming the concern most residents already share: parking.
That's the exact question the Main Street Bash answers, once a year, without meaning to. On Sept. 18, the entire corridor goes car-free for seven hours, not just one block for ten days. It's the first time that's happened since Laurannae opened its patio and gave the east end a reason to sit still. Whether Main Street can hold foot traffic all day without cars, on a stretch that finally has something at both ends worth walking to, is the practical version of the question the master plan is trying to answer on paper. One Saturday won't settle it. But it's the closest thing to a live trial run the corridor has had since the debate started.
If you're the kind of Jenks resident who treats the Bash as background noise, a parking hassle en route to a normal Saturday, this year is worth a different approach. Park once, either at Commons Park or a side street early, and walk the full stretch instead of ducking in for the car show and leaving.
Start at Laurannae for coffee and a slice from the pastry case, sit on the lawn if the weather cooperates. Walk the car show itself down the middle of Main. Grab lunch from one of the food trucks, or duck into Pure Kitchen if you want something more substantial than fair food. Finish at Slim Chickens if you're still hungry by the time you loop back to your car.
That's not a route that existed in any previous September. It exists now because four business owners bet on the same stretch of Main inside of a year, and the city is actively deciding whether to make that kind of walk the everyday version of Main Street rather than the once-a-year one.
If you're watching how downtown Jenks is changing, whether because you're weighing a move within the neighborhood or just curious what a property near Main is actually worth these days, Susan Olivarez has spent decades reading exactly this kind of shift in Tulsa-area neighborhoods. Let's connect to discuss your next move.
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