"This project provides an identified needed connector from Catawba to South Street." Cornelius commissioner Mike Miltich said that when the town board approved the Greenway Gartens and Caroline developments, and he wasn't talking about traffic counts. He was describing the last unbuilt link in a plan that downtown Cornelius has been assembling, corner by corner, for years.
If you've driven Catawba Avenue this year, you've noticed the corridor doesn't behave the way it used to. It once stopped cold at Main Street. Now it runs east into Antiquity, west past a block of live-work units built above the shops near Town Hall about a decade ago, and it's about to gain a connection nobody who grew up in Old Town would have predicted: a second Olde Mecklenburg Brewery.
Two Anchors, One Unfinished Middle
Downtown Cornelius now has a real anchor on each end of Catawba, and the space between them is what everyone is arguing about.
On the west side, the Cain Center for the Arts opened in 2023 as a $25 million regional arts venue with a 400-seat theater and an outdoor plaza. On the east side, near Zion Avenue, Olde Mecklenburg Brewery has an approved second location planned inside the Greenway Gartens development, the brewery's own answer to its original south Charlotte brewhouse.
Neither of those is news to anyone who drives past them. What's less visible is the corridor connecting them, and that's where the actual construction is happening right now.
What's Rising at Catawba and Meridian
Mills Market is the $70 million mixed-use project going up at the corner of Catawba and Meridian, built by Charlotte developer Highline Partners. The plan calls for 238 apartments over a ground-floor corner restaurant and roughly 12,000 square feet of additional retail, with a new public pedestrian plaza called Catawba Court running behind the storefronts. The building's rounded windows are a deliberate nod to the two textile mills that once stood in this exact spot, and the parking deck built alongside it sets aside close to 130 spaces for public use, not just for residents.
Here's a sign of how quickly this filled in: in March 2026, the town board expanded downtown's social district, the boundary where restaurants and shops can serve to-go alcohol, specifically to catch up with what's already operating. The new boundary now covers the Cain Center's pottery studio, the Mills Market development, the Oak Street Mill complex, and the Catawba Avenue live-work units. The town redrew its own permit map because downtown had outgrown the old one.
The Build Most Residents Haven't Seen Yet
The bigger project isn't on Catawba at all. Greenway Gartens and the neighboring Caroline development, approved together on 41 acres between northern Zion Avenue and South Street, will bring roughly 650 residential units and 34,000 square feet of commercial space to the northeast side of town, including a 180-unit active-adult community from developer Proffitt-Dixon. Greenway Gartens is also where Olde Mecklenburg Brewery's second location is headed.
Getting there means finishing the South Street connector, the same road Miltich was talking about. The road was designed to pull cut-through traffic off Old Canal, which was closed for upgrades when the project was approved, remove a blind curve near the town's covered bridge, and add a three-way stop. Construction vehicles were barred from crossing the bridge itself while that work was underway. It's a small, unglamorous stretch of road, and it's also the literal link between the Cain Center side of downtown and the brewery side.
Here's the shape of it, if you're trying to picture the whole corridor at once:
- Already open: Cain Center for the Arts (2023), its pottery studio, and the Catawba Avenue live-work block
- Under construction now: Mills Market at Catawba and Meridian, including Catawba Court
- Approved, not yet built: Olde Mecklenburg Brewery's second location, Greenway Gartens, and Caroline
- In progress, connecting both ends: the South Street road work near the covered bridge
The Plan Trying to Hold It Together
None of this is happening without a document trying to referee it. Cornelius's planning board signed off on a master plan direction for downtown in December 2025, and the town released an updated draft, framed as a 2050 vision, for public comment this spring. Two feedback sessions were held at Town Hall on April 29 and 30, with residents able to drop in and mark up the plan directly. Formal adoption by the elected Board of Commissioners is still expected sometime later this year.
The study area itself covers about 220 acres along Catawba Avenue and Main Street, centered on Town Hall and the police department and stretching toward where a future Red Line commuter station could eventually sit near Zion Avenue. Planning director Rox Burhans has said the goal was to have a final draft ready by early April, then explain it to residents before commissioners take it up.
What's notable about the draft isn't the acreage. It's what the town is using as its design compass. Cornelius leaders keep pointing back to the town's roots as a mill village, and specifically to something called the Tree of Knowledge, a large oak that once stood between the town's two original mills and served as an informal gathering spot for the workers who lived here. The plan's language ties future public spaces and design decisions back to that history, which is the town's own answer to residents who've complained that the Cain Center's glass architecture doesn't match Old Town's older brick storefronts. You can read the draft plan directly on the town's planning department page.
What Hasn't Changed at All
Not everything downtown is being rebuilt. A short drive down Catawba, Jetton Park still looks exactly like it has for years: 104 acres of lakefront on Lake Norman, a 1.5-mile paved loop trail, and a sunning beach where swimming has never been allowed. None of the master plan's 220 acres touch it, and none of the developments on this list change what happens there on a Saturday morning. If Old Town is being rebuilt around two new anchors, Jetton Park is the one piece of the neighborhood's identity nobody is trying to redesign.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live here. Downtown Cornelius isn't sprawling outward or getting a single big makeover. It's closing a gap between two ends of the same half-mile stretch, using a road, a plaza, and a planning document that all reference the same 19th-century mill town it grew out of. The construction detours near the covered bridge and the parking deck going up at Meridian aren't unrelated projects. They're the same plan, built one piece at a time.
If you're watching these changes and wondering what they mean for your own street, your equity, or the timing of a move, that's exactly the kind of question Andy Nock fields regularly from Cornelius homeowners. Reach out for a conversation grounded in what's actually happening in Old Town, not a generic market snapshot.
