Walk South White Street on a Friday night right now and you will notice something that would not have made sense two years ago: the newest crowd downtown is not clustered around Town Hall or the old Wilkinson Building. It is three blocks south, spilling out of a warehouse that spent most of its life storing tobacco supplies, not serving margaritas.
That warehouse has a name now. Locals call it 535 Warehouse, and the story of how it got there explains something bigger than one building. It explains why the newest wave of Wake Forest businesses keeps landing in the same few hundred feet of pavement, and why this fall's event calendar ends up pulling residents in two directions on the same street rather than one.
The Building That Started the Pull South
The address is 535 South White Street, and before it was anything else, it was the Welsh Warehouse, a 16,200-square-foot building put up in 1962. Developer Atlas Stark bought the property in 2021 with almost two acres to work with and a plan to anchor the south end of downtown. The original idea was a food hall. That fell apart when a prospective anchor tenant backed out, and Atlas Stark reworked the whole project around multiple smaller tenants instead, adding a wraparound porch, green space, and stormwater systems built into the site rather than around it.
Jason Cannon, president of the Wake Forest Business & Industry Partnership, described what the finished building would do to the map of downtown once it filled up:
"When paired with The Loading Dock Wake Forest and the Northern Wake Senior Center, we'll definitely see more activity along South White Street."
That is not marketing language. It is a specific bet that foot traffic would start moving south, and the tenant list backs it up.
Who Actually Moved In
The building leased up completely, and Lil Hombre Smoked Taco Joint was the first to open its doors, taking Suite 125 as its second location after an original spot in downtown Clayton, cooking over live fire and serving tacos three ways alongside margaritas and beer. Cardinal Bar, a Raleigh mainstay known for food, drinks, and live music that had already expanded into Clayton and Wilson, signed on as another tenant. Pure Barre and MassageLuXe rounded out the wellness side of the lease-up, and a pediatric autism therapy practice took roughly 7,000 square feet, a tenant mix nobody would have predicted for a converted tobacco warehouse.
None of this happened in isolation. Walk the same block today and you will pass Over the Falls, Strike & Barrel, Canaria Boutique, The Naked Empanada food truck, and Plant Cakes Bake Shop, all within a few tenths of a mile of the warehouse doors. The south end of White Street was already building a food and drink identity before 535 Warehouse finished leasing. The building did not create the cluster. It gave the cluster a center.
The Ripple a Few Blocks Over
The pull south shows up elsewhere in town too, even outside the immediate corridor. Sugar Magnolia Café, a longtime downtown spot that also runs Magnolia Roots Music Lounge, changed hands under new owners who live in Wake Forest and come from a food and hospitality background. On South White Street, the restaurant that spent 26 years operating as Las Margaritas Mexican Restaurant at 111 South White Street, then sat closed for two years, spent this year on a full remodel to reopen as Las Mas Mexican Food & Cantina. And out at Wake Forest Crossing, Flying Biscuit opened a new location, joining a small but growing list of breakfast spots serving the northern edge of town.
None of that is downtown proper. It matters anyway, because it shows the appetite for new dining options in Wake Forest is townwide right now, not confined to one redevelopment project. The 535 Warehouse block is simply where that appetite is most concentrated.
Two Ends, Two Jobs
Here is the part that is easy to miss if you only see the new restaurant openings one at a time: this fall's town-run events are not happening at 535 Warehouse. They are happening at the other end of the same street.
| North End (Town Hall / Main Street) | South End (535 Warehouse block) | |
|---|---|---|
| Anchor | Town Hall, Wake Forest Birthplace Museum | 535 South White Street |
| What's new | Ghost walks, civic events | Tacos, bars, boutique fitness |
| Fall draw | Storytelling, history, community walks | Dinner, drinks, a night out |
The Spirits of Wake Forest ghost walks return this fall, running Thursday through Saturday evenings from October 1 through October 30. Tour groups meet outside Town Hall at 301 South Brooks Street and walk the historic business district, primarily along South White Street, hearing stories about the town's train wrecks and folklore. Tickets are $20 each and go on sale tomorrow, Tuesday, September 8, at noon.
That is the north end doing what it does best: leaning on more than a century of history that the south end, by definition, does not have yet.
Meanwhile, the town's other fall anchors sit even farther north, out at E. Carroll Joyner Park. Concerts in the Park continues with a second date on Sunday, September 13, and the Wake Forest Diwali Festival lands there October 3. Closer to downtown, the CROP Hunger Walk starts at the Birthplace Museum on September 20, and Pride Fest takes over East Owen Avenue and South Brooks Street on October 10.
Every one of those dates sits north of the warehouse block. The town's civic calendar and its newest commercial cluster are pulling residents to two different ends of the same corridor this season, not competing for the same evening.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
If you have lived in Wake Forest for a while, you already have a mental map of downtown built around Town Hall, the museum, and the shops you know on sight. That map is still accurate. It is just no longer the whole map.
A resident planning an October Saturday now has a real reason to walk both ends. Buy ghost walk tickets for one of the evenings between October 1 and October 30, meet at Town Hall, and finish the tour a few blocks from where Lil Hombre and the rest of the 535 Warehouse block are just getting their evening crowd. The two halves of White Street were not designed to connect that way. They just happen to, because the calendar and the redevelopment landed in the same season.
The September 13 Concerts in the Park lineup was still unannounced as of this writing, so that detail is still filling in, much like the south end of downtown itself.
None of this changes what makes Wake Forest worth living in. It just means the walk down White Street looks different than it did two years ago, and it is worth taking that walk again before you assume you already know what's there.
If a move to Wake Forest, or a move out of it, is somewhere on your mind, Tanya Ireland knows this corridor block by block. Let's talk about your move.