Drive along Deacon Boulevard on a Saturday with Wake Forest playing at home and you'll notice the construction fencing has started to look less like a barrier and more like scaffolding for something specific. Steel beams. A five-story shell taking shape at Piccolo Lane. A crosswalk that wasn't there last year, cutting a clean line across University Parkway. Most people who pass it assume there's nothing to actually see yet, that the whole 100-acre project stays sealed off until its official Fall 2027 debut. That assumption is wrong, and it's wrong in a way that matters if you live anywhere near this corner of Winston-Salem.
The multi-use trail that will eventually loop through The Grounds is already finished. It's a 13-foot-wide, 1.5-mile path built alongside the restoration of Silas Creek, and according to the project's own construction updates, it's being opened to the public for select sneak peeks during major events this fall. Not a rendering. Not a "coming soon" sign. An actual paved trail you can walk, timed to the exact weekends when the neighborhood already has a reason to be there.
What's finished right now, not what's promised for later
The University Parkway and North Cherry Street intersection reopened this year in its redesigned form, with a new pedestrian crossing now fully operational. Drivers are getting used to the changed traffic pattern. The multifamily building known as Creekside at The Grounds has its brickwork nearly complete. The retail village, five buildings totaling 42,000 square feet, is going vertical on the site that used to be surface parking lots and, before that, home to The Last Resort, a bar generations of Wake Forest students remember fondly.
None of this is speculative. It's the state of the site as of September 2026, according to the developers' own project updates. The $250 million first phase, a joint venture between Atlanta-based Carter and Winston-Salem's own Front Street Capital, is under construction with Nelson as architect and Brasfield & Gorrie as general contractor. That's a lot of institutional weight behind a project most residents still associate with orange cones and lane closures.
The tenant list that actually tells you something
On September 16, the developers announced the first five confirmed tenants for the retail village, and the lineup is worth reading closely because it answers a question a lot of people near campus have been asking without realizing it: is this just going to be a tailgate zone, or something that functions the other 350 days a year too?
The answer, based on who signed on, leans toward the latter.
- The Jimmy — an expanded Mediterranean and Italian restaurant and bar from Charlotte restaurateur Jim Noble, with wood-fired pizzas and a rooftop overlooking the district
- The Fieldhouse Tavern — a food-forward sports bar from local restaurateurs Tom and Brandon Brock, the same team behind Sage & Salt Bistro, Tuscani, and the recently opened Spicy Pickle, with a two-story space and its own rooftop bar
- Bagels & Co. — a breakfast and lunch concept with an established presence in university communities
- TREMBLE — the second North Carolina location of a high-intensity reformer Pilates studio
- Allegacy Financial — a multipurpose branch tied to the credit union's existing partnership with Wake Forest
A bagel counter and a Pilates studio don't get built for game days. They get built for Tuesday mornings. Front Street Capital's Coleman Team put it plainly when the lineup was announced, saying the mix is meant to work "for those event days and beyond, on every other day of the year." That's a different bet than a straightforward sports-bar row next to a stadium, and it's the clearest signal yet of what daily life on this stretch of Deacon Boulevard is supposed to feel like once the retail village opens.
Why this particular fall, and not some other one
Timing is the part easy to miss. The trail's sneak-peek access is tied to major events, and this fall happens to stack two of them within weeks of each other. Wake Forest's home football schedule runs through the Allegacy Stadium side of the site all season, and the Carolina Classic Fair returns for its 144th year October 2 through 11 at the Winston-Salem Fairgrounds, directly adjacent to The Grounds. That's ten straight days when the fairgrounds, the coliseum, and the construction site all sit within a few hundred yards of each other, and it's exactly the kind of event window the developers have flagged for limited trail access.
Wait until the official 2027 opening and you'll see a finished retail village with restaurants running full service. Show up during a home game or during fair week this October and you get something different: a half-built district still wearing its scaffolding, a completed trail with almost no foot traffic on it yet, and a rare look at a 100-acre project mid-transformation instead of after the ribbon gets cut. For anyone who likes watching a place change shape before the crowds arrive, that's the actual window, and it closes the day the retail village finishes leasing out.
What this corner of town used to be
It's worth sitting with what the site replaced, because it explains why this project carries the weight it does locally. For more than 80 years, this stretch around Allegacy Stadium, Couch Ballpark, and the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum functioned as the athletic and entertainment backbone of the city, but the land immediately around those venues was mostly asphalt. Parking lots. A beloved dive bar that closed to make way for construction. More than 750,000 people pass through the surrounding venues in a typical year, and until now, almost none of that foot traffic had anywhere to go before or after an event except back to their cars.
The Grounds is a direct answer to that gap, and it's why the tenant mix and the trail matter more than they might at a project without an existing crowd already showing up 750,000 times a year. This isn't a developer hoping to create demand from nothing. It's a developer building infrastructure for demand that's been standing in parking lots for decades.
What to actually do this fall if you're curious
If you live near campus or anywhere along the University Parkway corridor, the practical move is simple. Check the trail access windows tied to Wake Forest home games this season, or plan a stop during Carolina Classic Fair week between October 2 and 11. Park where you'd normally park for a game or the fair, and give yourself fifteen extra minutes to walk the section of trail that's open. You'll see the Silas Creek restoration up close, get a real sense of scale on the retail village buildings going up at Piccolo Lane, and understand what "42,000 square feet" actually looks like on the ground instead of on a spec sheet.
The district won't run full service until Fall 2027, and more tenants for the remaining retail spaces are expected to be announced in early 2027. But the parts that are already real, the trail, the reopened intersection, the steel going up, are worth seeing now, while they still look like a work in progress instead of a finished neighborhood everyone already knows.
If you've walked the trail already or have a favorite spot to watch the construction from, The Jordan Factor would genuinely like to hear about it. This kind of ground-level change is exactly the sort of thing worth talking through, whether you're weighing what it means for daily life around University Parkway or just want to compare notes on the best weekend to go take a look. Let's Connect.
