"We're tracking down anywhere from 10 to 20%." That's Steven Perticona, a manager at Anna's Pizzeria, describing what a year of one-lane traffic and torn-up sidewalks has done to foot traffic on Salem Street. It's the kind of number that sounds like a eulogy for a downtown. It isn't one. While Salem Street lost customers, it also gained a popover bakery, a modern Indian restaurant with a late-night lounge, and a second location for one of the Triangle's better-known coffee roasters. The construction didn't just cost downtown Apex business. It sorted it.
The Year Salem Street Has Had
The Salem Streetscape Project has been the defining fact of downtown Apex life since January. The Town Council awarded the $4.7 million contract to Browe Construction in December 2025, a roughly $1.75 million gap above the project's original approved funding, a gap Mayor Jacques Gilbert attributed to inflation and years of delay before the project finally broke ground. The plan itself is straightforward: wider, curbless sidewalks, new American Elm street trees, decorative lighting, and a new gathering space at Saunders Street, replacing the narrow sidewalks that have squeezed pedestrians against storefronts for decades.
What wasn't straightforward was the execution. Work started in January with North Salem Street reduced to one-way traffic between Saunders and West Chatham. By spring, electrical issues forced a design pause, and the completion date that had been pegged at October slid. As of a town email shared with local reporters in June, the new target is somewhere between early November and early January. That's not a small miss. It means downtown Apex is heading into its first holiday season with Salem Street still under some form of construction disruption, even as the finished sidewalks, lighting, and elm canopy start to take shape blade by blade.
If you live near Salem Street, the practical question isn't "when will this be done" in the abstract. It's whether the fall shopping season and the holiday parade route will look normal this year. Based on the town's own timeline, don't count on it. Plan for construction noise through at least Thanksgiving.
Who Didn't Make It
Two businesses illustrate what a prolonged construction detour actually costs a small storefront. Alleyway Bookstore, a used bookshop that depended on walk-in browsing, closed in June, citing rising costs alongside the drop in foot traffic outside its door. Mayor Gilbert addressed the closure directly in a Facebook post, noting that Bella + Mauve Boutique, another downtown retailer, had shared that it too might face hard decisions if conditions didn't improve.
These aren't franchise locations with a corporate cushion. They're the kind of single-location, thin-margin businesses that make a historic downtown feel like a downtown instead of a shopping center. When a sidewalk narrows to a construction detour for half a year, that's exactly the kind of business that absorbs the hit first.
Who Bet on the Other Side
Here's what makes the past year more interesting than a simple story of decline: the same conditions that closed Alleyway Bookstore didn't stop a wave of new operators from signing leases on or near Salem Street.
- Popovers Cafe opened at 219 N. Salem Street, a sweet-and-savory pastry shop owned by Mustafa and Juliette Ozturk, built around family recipes going back to Juliette's grandmother.
- Kaara Indian Restaurant opened on Stokesdale Avenue with two dining halls, a private room, and a patio, adding modern North and South Indian fine dining to a corridor that didn't have it before.
- Lime & Lemon Restaurant & Lounge brought a premium Indian restaurant and a separate late-night lounge with its own entrance to Creekside Landing Drive, a 7,000-square-foot space built for both dinner service and a DJ-lit night out.
- Foxtail Coffee Co. opened its second Apex location at Sweetwater Town Center, expanding beyond its original spot near downtown.
None of these are impulse openings. A restaurant with a private dining room and a 200-person lounge capacity, or a coffee chain committing to a second address in the same town, is a bet that the disruption is temporary and the address is not. Whoever signed those leases looked at a one-way street and a construction fence and decided the finished version was worth building toward now, not after ribbon-cutting day.
That's the real signal buried in this year's headlines. Salem Street isn't emptying out. It's re-sorting itself around operators who can absorb a year-long construction window, which tends to mean more concept restaurants and destination dining and fewer single-owner shops running on thin margins.
Three Blocks Away, the Same Argument
Downtown Apex is having a parallel conversation that has nothing to do with sidewalks and everything to do with the same underlying question: what does a growing small town keep, and what does it let go?
Fire Station 1 has anchored downtown since 1954, when volunteers built its original three-bay brick structure by hand. The Town Council has decided to move Engine 1 and its crew to Station 3, less than a mile away, arguing that operating two stations within seven-tenths of a mile no longer makes sense for a town Apex's size. Fire Chief Tim Herman has called the two stations "one fire station under two roofs" and said consolidating resources at the larger Station 3 improves coverage across a town that has outgrown its old footprint.
Retired firefighter Roy Moore doesn't see it that way. He spent 22 years at Station 1, as both a volunteer and a paid firefighter, and has led a petition drive that topped 1,200 signatures by early August, arguing that keeping an operating firehouse in the middle of Salem Street's restaurant row is part of what makes downtown feel like a small town rather than a stage set of one.
"This station, the interaction with the community of the guys down here is priceless. You just don't see that elsewhere, and I don't think it's a compromise situation."
The Town Council isn't deciding the building's fate yet. On August 11, it approved $170,000 to fund a market analysis and feasibility study, with the consulting firm Arcadis expected to spend nine to ten months gathering public input before recommending options. Concepts on the table range from a museum and fire-prevention education center to a redevelopment that preserves the original bays as storefronts. Nothing will happen to the physical building until Station 3's renovation is complete.
Read next to the Salem Streetscape story, the fire station debate is the same tension in a different register. One is about which small businesses survive a modernization project. The other is about whether a modernization project should touch a building at all. Both are the visible cost of a town that's outgrown the infrastructure it built for a much smaller version of itself, and both are being decided in real time, in public meetings, by residents who showed up because they still recognize downtown as theirs.
What This Means for Your Fall
If you're mapping out weekend plans on Salem Street between now and the holidays, a few things are worth building into your routine:
- Festa Italiana lands September 19, and GoApex Route 1 will run an all-day detour from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. to accommodate it. If you rely on the bus to get downtown, check the town's detour map before you head out.
- Construction on North Salem is likely to run through the holidays. Sidewalks stay open on both sides throughout, so walking to dinner remains easy even where car access doesn't.
- The Saunders Gathering Space, with pergolas, seating, and a digital kiosk, is part of the same project and will be one of the more visible payoffs once the streetscape wraps.
- GoCary Route 9's stop at the historic Apex Union Depot on Center Street remains open throughout construction, which is useful if GoApex's detoured Route 1 doesn't line up with your schedule.
The businesses that opened this year did so with full knowledge of the mess outside their front doors. That's a better read on where downtown Apex is headed than any single quarter's foot-traffic numbers.
If you've been watching Salem Street change and you're wondering what that means for your own address nearby, whether it's worth understanding while the corridor is still mid-transformation, the team at Hodge & Kittrell Sotheby's International Realty knows this stretch of Apex block by block. Request Your Instant Home Valuation whenever you're ready to see where your home stands.
