Taste Of Cooksville Grew Five Times Over. The Street It Sits On Is Still Under Construction.

Taste of Cooksville wrapped this past weekend, and if you walked Dundas Street between Hurontario and Camilla on Saturday, you saw something close to a hundred vendors and food trucks packed into two days that ran from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. There was a car show. There was a beer garden. There was more food than anyone could reasonably try in an afternoon. If you live here, you already know this, because you were probably there.

What you might not have clocked, standing in that crowd, is how strange the timing actually is. This festival has grown every single year since it started in 2019, from 5,000 visitors and 25 vendors to a weekend that this year drew close to 100 vendors and extended hours both days. That growth happened during the exact stretch of years when the Hurontario corridor, two blocks from where you were standing with a plate of food in hand, has been torn up, rerouted, and barricaded with no firm date for when it ends. Cooksville's biggest community event and its most disruptive infrastructure project have been running on parallel tracks, almost literally, for six years. One kept getting bigger. The other kept getting later.

The festival's growth, year by year

The Cooksville Business Improvement Area has been publishing attendance and vendor counts for Taste of Cooksville since its first year, and the trajectory is worth laying out plainly:

This year's edition ran Saturday, September 19 through Sunday, September 20, sponsored by a list that reads like a cross section of who is actually investing in this neighborhood right now: Brixen Developments, Mattamy Homes, Sheridan College, Planet Fitness, Interlinx Security Solutions, the Mississauga Arts Council, Old Credit Brewing, Domino's Pizza Cooksville, Mario's BBQ, Valencia Jewelry, and Aqua-Tots Swim School, with Trillium Health Partners Foundation as charity partner. That is not a small-town street party anymore. That is one of the larger food festivals in the GTA, and it happened on a street that has spent the better part of six years as a construction zone.

What's happening two blocks over

The reason "two blocks over" matters is that the same stretch of Hurontario Street the festival crowd walked past to get to Dundas has been the site of the Hazel McCallion LRT build since spring 2020. The project's original completion date was fall 2024. As of this year, Mississauga Mayor Carolyn Parrish told insauga.com in November 2025 that she did not expect anyone riding it before 2029, and by February 2026 she was telling The Pointer she had been assured by Metrolinx's CEO that 2028 was the real target. Metrolinx itself has not publicly committed to either date, saying only that it will announce a completion timeline once the project reaches its testing and commissioning phase.

For residents, the abstraction of a missed deadline becomes something concrete at the Hurontario and Dundas intersection, one of the busiest in Mississauga and the same one that anchors the festival's western edge. In June 2026, that intersection saw a full five-day closure for track installation. The Cooksville BIA, which represents more than 600 businesses along the corridor, said at the time that Metrolinx gave only a few days' notice despite prior commitments of roughly two weeks. Charlie Budhoo, who has owned Charlie's West Indian Food Mart, Charlie's Caribbean Cuisine, and Charlie's Meat and Seafood less than 40 feet from that intersection since 1991, described losing close to half his regular customers to the ongoing detours and barricades.

"Charlie, I love shopping at your store, but it's so difficult."

That is what Budhoo says customers tell him now, according to reporting from The Pointer earlier this year. Another business owner told a February town hall he had seen a 40 percent drop in sales tied directly to the construction maze around that same intersection. Metrolinx's most recent public notice confirms work is continuing along Hurontario between Harborn Road and Burnhamthorpe through the end of September, meaning the corridor that runs past this year's festival grounds is still an active work zone as you read this.

So the same six years that took the festival from a neighborhood pop-up to a GTA-scale event took the street it borders from "under construction" to "still under construction, no confirmed end date." Both things are true about Cooksville at once, and neither cancels the other out.

A gathering space the neighborhood built while it waited

If the LRT is the thing Cooksville has been waiting on, the neighborhood didn't just sit still in the meantime. At 67 Hillcrest Avenue, a stretch of parking lot owned by TAS Impact Developers that had already been informally hosting pop-up markets and cultural celebrations was formally reimagined last year as 8 80 TowerPOPS, a project led by the nonprofit 8 80 Cities with funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada and United Way of Greater Toronto. The opening celebration ran July 12, 2025, and by the end of that year the 350 square meter site had been fitted with raised Islamic-style garden beds planted with native species, a community chalkboard, a Play Library, and large harvest tables meant for exactly the kind of gathering that used to happen there informally.

The longer-term plan for that same Hillcrest Avenue lot, according to TAS, includes more than 200 new homes along with retail and office space. The current pop-up version of the site is explicitly a test run for that future concept, which means the picnic tables and garden beds you might walk past this fall are a placeholder for something considerably denser. It is a small, telling detail about how this neighborhood operates right now: rather than waiting for a formal transit line or a formal development to deliver public space on its own schedule, residents and a handful of nonprofits turned an underused lot into a functioning gathering spot in the meantime.

What this actually means if you live here this fall

None of this changes what Cooksville is. It is still, as it has been since well before any of this construction started, a dense, culturally layered pocket of Mississauga bounded roughly by the old rail corridor to the north, the QEW to the south, Mavis Road to the west, and Cawthra Road to the east, with a food scene the BIA itself describes as running from family-run kitchens to global cuisines within a few blocks of each other. What has changed is the texture of getting around it.

If you are planning errands or a commute along Hurontario this fall, expect the work between Harborn and Burnhamthorpe to continue at least through the end of September, per Metrolinx's own posted schedule, with some activity happening overnight or on weekends specifically to reduce daytime traffic impact. The Dundas and Hurontario intersection, which just hosted a festival for 100 vendors, has already seen one full closure this year and there is no guarantee it is the last. Cooksville GO Station, rebuilt between 2018 and 2020 at a cost of $128.4 million, will eventually connect to the LRT through a stop at John Street, though that connection remains tied to whichever completion date eventually holds.

In the meantime, the neighborhood's own answer to all of this uncertainty has been to build things it controls directly: a festival that keeps expanding on its own timeline, a garden and gathering space at Hillcrest that didn't wait for a developer's final permit, a BIA that represents 600 businesses and pushes back publicly when a provincial agency goes quiet. That is not a neighborhood on pause. It is one that has learned to grow around an obstacle it cannot move on its own.

If you're weighing what life actually looks like in Cooksville right now, or wondering how a stretch of ongoing construction affects a specific block you're watching, the Peterson Team knows this corridor block by block. Start your family's next chapter, book a conversation with the Peterson Team.