The ribbon got cut on August 14. Coastal Ridge Real Estate welcomed its first tenants into The Fitzgerald, the six-story building now anchoring 2200 East Main Street, and Frank Kass stood in the courtyard calling it a project that "belongs to its neighborhood." Bexley's Main Street has a new building with 230-plus apartments, a public parking garage, and space set aside for a restaurant that won't open for another eight months.
If you've lived in Bexley more than a decade, you've watched this movie before. Not this exact plot, but the same director.
The pattern nobody's naming out loud
Frank Kass is a Bexley native, and The Fitzgerald is his third significant Main Street project in this city, not his first. Before this, he brought the Market District-City Hall project to East Main, moving Bexley's municipal offices into the old Bexley Monk space and opening the door for a two-story Giant Eagle grocery with a full restaurant on top. Before that, or around the same era, came the Gramercy Building, where his wife Linda Kass runs Gramercy Books on the ground floor of the building where the couple lives.
Three projects, same family, same two-and-a-half-square-mile city. That last part matters more than it sounds like it should. Bexley is boxed in by Alum Creek, Delmar Drive, Gould Road, and Livingston Avenue. There is no farmland on the edge of town waiting to be platted into a subdivision. Every redevelopment here has to happen on top of something that already exists, which means each project is, by necessity, a bet that the site can support more than it currently does.
The Fitzgerald is the biggest version of that bet yet. It replaced a 60-unit apartment building that had, for years, quietly housed some Bexley City Schools students. What's going up in its place holds roughly four times as many units, plus 11,100 square feet of retail and restaurant space, 12,500 square feet of medical office space, and a structured garage built to serve the public, not just residents. To get there, the city had to approve a height typically off-limits on Main Street: six stories along the street edge, five stories set back. That's not a minor variance. It's the kind of exception a city grants when it has decided, deliberately, that the old math on this stretch of Main no longer applies.
What the site used to be worth, on paper
Here's the detail that tends to get skipped in the celebratory coverage: the parcel Capital University and Trinity Lutheran Seminary owned was tax-exempt. Zero property tax revenue, for as long as it sat in university hands. That's the argument the city used to justify offering Continental Development Ventures tax increment financing to help fund the parking garage. A TIF doesn't create new taxes out of nothing. It captures the increase in property value a project generates and redirects a portion of it toward public infrastructure tied to that same project, in this case a garage the public can actually park in when visiting Bexley Square or the businesses around it.
Whether you think that trade was worth it probably depends on how you feel about six stories on Main Street. But it's worth being precise about what changed: a parcel that generated no city revenue for years now generates a garage, medical office space, and a housing stock with 230-plus units where 60 used to stand. That's not incremental growth. That's the site being asked to do roughly four times the work.
The anchor tenant that isn't open yet
There's a detail in the coverage of The Fitzgerald that residents walking past the building this fall are going to notice on their own: the dining anchor isn't operating. Hudson 29 Kitchen and Drink, the Cameron Mitchell Restaurants concept slated for the ground floor, isn't opening until spring 2027. That's roughly eight months after the first residents already moved in.
This isn't unusual for mixed-use projects generally, but it's a real change of pace from how Bexley's last big Main Street bet played out. When Market District Express opened its grocery in August 2016, the in-house restaurant called Table, a 4,000-square-foot space with 155 seats and a Main Street-facing balcony, opened the same day. Residents got the full package at once.
The Fitzgerald is asking for more patience. When Hudson 29 does open, it will be the restaurant group's third Central Ohio location, joining existing spots in Upper Arlington and New Albany, and the Bexley build-out is planned at 5,500 square feet with seating for 178, including 42 seats on a heated, covered patio. It's a bigger footprint than Table ever had. It's just not ready yet, and the empty storefront in the meantime is part of what living next to this project looks like right now.
The old guard is still doing most of the actual work
None of this changes what still anchors East Main day to day. The Drexel Theatre has been running since December 1937, designed by Robert Royce in a mix of Art Deco and Art Moderne that earned it a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015. Rubino's has served thin-crust pizza from the same stretch of Main since 1954. Block's Bagels has been turning out New York-style bagels since the 1960s. Giuseppe's Ritrovo has built a reputation for Italian food good enough that Gramercy Books partners with it, alongside the Drexel, to host author events.
That partnership is worth sitting with for a second. A bookstore, a movie theater, and a restaurant coordinating on programming isn't something a developer can plan into a pro forma. It's the kind of density of relationships that only shows up after decades of the same small businesses operating within a few blocks of each other. The newer arrivals, Katalina's and COhatch among them, are filling in around that existing fabric rather than replacing it. Cherbourg Bakery is still tucked around the corner on South Drexel. Urban Emporium is still there. The Fitzgerald changes the skyline. It hasn't changed who runs the corner storefronts.
What's actually on the calendar
If you want to see all of it at once, the timing works out well this year. Bexley Summerfest runs Sunday, September 6, from 3 to 8 p.m., taking over East Main Street and Drexel Avenue. Main will close between College Avenue and Pleasant Ridge Avenue from noon to 9 p.m., and Drexel Avenue closes between Main and Sherwood from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., so plan your errands or your dog walk accordingly.
This is also year three for Artfest and the Mural Festival component, with more than 50 artist booths and a Brewfest ticket that includes unlimited samples for adults, with kids allowed into the Brewfest area if accompanied by a ticketed parent. New this year is a Mini-Makers tent for elementary and middle-school-aged artists, featuring young Bexley talent including Simone Limbach, Harriett Dunstan, Hadar Skolnik, Lyra Schuerman, and Oliver and Seneca Streicher. The Egg Drop, a longtime crowd favorite, is back. The event runs through the Bexley Community Foundation's Celebrations and Events fund, with this year's season sponsorship coming from Ohio Heating and Cooling and The Weiler Collection.
Walk that same stretch of Main during Summerfest and you'll pass The Fitzgerald's ground-floor windows, still waiting on Hudson 29, a few doors down from a theater that's outlasted three owners and a lightning strike, next to a pizza place that's been open since Eisenhower was president. That contrast, new density next to old permanence, is a more honest picture of what's happening on Main Street than any single ribbon-cutting photo can capture.
Worth watching next
The Fitzgerald won't be the last word on this stretch of Main. Bexley's own land use strategy points toward the same tools being used again, and the city has already started similar groundwork up on Cassady Avenue, another commercial corridor officials have flagged for the same kind of careful, incremental redevelopment. If the pattern of the last decade holds, the next project on Main Street probably won't come from an outside developer parachuting in. It'll come from someone who already lives here, betting that this small, landlocked city can still support more than it currently does.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home you own on or near Main Street, or you're trying to understand how a project like this affects property values on a block you're watching, the team at Cece Miller tracks these changes as they unfold, not after the fact. Request a Private Market Consultation to talk through what a development like The Fitzgerald actually means for your corner of Bexley.
