Saturday night Mr. Juan Boyle held the grand opening of his Lake View Pavillion. Fully seventeen hundred citizens attended. The night was beautiful moonlight, and the air cool and the affair was enjoyable in every way. The Kearney Cornet Band furnished good music. During the evening a splendid display of fireworks was given, consisting in the shooting of sky rockets and Roman candles over the water from boats and from the South bank of the lake. The bath house for ladies and gentlemen will be completed this week and everything perfected to make Lake View a great pleasure resort.
In late summer of 1886 Mr. Boyle announced plans to build an ice house near the canal to hold 200 tons of ice. However, this venture seems to have become a project of an Omaha Company. The December 18 New Era announced that the work of building immense ice houses below Lake View was commenced, and the company "will push rapidly toward filling the houses with the prettiest and cleanest ice ever harvested in this state." It was estimated that 500,000 tons would be harvested "this season." The ice harvest at Kearney Lake was eventually taken over by the Nebraska Ice Company, a local corporation, and it was a flourishing industry for many years, furnishing ice to the Union Pacific Railroad, to surrounding towns and to the Nebraska State Fair.
But all of the activity of the city in 1886 was not taking place at the lake. The Nebraska Telephone Company, located on the second floor of the W. A. Downing building at 2108 Central Avenue, enlarged its Kearney exchange to make room for two hundred subscribers. There had been 70 new subscribers since June 1885, making a total of 102. This placed Kearney ahead of Grand Island, Columbus and Fremont in the number of telephone customers.
At a special meeting of the City Council in early August, an ordinance was passed giving the Kearney Street Railway Company permission to lay a track for street cars. It was a horse drawn trolley system, and the New Era of November 13 reported that the street cars were running from Grand Avenue (25th Street) to the court house.(the electric streetcar system began in 1889)