What Finally Came Back to South Oleander and Forest Hills in 2026

"It has taken a long time to get here," Cape Fear Museum director Kate Baillon said the week her museum reopened, and she wasn't just talking about a building.

She could have said the same thing about a restaurant just down Oleander Drive, or about a concert calendar at the lake that residents have been driving past for months waiting to see fill back up. This is the real story of South Oleander and Forest Hills in 2026: three separate things the neighborhood had been waiting on, some for years, landed inside the same nine months of the year. Not because anyone planned it that way. It just happened to break all at once, right as summer turns into fall.

Here's the shape of it in one place:

None of these are small. Add them up and you get a neighborhood whose weekend options changed twice in the same year, plus a fall calendar that's suddenly worth checking before you make other plans.

The building on Oleander Drive that sat empty for nearly three years

Anyone who's driven Oleander Drive through the middle of South Oleander has passed 5400 Oleander Drive more times than they can count, most of that time as a dark storefront. Hops Supply Co. closed there in March 2023, and before that the space was Eddie Romanelli's. For close to three years it sat as the kind of vacancy that becomes part of the scenery, the building you stop noticing because nothing changes.

Something finally did. In January 2026, Grant Steadman, the founder and president of Flying Machine Brewing, opened The Sounder in that same building after months of renovation. Steadman bought the property in late April 2025 and brought in executive chef Jason Burrows, a Maine native who's cooked in Wilmington kitchens since 2016, to build a menu built around local seafood. Burrows' NC Shrimp dish, built around house-made marigold spaghetti with cherry tomato and anchovy herb crumb, and a cold-smoked tuna dish wrapped and seared in the style of a Wellington, are the two the kitchen points to first. Steadman also has a personal stake in the supply chain: he co-founded Salt Street Oyster Company, a one-acre oyster farm near Topsail Beach, and The Sounder pulls from that same farm.

What this means for the neighborhood isn't complicated. A three-year gap in a walkable strip is a real gap, the kind that quietly shrinks a neighborhood's sense of what's close by. Filling it with a full-service kitchen serving lunch, dinner, weekend brunch, and a late-night bar menu until midnight puts a legitimate dinner option back on the same stretch of road most South Oleander residents already drive to get anywhere.

Eight months without the rainy-Saturday museum

If you raised a kid in Forest Hills anytime in the last decade, Cape Fear Museum was probably your default answer for "what do we do today" on a wet weekend. That option disappeared on Dec. 31, 2025, when the museum closed its Market Street location to the public so staff could safely relocate more than 400 artifacts to a new building.

It came back on Aug. 18, 2026, at 230 Grace Street downtown, as part of a redevelopment called Project Grace. The new museum roughly doubles the exhibit space and triples the education space compared to the old site, according to Baillon, and adds a 60-seat planetarium that didn't exist before. The public portion of the project cost $77 million total, with $21.5 million of that going specifically into the museum's build-out. A members and community preview called the Grand Opening Summer Soiree ran Aug. 22, catered by Pine Valley Market, with the planetarium open for stargazing that night.

The distance from Forest Hills to Grace Street hasn't changed. What changed is what's waiting at the other end. A museum with new galleries like Cape Fear Stories and an outdoor learning space called Curious Nature, sitting a few blocks from the Riverwalk, turns a museum trip into something that folds naturally into a downtown Saturday instead of standing alone as its own errand. For a neighborhood that spent eight months without this option at all, that's a bigger shift than the mileage suggests.

The lake that's always been there just got a stacked fall

Greenfield Park has never needed an opening date. It's been sitting on the southern edge of the Historic District, bordering Forest Hills and South Oleander, since long before any of this year's other changes. The park runs 250 acres around Greenfield Lake, with a paved loop a little over four miles around the water, a boathouse that's rented paddle boats and kayaks since 1925, pickleball courts, the Greenfield Grind Skate Park, and the Rotary Wheel Garden, a 240-foot symbol built in 1965 that's billed as the largest of its kind in the world. Dogs are welcome on leash, and the alligator sightings are common enough that regulars mention them the way other parks mention squirrels.

What's different this fall is the amphitheater tucked inside that same park. After a summer calendar that had gaps, the fall lineup at Greenfield Lake Amphitheater is genuinely dense. Ziggy Marley plays Sept. 28. Andy Frasco & the U.N. follows Oct. 2. An Old School R&B Vs Hip Hop Party lands Oct. 3, Lettuce plays Oct. 4, and Trampled By Turtles closes the run Oct. 8. That's five ticketed shows in an eleven-day window, at a venue that's a walk or a short bike ride from most of South Oleander. Parking along Lakeshore Drive is free, and the box office only opens the day of a show, so the routine for residents who go regularly is simple: park on the grass, walk in, walk home.

What actually changes this fall

Put these three together and the pattern isn't "a lot of things opened this year." It's that the specific things this neighborhood had quietly been missing, a kitchen, a museum, a full concert calendar, all landed inside the same nine months, with the museum, the last of the three to reopen, arriving just two weeks ago. That's not a coincidence anyone can take credit for, but it's real, and it changes what a fall weekend in South Oleander or Forest Hills actually looks like: dinner a few blocks down Oleander instead of a drive to Mayfaire, a museum trip that fits inside a downtown Saturday instead of standing alone, and five nights this fall where the walk to the lake ends with a show instead of just a loop around the water.

If you already live here, none of this needs an explanation. If you're weighing whether South Oleander or Forest Hills fits the way you actually want to spend a weekend, this is the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a listing sheet. Logan Sullivan Real Estate Group works this pocket of Wilmington block by block, and we're always glad to talk through what a neighborhood is actually like to live in, not just what it looks like on paper. Let's Connect.