What’s Opening on Downtown Clearwater’s Cleveland Street
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Three thousand people showed up at the corner of Cleveland Street and Fort Harrison Avenue in July to watch a clock get turned back on. The occasion was the reopening of the Peoples Bank Building, restored down to its original brick and storefront glass, and the crowd came for the clock tower ceremony as much as anything else. Within days, the news that followed the celebration wasn't about the building. It was about who was moving into it.
That's the part worth paying attention to if you live anywhere near downtown Clearwater. The story isn't just that empty buildings are filling up. It's that one restaurant group has announced projects in two of the restored buildings.
Tastes Pretty Good Hospitality, the group behind Tampa's Rocca, Bar Terroir, Lumbre and the Michelin Bib Gourmand recipient Streetlight Taco, announced two Clearwater projects within the same few weeks this past July. First came Rippers, a deep-fried hot dog and burger concept moving into the ground floor of the historic Telephone Building at 534 Cleveland Street, a structure built in 1914 and now the first landmark completed under the Cleveland Street Alliance's restoration push. Then came the bigger announcement: Streetlight Taco's second location ever, and its first outside Tampa, taking the ground floor of the newly restored Peoples Bank Building at Cleveland and Fort Harrison.
In What Now, Tastes Pretty Good CEO Nick Reader framed the move as a homecoming of sorts.
"We started in Tampa as a love letter to the city we grew up in. When this opportunity arose to come to Clearwater, we saw something very familiar. We understood the vision, we understood where it could go and we knew we wanted to be part of it."
The group announced projects for two of the corridor's three fully restored buildings within the same month, and Streetlight Taco already carries Michelin recognition from its January 2024 South Tampa opening. Those projects offer one view of what may be coming to downtown Clearwater.
As Bay News 9 reported, the Cleveland Street Alliance told a city council work session in late May that nine properties along Cleveland Street between Osceola and Myrtle avenues were either finished or in progress.
| Building | Address | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Peoples Bank Building | 432 Cleveland St | Restoration complete, Streetlight Taco moving in |
| F.W. Woolworth Co. Building | 519 Cleveland St | Restoration complete |
| Telephone Building | 534 Cleveland St | Restoration complete, Rippers moving in |
| Brown Brothers Building | 615-621 Cleveland St | Underway, expected to wrap late 2026 or 2027 |
| Five additional storefronts | 623, 629, 635, 639, 645 Cleveland St | Underway, expected to wrap late 2026 or 2027 |
City Councilman Michael Mannino, who requested the work session, described downtown Clearwater's recent history bluntly: for decades it had been known as a ghost town, and only now are the 400 and 600 blocks of Cleveland showing signs of life. The Cleveland Street Alliance told council members the full project is expected to generate $200 million in private investment for the district.
At the May work session, city officials confirmed that members of the Church of Scientology are funding the restoration effort through the Cleveland Street Alliance. The funding was discussed openly at the public council meeting.
The activity isn't confined to the historic core. Over on East Bay Drive, a former Boston Market at 4001 E. Bay Drive is becoming Dank Burrito this fall, a North Carolina-born chain making its second Florida stop after a spring opening in Ponte Vedra. Franchise owners Bryan and Lambdin Hill, along with general manager Jackie Garcia, are turning the space into a 3,100-square-foot spot with custom graffiti honoring Bay Area icons like the Buccaneers, the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and local beach scenes, painted by an artist known as Pause who's scheduled to install the work in early September.
It's another announced restaurant project in Clearwater, alongside the Cleveland Street projects.
The most ambitious piece of the downtown plan hasn't broken ground yet. EVO Entertainment is slated to build an 83,000-square-foot, $50 million family entertainment complex at the corner of Cleveland Street and Myrtle Avenue, the literal gateway into downtown. Plans call for a seven-screen multiplex anchored by a screen described as more than 130 feet wide, billed as the largest in the world, with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos in every auditorium, plus 16 lanes of bowling, laser tag and rock climbing.
Worth being straight about: as of the April 2026 reporting on the project, no construction timeline or permit schedule had been finalized, and organizers said design work, permitting and traffic and parking plans still needed to be worked out before anyone breaks ground. It's real, and it's the intended anchor for the whole corridor, but it's further out than the restaurants already moving into finished buildings.
On the site of the old City Hall, developers the Gotham Organization and the DeNunzio Group held a ceremonial groundbreaking on April 6, 2026 for The Bluffs, a 630,000-square-foot mixed-use project with a 400-unit luxury rental building, more than 10,000 square feet of retail and 440 parking spaces. It's described locally as the second and more prominent piece of a two-project development from the same developers.
A few blocks away, the city's new $31.6 million City Hall at 200 S. Myrtle Avenue, a two-story, 40,000-square-foot building that broke ground in 2024, is in the middle of phased move-ins scheduled for August and September of this year. If you've driven past Myrtle Avenue recently and noticed moving trucks, that's what you're seeing.
For residents, the most immediate way to feel the shift is at The BayCare Sound, the amphitheater inside Coachman Park. Blues Traveler, the Gin Blossoms and the Spin Doctors play on August 31. John Fogerty and Steve Winwood are booked for September 19, and Freedom Rocks, featuring 38 Special, the Marshall Tucker Band and Don Felder, rounds out the fall lineup on October 11. Whatever downtown Clearwater becomes over the next few years, right now it already has a concert calendar that would have been hard to imagine when Cleveland Street was still mostly boarded storefronts.
The generic version of this story says downtown Clearwater is having a moment. The more useful version says the moment has a shape you can actually track. Three buildings are done. Six more on the same block are next, expected to finish late this year or in 2027. One hospitality group is choosing where its flagships go first. Members of the Church of Scientology are funding the historic restoration through the Cleveland Street Alliance. And two much larger projects, the EVO complex and The Bluffs, are set to bookend the corridor once they catch up to the pace the restaurants have already set.
If you're already spending your Friday nights on this stretch of Clearwater, the next building to watch is the Brown Brothers Building at 615-621 Cleveland and its five neighboring storefronts. That's the next domino, and given that Rippers and Streetlight Taco are moving into restored buildings, it's worth keeping an eye on before it's suddenly finished too.
For more on how this part of the city fits into the bigger picture of living in Clearwater, our Clearwater neighborhood guide has additional local context worth bookmarking. And if downtown's momentum has you thinking about what your own Clearwater property might be worth in this market, Khristian Marcotrigiano and the SoldByKhris team are always glad to talk it through, starting with a free instant home valuation.
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