Ask a longtime Concord resident what the building at 22 Union Street North used to be, and you'll likely hear about sticky floors, bottle caps traded for movie tickets, and the hum of window units in a theater that had air conditioning before anywhere else in Cabarrus County did. Ask a twenty-something who just moved here, and you'll probably get a blank stare followed by "isn't that the coffee shop?" Both answers are correct. That gap between the two is the whole story of what's happened on this block over the past year.
Kristen Adamczuk, who bought the building with her husband Tristan in 2019, put it simply when she talked about the years the theater sat closed: "generations walked past it without realizing what was inside." That's not an exaggeration. The building spent nearly five decades as a bank office with a false ceiling built directly over its original vaulted barrel bow truss, the architectural centerpiece of a movie house that opened in 1939 and quietly disappeared behind drywall in 1977.
Today you can climb the original staircase from Union Street straight up to that same mezzanine, now fully reopened, order a bagel and a coffee, and look up at a ceiling nobody in this town under the age of sixty has ever seen with their own eyes.
A Theater, a Bank Lobby, Then Almost Nothing
The Cabarrus Theatre was, by Adamczuk's account, a genuinely remarkable building when it opened in 1939. It closed as a single-screen movie house in 1977 and was converted into offices, first by Concord National Bank, later by Fifth Third Bank. Somewhere in that transition, a second floor was framed in over the original mezzanine, sealing the theater's vaulted ceiling from public view for close to fifty years.
That's the part of the story most coverage of downtown Concord skips past on the way to talking about the new restaurants. But it matters, because it explains why the building's return isn't just another retail opening. When the Adamczuks bought it in 2019, restoring that hidden ceiling became a stated priority of the renovation, not an afterthought. The mezzanine is now open to the public for the first time since the Ford administration, and it changes what the building can hold. A single-screen theater becomes a two-story marketplace with double the square footage for local businesses to occupy.
Twenty Storefronts, Filled Faster Than Expected
Here's the detail that separates this project from a typical downtown retail buildout: the space filled up. All the way up. By November of 2025, the final vendor lease was signed, closing out all twenty micro-retail spaces inside what's now called The District Exchange.
The roster reads like a list of businesses that chose Concord on purpose rather than by default. Crane Coffee Co. anchors the second floor with a flagship location, its owner Kris Zouzoulas having already run two coffee shops in Uptown Charlotte before deciding Concord was where he wanted to plant a home base, selling pastries, local bagels, vintage clothing, and records alongside the espresso. First-N-Flights, run by retired air traffic controllers Meg and Eric Granillo, started as a small beer and wine counter and has since grown into a 2,500-square-foot taproom with a 1,000-square-foot back patio, the only dedicated food truck space inside Concord's social district. Rounding out the first floor are Barley Jean's Bakery, Decadence Popcorn, Life is Sweet, A Ceylon Story, and Red Bird Thread Co., a mix of local food, candy, and craft businesses that would not look out of place in a much bigger city's arcade district.
The third anchor tenant is Bae's Burgers, a Mooresville-based smashburger spot expanding for the first time, taking over three adjoining suites on the first floor. Its opening date has moved since it was first announced, and as of the developer's own site it's still listed for a summer 2026 opening, the last piece of the marketplace's original roster to land.
For context, that's a full commercial buildout landing inside a single year of active leasing, in a building that had sat with a closed door for most of the time it's been standing. That pace is the actual signal that something changed downtown, more than any press release about a ribbon cutting.
The Street Had to Get Worse Before It Got Better
None of this happens without the block outside getting rebuilt first, and that part of the story took longer and hurt more than the marketplace's quick lease-up suggests. The Union Street streetscape project, part of a Downtown Master Plan the city adopted back in 2016, ran close to $9.5 million and widened sidewalks to 22 feet while narrowing travel lanes to 11, adding ADA parking, new street trees, and brick paver accents at the corners.
While it was underway, businesses along the block adapted however they could. Robert Burrage, who owns The Mullet at Lil Robert's Place, temporarily moved his bar operation into the thrift shop next door rather than close entirely. Streakers and Goldberry Books both ran on special hours to work around the construction. The project's substantial completion date was contractually set for August 2024, with daily fines built in if the contractor missed it. The final ribbon cutting landed on May 3, 2025.
Less than a year after that ribbon cutting, the project picked up a 2025 Award of Merit for Best Outdoor Space Improvement from the North Carolina Main Street and Rural Planning Center, presented at a statewide ceremony in New Bern this past March. Awards for streetscape design are common enough. What's less common is a design award arriving after the buildings along that street had already filled with tenants willing to bet on it, which is a different kind of validation than a jury's opinion of the paving pattern.
What's Actually Different This Month
If you walked Union Street a year ago, you were walking past a lot of scaffolding and a bank office with a boarded-up second floor. Walk it now and a few things have changed in ways that show up on a weeknight, not just in a press release.
Concord's social district lets you carry a drink from bar to bar between 11 a.m. and 10 p.m. daily, which is part of why the Trolley Pub running along Church and Union Streets makes sense as a business now in a way it wouldn't have during construction. Harmony Night filled Union Street South earlier this month, on August 1. Coming up, Friday Night Flicks kicks off its run on August 28 and continues through November 20, free movies at 7 p.m. in the parks and downtown, with food available for purchase rather than packed in a cooler. The following day, the second annual Harry Potter Wizarding Festival takes over Percent, The Nook, on August 29, with a market and a trivia tournament for anyone whose Saturday plans involve neither a car show nor a dragway.
None of these events existed on this stretch of road two years ago, mostly because there wasn't a finished stretch of road for them to happen on.
If You Already Live Here
This isn't a pitch to move to downtown Concord. If you already live in the area, the honest version of this update is smaller than that: a building that most of your neighbors have never associated with anything other than a bank is now a place where you can get a coffee and see a ceiling nobody under sixty has ever looked at before. The sidewalks that were torn up for the better part of two years are wide enough now to hold a food truck line on a Friday night. Worth a walk-through some Saturday, if you haven't been down there since the construction fencing came down.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property values or timing a move in or around Concord, that's a longer conversation, and one where local specifics matter more than a national headline. Kris Kjeldsen Realty Group works Lake Norman and the greater Charlotte suburbs day to day, Concord included, and is always glad to talk through what a changing downtown means for a specific street or a specific house. Reach out any time you're ready for that conversation.
