Last week I drove on Lincoln Way through downtown Ames for the first time in a while. There have been changes since I was doing that regularly — though not nearly as many as US 65 through Bondurant — but one jumped out at me. The Burger King at 902 Lincoln Way has closed. The signage was gone and the menus at the drive-thru were punched out.
This is a very recent development, given that Google Street View was just through in August. I found an Ames Tribune article from May 2018 about the beginning of a rezoning project intended to completely reshape Lincoln Way into a “Downtown Gateway” and the BK was among “nonconforming businesses.” The Ames City Council that June approved the new zoning rules after excluding an area including the Culver’s, but the BK got no reprieve. It’s an eviction of sorts.
The Lincoln Way Burger King was the site of an armed robbery on March 30, 1989. A 5-foot-2 kitchen worker escaped through the drive-thru window and was able to contact police, the Tribune reported the next day. Two Iowa State athletes were arrested; one was later found not guilty. More about the robbery can be found here (the date given is incorrect).
The city of Ames’s official plan for Lincoln Way between Grand and Duff avenues includes a “road diet” proposal (eww) that “calls for the southern extension of Grand Avenue and the realignment of the US 69 designation.” A very new extension of Grand Avenue now cuts from the Hy-Vee through the golf course to South 16th Street, but it is two lanes, and having traffic for northbound 69 turn left at the intersection of South 16th and Duff Avenue — the first stoplight north of the US 30 exit — is not optimal from a traffic flow perspective.