On a Saturday evening in late July, more than 3,000 people packed the intersection of Cleveland Street and Fort Harrison Avenue to watch a clock turn on. Not a metaphor. An actual four-faced copper clock, silent above the Peoples Bank Building for decades, restored by a Tampa horologist named David Boyd over five months and roughly 700 hours of work. The crowd came for the same reason people have always gathered at that corner: to see what time it is on Cleveland Street.
Here's what that crowd didn't get that night, and still can't get as of this writing. Dinner. Three restaurants have been announced for buildings along this same three-block stretch since May, and not one of them has opened its doors. If you live downtown and you've been reading the headlines, you'd be forgiven for thinking Cleveland Street is already a finished food scene. It isn't. It's a street where the architecture came back online before the kitchens did, and understanding that gap is the difference between planning your fall around what's real and planning it around what's still a press release.
The Corner That Came Back First
The Peoples Bank Building at Cleveland and Fort Harrison has anchored that intersection since 1910, remade in the 1920s into a Mediterranean Revival landmark with a terra-cotta façade that, over decades, faded into just another old storefront. The restoration that finished this summer wasn't cosmetic. Crews recreated the colorful terra-cotta from archival photographs using custom molds, cast and kiln-fired the way it was originally made, and rebuilt the storefronts and canopies to match the building's 1920s proportions. The full effort ran an estimated 45,600 hours across roughly 80 craftspeople, according to the Cleveland Street Alliance, the group leading the corridor's restoration.
The clock was the last piece, and the one people actually noticed. Boyd, who restored the McClintock-Loomis mechanism, put it simply:
"To me, this clock is much more than a timepiece. It is a jewel of Clearwater."
That's the part of the transformation you can already see and touch. The part you can eat at is a different timeline entirely.
Three Kitchens, Zero Open Doors
Here's the corridor as it actually stands in early August 2026, building by building:
| Building | Built | New Tenant | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peoples Bank Building, 432 Cleveland St | 1910, remodeled 1920s | Streetlight Taco | Announced July 30, no opening date |
| Telephone Building, 534 Cleveland St | 1914 | Rippers | Announced July 13, no opening date |
| 635 Cleveland St | Existing storefront, part of the 600 block redevelopment | Hanami Japanese Izakaya | Announced May 12, no opening date |
| Cleveland St & Myrtle Ave, 700 block | Site cleared June 29 after five buildings were demolished | EVO Entertainment, 83,000 square feet | Design and permitting phase, no construction start date |
Streetlight Taco, the Michelin Bib Gourmand taqueria that opened in South Tampa in January 2024, will take the Peoples Bank Building's signature ground-floor space, the same corner where the clock celebration happened days before the announcement. Rippers, a deep-fried hot dog concept, is headed into the fully rebuilt Telephone Building at 534 Cleveland, a structure that underwent what the Cleveland Street Alliance calls a complete reconstruction behind its original façade. Hanami, a modern Japanese izakaya serving sushi, ramen and yakitori, is set for 635 Cleveland, positioned between the Pinellas Trail and what will eventually be the neighborhood's biggest anchor. None of the three has a date on the calendar yet.
One Hospitality Group, Two Blocks
There's a detail in that table worth sitting with. Streetlight Taco and Rippers are both projects of Tastes Pretty Good Hospitality, the Tampa group behind the Michelin-starred Rocca, the Michelin Guide-recommended Bar Terroir, and the newly opened Lumbre. Within seventeen days of each other this July, the same operator announced two separate concepts on the same three-block stretch of Cleveland Street. That's not diversification. That's one Tampa restaurant group making a concentrated bet on a single downtown corridor it didn't previously operate in at all.
CEO Nick Reader framed the move as recognition rather than risk. Speaking about the Telephone Building, he said the team saw something familiar in Clearwater's redevelopment, the same energy that drove the group's original Tampa expansion. Whatever the motivation, the practical effect for anyone living downtown is that two of the three new dining announcements on your street share a kitchen philosophy, a design language and a corporate parent. The food scene taking shape here is being built by one company's playbook, applied twice, three blocks apart.
The Big One Still Isn't Poured
The project generating the most attention is also the furthest from opening. EVO Entertainment's planned flagship at Cleveland Street and Myrtle Avenue is an 83,000-square-foot, $50 million complex built around what developers call the largest cinema screen in the world, more than 130 feet wide, with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos in every one of its seven auditoriums. If it delivers as designed, it would be the first multiplex on earth with that combination in every screen, according to Dolby's own announcement at CinemaCon.
As of June 29, 2026, the site had been cleared, five existing structures on the 700 block demolished, the 1.6-acre parcel prepped along the Pinellas Trail. That's real progress. It's also the only progress. There is no construction start date, no permitted design, and the project is currently sitting in what developers describe as the design and permitting phase. The current world-record screen, at Germany's Traumpalast Multiplex, measures 127 by 69 feet. EVO's proposed screen would beat that by a few feet, on paper, once someone actually builds it. For now, the record stands, and so does an empty lot.
What's Already Real This Fall
While Cleveland Street's restaurant row is still mostly signage and renderings, the other end of downtown has been operating without interruption for three years. The Sound at Coachman Park opened in June 2023 as the centerpiece of the $84 million Imagine Clearwater project, with 4,000 covered seats and 5,000 lawn seats built into a 19-acre park that also added a playground, a splash pad with 67 water nozzles, and a new Dockmaster's Office for the adjacent marina. None of that is new information to anyone who's already spent a Saturday there. What is worth marking on a calendar is the 47th Clearwater Jazz Holiday, running October 15 through 18, 2026, back at Coachman Park and The Sound for another multi-night run of ticketed shows and free festival programming.
That's the actual, dated, plannable thing happening on this stretch of downtown this fall. Everything on Cleveland Street proper is still in the announced-but-not-open column.
Who's Actually Behind the Corridor
If you're wondering who's coordinating all of this building by building, the answer is public record and worth knowing if you live nearby. The Cleveland Street Alliance, the entity issuing nearly every press release behind these projects, describes itself as made up of the Church of Scientology, its parishioners, and a team of professional advisors, including architecture firms Halflants + Pichette and Gensler, along with Streetsense and Fairmount Properties. The initiative is managed by Scott Dobbins, principal of Tampa-based commercial real estate firm Hybridge. That's not a footnote. It's the organizational structure behind every building named in this piece, from the Peoples Bank restoration to the EVO site clearing, and it's useful context for anyone trying to understand why this particular stretch of downtown is moving all at once.
The Season to Actually Watch
If you live downtown, the honest version of this fall looks like this: the Jazz Holiday is real and it's in three months. The Peoples Bank Building's clock is already running. Everything else, the tacos, the hot dogs, the izakaya, the world's largest screen, is still catching up to the buildings that are already standing there waiting for them. Cleveland Street looks finished from the sidewalk. It isn't yet. Knowing the difference is the whole point of paying attention to your own street instead of the press release.
We watch these corridors closely because they tell us where the neighborhood is actually headed, not just where the renderings say it's going. If you're curious what any of this means for property values or timing along Cleveland Street, or you just want a second set of eyes that's been tracking it in real time, The Orns Solution is always glad to talk it through.
