Walk Greensboro Avenue this summer and you'll still dodge orange barrels between University Boulevard and 6th Street, then dodge different barrels between 6th and 7th. Concrete trucks have been parked outside Chuck's Fish since May. If you eat downtown often enough, you've probably rerouted around this block without thinking about it anymore.
By September 5, when Alabama hosts East Carolina at Bryant-Denny Stadium, the city wants all of it gone. What's less obvious is what the construction is actually building toward, and why a handful of storefronts on this same stretch have sat empty while restaurants keep announcing bigger and bigger plans for the space next door.
The short version: Tuscaloosa removed a travel lane from Greensboro Avenue and handed that pavement to businesses that can use a sidewalk, not the ones that can't. That single decision is doing more to reshape this block than any new restaurant opening on its own.
The math nobody put on a yard sign
The project has a name, Elevate Tuscaloosa, and a number attached to it: $4.3 million. The city awarded the actual construction contract to GFC Construction of Duncanville for $3.8 million, the lowest of five bids submitted. Work started Monday, May 4, on the two blocks between University Boulevard and 7th Street.
What's changing physically: one travel lane comes out of Greensboro Avenue for good. In its place, the city is widening sidewalks, adding landscaping, and carving out dedicated loading zones and rideshare pickup spots. Mayor Walt Maddox framed it as a safety project when it broke ground.
"This project will improve traffic flow, strengthen pedestrian access and safety, and increase economic vibrancy with enhanced streetscaping and dedicated areas for ride shares and loading zones," Maddox told the Tuscaloosa Thread.
That's the official framing. But a traffic lane converted to sidewalk isn't a neutral upgrade. It's square footage, and square footage on a commercial block always ends up serving whoever can build a business model around it. On Greensboro Avenue right now, that's restaurants with patios, not the retail shops that used to anchor this stretch.
Where the new sidewalk is already spoken for
The clearest example is still under construction. Charles Morgan, the restaurateur behind Chuck's Fish and Five Tuscaloosa, has teamed up with photographer Miller Mobley and Cris Eddings, son of Chuck's longtime sushi chef Yoshie Eddings, to bring Slim's Pizzeria to 550 Greensboro Avenue, the corner of 6th Street, directly across from the Bama Theatre.
The original Slim's, which Mobley opened in Crestline Village in Mountain Brook back in 2020, is a 1,700-square-foot room that seats 64 people. The Tuscaloosa version is being built inside a full renovation of an existing high-rise, with condos going in above and a 7,800-square-foot restaurant on the ground floor, more than four times the size of the Birmingham original.
The part that ties directly back to the streetscape project: Morgan has said the road changes will let Slim's put more than 60 outdoor seats on the sidewalk alone, more than the entire seating count of the Birmingham location. That patio doesn't exist without the lane removal. The city didn't just repave a street. It manufactured buildable outdoor space and handed the first big chunk of it to a restaurant group with the capital to use it. Morgan has said he's hoping to open in October, which would put Slim's serving pizza on a sidewalk that didn't have room for a table six months earlier.
What's actually open on this block right now
Before the cones showed up, the two-block stretch between University and 7th was already a dense mix of restaurants, bars, and small shops. As of this spring, the businesses along that run included:
- Chuck's Fish, the Wine Market, Broadway Pizzeria Express, Central Mesa, Mugshots Bar and Grill, and Half-Shell Oyster House for food
- The Parlor, an ice cream shop, and Babe's Doughnuts for dessert
- Icon Tuscaloosa and the Gray Lady as bars
- Swag, the Shirt Shop, Zaria, the Trunk, and ABS Business Systems as retail and service tenants
- The Bama Theatre at 600 Greensboro and the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center at 620 Greensboro, both still running events through construction
The Parlor is worth a second look because its origin story is the block in miniature. Owners Forrest and Christin Brown, who also run Tuskaloosa Tornado Shelters, opened it at 514 Greensboro Avenue after walking downtown one night with their three kids looking for ice cream and finding nothing open. Christin Brown told the Tuscaloosa Thread they'd assumed they'd stumble onto dessert somewhere on the strip and didn't. They leased the gap between Chuck's Fish and Icon instead of waiting for someone else to fill it.
That's the pattern on this block right now. Gaps get filled by people who can build a food or drink concept fast, not by the kind of retail that used to be here.
What's not there anymore
The same reporting that listed the current tenant roster also noted the spaces still sitting empty: the former homes of Downtown Trading Co., Brick House, and Lorch Diamond Center, along with some vacant offices. These aren't hypothetical vacancies. They're specific, named storefronts that closed or relocated and haven't been replaced, even as restaurant announcements keep stacking up two doors down.
District 4 Councilman Lee Busby pointed to the stretch between University Boulevard and the county courthouse, which he called a downtown dead zone, and predicted the block between 5th Street and the courthouse specifically would see what he called a flourishing once a handful of undisclosed projects land. He didn't name them. But the pattern he's describing, restaurants and bars claiming ground floor space while older retail formats sit dark, is already visible one block over on Greensboro.
City Bowls is the other side of that coin, a newer addition that filled one of downtown's gaps rather than leaving it open. Owner Jess Alenemer told WVUA23 the brand felt Tuscaloosa was the right fit, especially downtown, where he said the community is centered. That's another food concept taking a storefront that could have gone to almost anything.
None of this means retail is finished downtown. It means the specific kind of retail that used to fill Greensboro Avenue, jewelry counters, trading posts, standalone offices, isn't what's competing for the space that's opening up now. Restaurants and bars are the tenants who can turn a wider sidewalk into revenue, and the last year of leasing activity on this block reflects that.
What changes by kickoff
As of July 10, the city's director of construction management, Josh Norris, said crews were in the third month of the project and had finished the first two phases, the sidewalk and parking bays on the east side of the block between University Boulevard and 6th Street. Phases three and four, covering the east side between 6th and 7th, were still underway but on schedule. That was a month ago. With the season opener now about four weeks away, crews have a narrow window left to close out the second block before the Saturday crowd shows up for kickoff.
If the schedule holds, the version of Greensboro Avenue that greets fans walking to the Bama Theatre or grabbing oysters before kickoff will have a permanently different curb line than the one that's been there for decades. One less lane for cars. More room for the businesses that know what to do with a sidewalk.
If you're running a business on this block, watching a competitor's patio go up next door, or trying to figure out what a storefront that used to hold a jewelry counter is actually worth to a restaurant tenant now, that's a conversation about leasing strategy, not sidewalk width. Right Space Commercial works with landlords and tenants across downtown Tuscaloosa on exactly that kind of repositioning. Find your space.
