Downtown Apex's Banner Says "Open for Business." Only Half the Street Agrees.

Walk south on Salem Street this week and your feet will tell you something your eyes might miss. For about a block, the pavement under you is new. Herringbone brick pavers, freshly set. Then you cross an invisible line and you're back on cones, plywood, and the orange mesh fencing that's been part of the downtown Apex scenery since January. Same street. Two different projects, running at two different speeds, at the same time.

That's the real story of downtown Apex this September. Not that construction is happening. Everyone already knows that. The story is that the Salem Streetscape project has quietly split into a finished half and an unfinished half, and the practical questions residents are actually asking, where to park, which shops are still hanging on, whether it's worth the hassle to eat out this weekend, have different answers depending on which side of the street you're standing on.

The Street Has Two Finish Times Now

The east side of Salem Street, between Saunders and Chatham, got its underground infrastructure and its pavers finished in mid-July. That side is essentially done. The town has since shifted southbound traffic onto that new lane, which is what freed up crews to start tearing into the west side: demolition, storm drain work, and the soil cells that will eventually hold new street trees.

So if you're downtown right now, you're seeing a project in transition rather than a project in progress. One side of the block looks like the finished renderings the town has been showing since the Downtown Master Plan was adopted back in 2019. The other side looks like it did in February. A five-foot sidewalk stays open along both sides throughout, so you can still walk into every storefront, but the experience of walking there depends entirely on which half of the block you're on.

Three Completion Dates in Eight Months

If you've been waiting for construction to wrap up before you start planning a normal Saturday downtown again, here's why that plan keeps getting pushed back.

Three different completion windows in eight months isn't a communication failure so much as it is what an underground infrastructure project actually looks like when it hits unexpected electrical conditions. But if you're a resident who's been telling yourself "I'll go back to eating downtown once it's finished," the honest answer right now is: plan around December, and treat that as an estimate too.

The Businesses Carrying the Weight

The town's messaging has been consistent since January: downtown is open. That's true. It's also incomplete, because "open" and "unaffected" aren't the same thing, and the businesses on Salem Street have been living the difference for eight months.

Cynthia Mollenkopf has run Cocoon Gallery on Salem Street since 2017, selling work from a rotating roster of 70 to 80 artists to people who happen past the storefront or find her online. She expected the construction dust and the slower foot traffic. What caught her off guard, by her own account, was that landlords started raising rent around the same time, anticipating the nicer street the construction is supposed to deliver. It's an odd position to be in: absorbing a sales dip today to help pay for a rent increase tied to a finished street you can't fully use yet.

Anna's Pizzeria has felt something similar in dollar terms. A manager there told reporters in late April that the restaurant was tracking down somewhere between 10 and 20 percent in sales. Larry Seiger, who owns custom jewelry maker Virtuoso Jewels a few doors down, put his frustration in plainer terms, saying what most business owners want isn't a finished street, it's a straight answer about how long the current slowdown will actually last.

Not every business has just been holding on. Alleyway Bookstore closed in early June, citing rising costs and the shift in foot traffic outside its door. Mayor Jacques Gilbert addressed that closure directly and said Bella + Mauve Boutique had shared that it, too, might be facing hard decisions, while also encouraging residents who can afford it to spend locally. At the same time, new businesses have kept opening anyway. Popovers Cafe, run by Mustafa and Juliette Ozturk, had its grand opening at 219 N. Salem Street this year. Foxtail Coffee opened a second Apex location out at Sweetwater Town Center, a few minutes west of downtown, giving the daytime crowd a coffee option that doesn't require crossing the construction zone at all.

That's the real texture of this fall in Apex. It isn't a street that's closed. It's a street where some tenants are stretching to make it to the finish line and others decided the timing was right to start something new.

What Actually Still Works Right Now

For residents trying to figure out whether a downtown trip is worth the friction this month, a few practical things are true right now:

• Parking is genuinely easier than it looks from the street. The Saunders Lot expansion added 152 new spaces earlier this year, a 40 percent jump in downtown parking capacity, and the town's interactive parking map and Apex Parking app show real-time availability if you'd rather not guess.
• GoApex Route 1 is running a detour that's been in place since late January, with stops near the Halle Cultural Arts Center and in front of Advance Community Health on Moore Street. GoCary Route 9's stop by the historic Apex Union Depot on Center Street hasn't been touched.
• The Local Spot, downtown's social district, still lets you buy a to-go drink from participating vendors and walk the designated outdoor stretch, construction or not. It's a low-effort way to string together a few stops on an evening walk without needing a reservation anywhere.
• Sidewalks stay open on both sides for the entire project. The five-foot path along the west side business fronts is narrow but it's there.

None of that erases the inconvenience. It does mean the excuses for skipping downtown entirely are smaller than the construction cones make them look.

The One Date Worth Circling

Festa Italiana lands on Saturday, September 19, its usual third-Saturday-in-September slot, and it's one of the better reasons to actually walk that finished east side pavement this month rather than wait for the whole street to catch up. The event is community-organized rather than town-run, but the town still provides the location and public safety support, the same arrangement that's kept Apex's civic-group festivals running for years even as Salem Street itself has been under construction.

If you're deciding whether this is the weekend to finally go back downtown, this is a reasonable one to pick. You'll be walking on the section of Salem Street that's actually finished, at an event that's been happening for years regardless of what the sidewalk looks like.

The Takeaway for Anyone Living Near Salem Street

Downtown Apex isn't one construction zone right now. It's two different streets stitched together at a seam somewhere around the halfway point of the block, one that already looks like the finished plan and one that's still being torn up. That distinction matters more than the overall completion date, because it tells you where the friction actually is this month and where it's already gone.

The honest version of "support local business right now" isn't a slogan on a banner. It's picking a specific place, Cocoon Gallery, Virtuoso Jewels, Anna's Pizzeria, Popovers Cafe, and walking in on purpose, on a weekend when there's an actual reason to be there. Festa Italiana on September 19 is as good a reason as downtown will offer this month.

If you're a longtime Apex resident who's been sitting on questions about your own home's value while all this street-level change happens around you, or if you're weighing whether a move closer to or farther from downtown makes sense for your family, DDR Realty is local enough to have opinions about which side of Salem Street is worth your Saturday. Call or schedule a free consultation with Dorothy or Eric Rainey any time you want to talk it through.