If you live in Clearwater and you've scrolled past a Cleveland Street headline in the last five months, you've seen the same handful of numbers repeated back at you: fifty million here, two hundred million there, a movie screen bigger than anything else on the planet. The press releases keep coming. The Cleveland Street Alliance has put out more than a dozen of them since April, along with nearly twenty videos documenting the work. What most of that coverage skips is the question a resident actually has: if I walk down Cleveland Street this weekend, what can I sit down and order, and what am I still looking at through a construction fence?
The answer splits the corridor in half in a way that doesn't match the press coverage. The loudest announcements, the ones with the biggest dollar figures, are the ones with no open date. The things you can actually use right now are quieter and, in one case, involve a bakery case.
The Corner That Actually Reopened
Walk to the corner of Cleveland Street and Fort Harrison Avenue and you'll find the Peoples Bank Building looking the way it hasn't looked in decades. The building went up in 1910, after Clearwater's Great Fire, and was reworked into a Mediterranean Revival landmark in the 1920s. The Cleveland Street Alliance says the recent restoration took roughly 45,600 hours of work from about 80 craftspeople, rebuilding the terra-cotta facade from archival photographs and restoring the four-faced McClintock-Loomis clock over five months of work by horologist David Boyd. When the building reopened in late July, more than 3,000 people showed up for the unveiling, filling the intersection.
That's the kind of crowd size that tells you something about how starved this corridor has been for a reason to gather. It also means the clock is real, the storefront is real, and if you've been avoiding downtown because it felt like a construction zone with no finish line, this corner now has one.
A few blocks away, the Telephone Building at 534 Cleveland Street tells the same story. Built in 1914, it's been through a full structural reconstruction, with the Alliance describing the work as rebuilding the entire building behind a period-matched brick facade. It's finished. What's not finished is what's supposed to go inside it, which we'll get to.
The one storefront on this stretch that's actually serving food right now is Nourish & Nosh Bakery Bistro, which opened in July at 601 Cleveland Street on the ground floor of the Atrium Building. It's a European-style cafe run by co-owner Nea Porta, who's originally from Helsinki, serving scratch-made breakfast and coffee. If you want a concrete answer to "can I get something to eat downtown that wasn't there a year ago," this is currently it.
What's Still Just a Name on a Press Release
Here's where the gap opens up. Three of the restaurant announcements that generated the most coverage this year don't have opening dates.
Rippers, from the Tampa hospitality group behind Michelin-starred Rocca, was announced in July for the ground floor of the restored Telephone Building. It's a casual concept built around deep-fried "ripper" hot dogs, and the company has said it's planned to open by the end of this year, but as of this writing no firm date has been set.
A second Streetlight Taco location, announced later in July for the Peoples Bank Building, is targeting the first quarter of 2027 according to the Cleveland Street Alliance. The building it's moving into is finished. The restaurant inside it is not.
Hanami Izakaya, a modern Japanese concept from restaurateur Sheng Long Yu planned for 635 Cleveland Street, was announced back in May. Florida Division of Corporations filings show the LLC was formed in January, and the Alliance's own construction updates from the 600 block, which describe ongoing demolition and structural work at that address, make clear the space isn't ready yet. No opening date has been announced.
And then there's the one everyone's actually asking about: EVO Entertainment. The planned $50 million, 83,000-square-foot family entertainment complex at Cleveland Street and Myrtle Avenue would anchor the corridor with a seven-screen multiplex built around what the developer calls the largest cinema screen in the world, at more than 130 feet wide, alongside bowling, laser tag and an arcade. It was announced in April. As of the most recent coverage, no construction timeline, permit schedule or opening date has been released, and reporting at the time noted the project still needs final design approvals and a resolution of parking and traffic logistics for a venue of that scale in a downtown setting.
Here's a quick way to keep the two lists straight.
| Address | What's there | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 601 Cleveland St | Nourish & Nosh Bakery Bistro | Open |
| Cleveland St & Fort Harrison Ave | Peoples Bank Building | Restoration complete, publicly reopened July 2026 |
| 534 Cleveland St | Telephone Building | Restoration complete; Rippers announced for ground floor, no open date |
| Peoples Bank Building | Streetlight Taco (2nd location) | Announced, targeting Q1 2027 |
| 635 Cleveland St | Hanami Izakaya | Announced, no open date, block still under construction |
| Cleveland St & Myrtle Ave | EVO Entertainment complex | Announced, no groundbreaking date |
Why the Buildings Move Faster Than the Restaurants
There's a reason the historic buildings are finished while the businesses going inside them aren't, and it's not bureaucratic delay. It's financing structure. The Cleveland Street Alliance has been explicit that the roughly $200 million in private investment behind this corridor, split across the entertainment center, historic restoration, and general renovation and construction, has moved forward with zero government incentives, subsidies or grants. The Alliance also reported that 50 permits had been pulled for downtown projects in the four months between April and August alone.
That matters for how you read the pace of change here. A city-funded downtown project typically moves on budget cycles and council votes, which means slow and predictable. A privately funded corridor moves on each individual developer's own construction and hiring timeline, which means uneven. The building shells, funded and built directly by the property owners restoring them, can hit their finish line on schedule. The restaurants and entertainment operators leasing space inside those shells are working through their own separate buildout, staffing and licensing timelines, and those aren't coordinated with the building schedule or with each other. That's why you can stand at a fully restored, historically accurate corner and still be looking at a storefront with paper on the windows.
If you're tracking this corridor because you live near it, the buildings finishing on schedule is the more reliable signal. The restaurant and entertainment opening dates are the ones worth treating as provisional until you see a sign go up.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall
None of this means downtown Clearwater is quiet right now. Four blocks west of Cleveland Street, the BayCare Sound at Coachman Park, the amphitheater built into the 19-acre park that reopened after an $84 million renovation, has a packed fall lineup, and the 47th Clearwater Jazz Holiday returns to Coachman Park and The Sound October 15 through 18. It's a four-night run of jazz, funk, soul and blues acts that's been a fixture on the bayfront since 1980, and it pairs ticketed shows near the stage with free festival programming that keeps the rest of the park open to everyone.
If you want to see what the corridor looks like when it's genuinely busy rather than under a tarp, that's the week to go. You'll get a real look at what Coachman Park's renovation actually delivered, and you'll be close enough to Cleveland Street to check on the Telephone Building and the Peoples Bank corner while you're at it.
The Takeaway for Anyone Already Living Here
The headline version of this story, the one built from press releases alone, makes downtown Clearwater sound finished. It isn't, not yet. But it's further along than a resident who's been avoiding the construction might assume, and the parts that are done, the Peoples Bank clock, the Telephone Building's brick, a bakery case at 601 Cleveland, are permanent in a way that the announcements aren't yet. The corridor is being built by roughly a dozen separate private parties on their own individual clocks, not by one city timeline. That's worth remembering the next time a press release lands with a big number attached. The number tells you what's been committed. It doesn't tell you when you'll be able to eat there.
Watching a neighborhood like this change in real time, building by building, is exactly the kind of texture that doesn't show up in a listing description but shapes what it's actually like to live somewhere. If you're weighing what a corridor like this means for a home nearby, or you're curious what your own Clearwater property is worth as the area shifts, Harvey Petty has spent 25-plus years tracking these changes street by street across Tampa Bay. Reach out for a home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
