The building at 22 Union Street North sat dark from 1977 until a few years ago, and most people who drove past it never gave it a second look. It had been a bank office, then nothing, its ground-floor windows either shuttered or filled with the kind of empty storefront glass that stops registering after a while. If you grew up in Concord, you might remember your grandparents mentioning a theater that used to be there. If you didn't, you probably assumed it was just another old building waiting for a developer with enough patience to bother.
Someone finally had that patience. What's worth understanding, if you live anywhere near downtown Concord, is that the building didn't quietly reopen sometime in the last few years the way local news coverage might suggest. It finished reopening. The last piece of that puzzle clicked into place on August 22, 2026, when Bae's Burgers held its grand opening inside the space and completed a 17-business lineup that had been assembling, one lease at a time, since 2025. That distinction between "reopened" and "finished reopening" matters more than it sounds like it should, because it explains why downtown feels different this fall than it did even a year ago.
The building that outlasted the block
The Cabarrus Theatre opened at 22 Union Street North in 1939 and was, by local accounts, the first structure in Cabarrus County with air conditioning. It ran as a single-screen movie house until 1977, when it closed and was converted into bank offices, first for Concord National Bank and later Fifth Third Bank. During that conversion, a second floor was built directly over the theater's original mezzanine, sealing off a vaulted barrel bow truss ceiling from public view. For close to 50 years, people walked past a building without knowing there was an entire architectural feature hidden above their heads.
Developers Kristen and Tristan Adamczuk bought the building in 2019 with the idea of turning it into what's now called The District Exchange, a two-story micro-retail marketplace modeled loosely on the kind of shopping arcade you'd find in an older European city, or closer to home, Uptown Charlotte's Latta Arcade. The mezzanine was reopened for the first time since the conversion, restoring public access to that original ceiling. First tenants, Barley Jean's Bakery and Life is Sweet Candy Store, opened in September 2025, and the rest of the space filled in fast after that: Crane Coffee Co. took a flagship spot with its own street-level staircase entrance, First-N-Flights set up as a beer and wine taproom, and more than a dozen small, mostly owner-operated shops moved into the remaining bays, selling everything from vinyl records to sewing supplies to Sri Lanka-inspired apparel. Owner Eric Granillo counted 20 micro-retail spaces when the building reached full occupancy that November, the first time in its history every bay had a signed tenant.
One piece was still missing. Bae's Burgers, a Mooresville restaurant expanding for the first time, signed on that same November to take three adjoining first-floor suites as the complex's third anchor tenant, which is also why the finished building settled into a 17-business lineup rather than 20. Its build-out took roughly nine months. When it opened this past August, the district finally had every bay filled and open to the public at once, something that hadn't happened at that address since Franklin Roosevelt was in his second term.
The street had to finish first
None of this would have worked if the street outside the building hadn't changed too, and that part of the story took even longer and went considerably worse before it went right.
Concord's downtown streetscape project on Union Street was supposed to take 18 months. Work began in 2022, and by the summer of 2024 the city was telling a frustrated city council that the timeline had stretched past two years, with at least six approved contractor time extensions along the way. Council member Andy Langford summed up the mood at the time by asking, essentially, when the city could actually promise residents an end date. The project finally reached substantial completion with a ribbon cutting on May 3, 2025, nearly a year after its original target and years after ground first broke.
What the city got for that delay was a corridor with 22-foot sidewalks, narrower travel lanes, new brick paver accents, upgraded lighting, and room for the outdoor dining and public art that downtown didn't have room for before. The project earned a 2025 Award of Merit for Best Outdoor Space Improvement from the North Carolina Main Street & Rural Planning Center, announced at the statewide awards ceremony on March 11, 2026. City figures cited around the time of completion put the public investment at $13.2 million, a number the city says helped unlock more than $165 million in private development along the corridor, including roughly $84 million from Lansing Melbourne Group's Novi Flats apartment project, a 48-unit building on Barbrick Avenue that had its own ribbon cutting the summer before the streetscape work wrapped.
That sequence matters for anyone trying to understand why The District Exchange succeeded where the building had failed to attract a tenant for half a century. A fully restored 1939 theater with foot traffic problems out front isn't a viable marketplace. A fully restored theater on a rebuilt street with wider sidewalks, a social district that lets people carry drinks between storefronts, and $165 million of nearby private investment is a different proposition entirely.
Not every storefront survived the wait
The streetscape project's slow pace wasn't just an inconvenience measured in council meeting frustration. It cost at least one longtime business its life. Table 11, a restaurant that had operated in Union Street Square, hit construction crews cutting into water lines in April 2024, forcing a shutdown for the day. Owner Bob VanAtta told local reporters at the time that the business was running about 50 percent below its break-even point. Four months later, Table 11 closed for good.
The space didn't stay empty. Union Street Cafe opened in the same storefront that fall, serving chicken and waffles and breakfast burritos to a downtown that was, by then, mostly through the worst of the construction. VanAtta himself stayed in the local food scene, starting a catering business called Cabarrus Cooking Company around the same time his restaurant closed. It's a smaller story than the theater, but it's the same pattern in miniature: the construction period had real casualties, and the recovery on the other side filled the gap almost immediately rather than leaving a hole.
What actually finished this summer
If you haven't been inside The District Exchange since sometime last year, here's a sense of what's actually there now that the lineup is complete:
- Crane Coffee Co., the specialty coffee anchor with its own mezzanine-level staircase entrance from Union Street
- First-N-Flights, a beer and wine taproom and lounge, one of the building's three anchor tenants
- Bae's Burgers, the newest anchor, occupying three adjoining first-floor suites with smashburgers and fried chicken sandwiches on the menu
- Barley Jean's Bakery and Life is Sweet Candy Store, among the first tenants to open back in September 2025
- More than a dozen additional micro-retail shops selling gourmet popcorn, vinyl records, sewing supplies, perfume, and handmade clothing, nearly all of them owner-operated
That owner-operated detail is worth sitting with. The building's whole design premise was affordable micro-storefronts for people who couldn't justify a full retail lease, and the tenant list mostly bears that out. This isn't a chain-anchored shopping center wearing a historic facade. It's closer to a small business incubator that happens to occupy one of the most architecturally distinctive buildings in the county.
What's on the calendar while the paint dries
Downtown's fall lineup gives you a few reasons to actually go see the finished building in person, rather than just knowing it exists:
- Concord International Festival, Saturday, October 3, 2026, noon to 6 p.m. on Union Street South, with live music, international food and drink, and craft vendors, admission free
- Flat Footed Truths: Stories of Lived Experiences, a juried quilt exhibition at the Cabarrus Arts Council galleries, running through October 10, 2026
- Friday Night Flicks, a free monthly movie series at city parks and downtown running August through November 2026
None of these events are tied directly to The District Exchange, but they're all happening within a few blocks of it, on a street that couldn't have hosted them comfortably five years ago without cutting into the two travel lanes that construction eventually removed.
If you've been putting off a walk through downtown because you assumed it was still mid-project, this is the season to go. The scaffolding is down, the last storefront is open, and the building that spent 49 years being a landmark nobody could get into is, for the first time since 1977, just a place you can walk into on a Saturday afternoon.
If wondering what's happening in your own neighborhood eventually turns into wondering what your home is worth in it, that's a conversation TrustRush is glad to have. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
