Cabarrus Creamery served its last scoop over Thanksgiving weekend in 2023. The shop had been part of Concord for a hundred years under different names and owners, and the family who bought its recipes two decades earlier had planned to keep it going. Instead, construction fencing sealed off Union Street for months at a stretch, parking disappeared block by block, and the creamery closed for good, with owners saying they hoped to reassess and possibly reopen in the spring.
Walk that same stretch of Union Street today and you'll find something that looks, on the surface, like exactly what the creamery's closing predicted would never happen again: a downtown packed with people, storefronts leased end to end, a building that sat empty for almost fifty years now humming with customers on two floors. The renovation worked. But it didn't bring back what it displaced. It replaced it with something structurally different, and that difference is the actual story of downtown Concord in August 2026.
What the construction actually cost
The Union Street streetscape project started as utility work in February 2023 and dragged for two more years through phase after phase of demolition, sewer replacement, and repaving. The city's own FAQ page had projected a Fall 2024 completion; the ribbon didn't actually cut until May 3, 2025, several months past that estimate and more than two years after the fencing first went up.
For a small storefront running on foot traffic and street parking, that is not a minor delay. It's a business cycle. Cabarrus Creamery didn't survive it. Neither did Table 11. Owner Bob VanAtta told a reporter in April 2024 that construction disruption had the restaurant running 50 percent below its break-even point; it closed four months later. Lil' Robert's Place, a craft beer bar, told a reporter at the time it might have to close too.
Not everyone who left, left the neighborhood entirely. Gianni's Trattoria pulled out of its original downtown spot and relocated to Gibson Mill. That move looked like a retreat in the moment. It's since been recognized as the Best Fine Dining Restaurant in Concord by the Quality Business Awards with a quality score above 95 percent, and it picked up back-to-back Spectrum Awards for customer service in 2025 and 2026. Lil' Robert's Place also stuck around, and its bar area now runs a weekly karaoke night under a new name, The Mullet. Survival downtown during the renovation years meant either leaving the corridor or reinventing what you were doing inside it. Staying put and waiting it out, which is what most small restaurants and shops assume they can do, turned out to be the riskiest option on the list.
The building that explains the shift
The clearest evidence of what replaced the old guard sits at 22 Union Street North, inside a building most Concord residents walked past for decades without knowing what was underneath the drop ceiling.
The Cabarrus Theatre opened there in 1939 as a single-screen movie house and was, according to the building's current owner, the first structure in Cabarrus County to feature air conditioning. It closed in 1977 and was converted into bank offices, first for Concord National Bank and later Fifth Third Bank. A second floor was built over the original theater's vaulted mezzanine, hiding the ceiling from public view for almost fifty years.
| Era | What was there | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1939–1977 | Cabarrus Theatre, single-screen movie house | First air-conditioned building in the county |
| 1977–2019 | Bank offices (Concord National, later Fifth Third) | Mezzanine sealed off, ceiling hidden |
| 2019–2025 | Purchased by developers Kristen and Tristan Adamczuk | Construction and buildout during the streetscape years |
| Nov. 2025–present | The District Exchange | Mezzanine reopened; full lease-up reached |
By November 2025, every space in the building was leased, a milestone owner Eric Granillo, who runs the beer and wine shop First-N-Flights with his wife Meg, described plainly: "There are 20 micro-retail spaces in here, all mom-and-pop shops." The Adamczuks had bought the building in 2019, meaning they held it through the entire construction window, betting that a finished streetscape would eventually make a two-story micro-retail model work in a building that had defeated a bank's use of the space for decades.
That bet is worth pausing on. A single-tenant restaurant with a hundred years of name recognition couldn't outlast the disruption. A developer running a portfolio of roughly twenty small, low-overhead leases could. The math changed who gets to occupy Union Street, not just what's for sale there.
Who actually moved in
The tenant list at the District Exchange reads less like a directory of Concord originals and more like a roster of operators expanding a proven concept into a new market. Crane Coffee, run by owner Kris Zouzoulas, chose the building for its flagship location and built a dedicated staircase entrance up to the mezzanine. Bae's Burgers, a smash-burger operation with a following across the greater Charlotte area, was still finishing its buildout this summer for what the property now lists as a Summer 2026 opening. Several others came from just up the road in Kannapolis, opening second locations rather than first ones: Decadence Popcorn, Life is Sweet, and Vintage Vibes all had an existing base elsewhere before adding a Union Street address.
Granillo said as much about his own decision to land there: "We kind of fell in love with the small-town vibe. We saw Kannapolis and saw that how well that's going, and then we were told about Concord."
That's a telling sentence for a downtown business owner to say about the town he's opening in. It's not a hometown loyalty story. It's a market-expansion story, and it describes most of the building's roster.
Outside the District Exchange, the same pattern shows up in smaller ways. Wider sidewalks from the finished streetscape gave Hawthorne's Pizza, Chopbox Asian Cuisine, Press & Porter, Union Street Cafe, and High Grounds Coffeehouse room to add outdoor tables, something the corridor couldn't support during construction. Union Street Cafe itself opened directly in Table 11's old space, run by different owners serving chicken and waffles and breakfast burritos where a struggling restaurant had been days from shutting down for good. According to the local business directory Discover Downtown Concord NC, the corridor now counts 126 local businesses within a half-mile stretch, meaning the roughly twenty new leases inside one building represent a meaningful share of the turnover the whole district has absorbed in under two years.
What's actually worth walking down for this month
None of this requires any real estate reasoning to enjoy. If you already live near enough to make it a Saturday plan, here's what's on the corridor and just outside it through the rest of August 2026:
- August 8 — Import Face-Off at zMAX Dragway, an evening car show at the speedway complex
- August 15 — Cars and Coffee, the recurring Saturday-morning meetup at 5555 Concord Parkway South
- August 24 — Mustang Week North Carolina, anchored at zMAX Dragway with HPDE sessions on the ROVAL, drag racing, and a full Ford and Mustang car show
- August 29 — The 2nd Annual Harry Potter Wizarding Festival at Percent, the bookstore's Nook location
- Through October 10 — Flat Footed Truths: Stories of Lived Experiences, a juried quilt and fiber art exhibition at The Galleries at the Cabarrus Arts Council, housed inside the historic Cabarrus County Courthouse
The city's parks department also runs a free outdoor movie series in the parks through the summer, with films starting at 7 p.m. and food available for purchase before and during the screening.
The corridor looks finished. The businesses running it aren't the same ones who waited for it.
That's the piece worth sitting with. A finished streetscape and a fully leased anchor building are the visible wins, the ones that show up in a state design award and a news segment about a grand opening. What's harder to see, unless you were watching Union Street closely for the last three years, is that the renovation selected for a different kind of business than the one it disrupted. Single-location legacy operators with decades of name recognition largely didn't make it through. Multi-location operators and a developer running roughly twenty low-overhead micro-leases did. Downtown Concord isn't the same neighborhood it was in 2022. It's a working version of what its master plan intended, run by people who mostly weren't there when the fencing first went up.
If you're watching how a neighborhood like this changes shape over time, from who occupies its storefronts to how that shift shows up in property values down the block, that's the kind of read the Ordan Osborne Team keeps close watch on across Concord and the rest of the Charlotte metro. Start your next move with a trusted team, let's talk.
