Drive east on Florence Boulevard toward the Shoals Creek bridge right now and you will pass a construction site that has nothing to do with the Pine Street resurfacing everyone has been grumbling about all summer. This one is a restaurant. Waldos Salty Tail, a fish camp going up at 4420 Florence Blvd, is scheduled to open sometime in October, and if you are heading east on U.S. Highway 72 it will sit on your right, just before you cross the creek.
It is a strange place to notice a pattern, but it is exactly where you should be looking. Because if you assumed Florence's newest restaurants and shops would land downtown, where the sidewalks fill up every First Friday and the storefronts stay lit past dark, this fall's crop of openings is quietly proving you wrong. The new construction is happening at the edge of town. The small stuff is squeezing in wherever it can, including upstairs.
Downtown Doesn't Have the Square Footage It Used To
In July, BossBabe Brownie Company cut the ribbon on its new space with the Shoals Chamber at 112 N. Court Street. Read that address again and notice the detail that matters: the shop is upstairs. Not a new storefront at street level, but a second-floor space above one of downtown's existing buildings.
That is not a stylistic choice. It is what happens when the ground floor along Court Street is already spoken for. Downtown Florence's sidewalks fill up on the first Friday of nearly every month from May through November, when the Downtown Florence Alliance turns Court Street into an evening of live music, sidewalk art vendors, and restaurants staying open late, this year presented by Bank Independent. That kind of steady foot traffic is exactly what makes ground-floor retail valuable, and exactly why there is not much of it sitting empty. A new business looking to open downtown right now is not choosing between three open storefronts. It is often looking up.
So the Room to Build Went to the Edge
Waldos Salty Tail did not have that option, and it did not need it. A from-scratch fish camp needs land, parking, and room to build out a kitchen designed for the concept from the ground up. That kind of space does not exist in the historic core. It exists out along Florence Boulevard, on a stretch of Shoals Creek that has never been part of downtown's walkable footprint but sits close enough to the bridge that anyone commuting through town on Highway 72 will drive past it daily once it opens.
This is the part of the story that a quick scroll through a restaurant app will not tell you. The newest full-build restaurant in Florence is not a downtown addition. It is an edge-of-town project, and it is there because that is where the room actually is.
The Small Spaces Are Filling In Too
It is not only the big builds moving outward. The City of Florence has recently welcomed two smaller businesses that tell a similar story about how little slack is left in the local commercial map right now:
- Midtowne MeatHouse, a new addition the city highlighted as it opened its doors, joining the stretch of local food and retail spread across town rather than clustered in one district.
- Z Icy Hub, a new ice cream and international treats shop the city welcomed this year, filling a niche that had not been claimed locally before it arrived.
Neither is downtown. Both are new. Put them next to Waldos Salty Tail and BossBabe Brownie Company and you get four different businesses opening in four different kinds of spaces this year: an upstairs suite, a from-scratch build on the edge of town, and two storefronts scattered elsewhere across Florence. That is not a coincidence. That is what it looks like when a small city's commercial real estate stops having easy vacancies and business owners start getting creative about where they land.
First Fridays Still Does the One Job Downtown Does Best
None of this means downtown is losing its pull. If anything, the opposite is true. First Fridays remains the steady anchor that keeps Court Street the social center of Florence even while the newest construction happens somewhere else. The event runs the first Friday of the month from May through November, most recently drawing a crowd on September 4, with a Farmer's Market Zone, a Food Truck Zone, and a Kid's Zone alongside the artisan booths and live music that have defined the event for years.
Downtown does not need new square footage to stay busy. It needs exactly what it already has: a recurring reason for people to show up, walk the same three blocks, and find the restaurants and shops staying open past their usual hours. That is a different kind of growth than a new building on Shoals Creek, but it is growth all the same, and it explains why a business willing to take an upstairs space over no space at all still bets on being close to Court Street rather than moving out to where the room is.
What This Looks Like Over the Next Few Weeks
If you live here, the next couple of months give you an easy way to watch both halves of this play out. Waldos Salty Tail should open sometime in October along that Shoals Creek stretch of Florence Boulevard, and the opening will be worth a drive-by if you have been watching the construction all summer the way a lot of us have. First Fridays keeps going through November, so there is still time to catch downtown at its most crowded before the season winds down. And next time you are running errands, Midtowne MeatHouse and Z Icy Hub are both worth a stop, if only because a town this size does not add four new businesses in four different pockets of itself without something real going on underneath it.
Florence is not choosing between downtown and the edge of town this fall. It is filling both at the same time, and paying attention to where each new business lands tells you more about how tight the local commercial map has gotten than any single opening could on its own.
If you are curious what any of this means for property values or timing in the neighborhoods around these openings, that is a conversation worth having with someone who watches this market daily. I Love Shoals Homes keeps close tabs on what is changing in Florence and across the Shoals, and we are always glad to talk through what a given block or corridor is doing right now. You can also browse more of what is happening around Florence or catch up on weekend life around town before your next visit downtown. When you are ready to talk specifics, reach out and we will pick up where this leaves off.
