The Fitzgerald's Ribbon Was Cut in August. The Building Won't Be Finished Until Spring.

If you've driven past 2200 E. Main Street any time in the last two years, you've watched the same lot cycle through demolition, steel, scaffolding, and finally glass and brick. On August 14, the wait ended, at least on paper. Continental Development Ventures and Coastal Ridge Real Estate held a ribbon cutting in the building's courtyard, Mayor Ben Kessler gave remarks, and The Fitzgerald was declared open.

Walk past it this month and you'll see something more specific than "open." You'll see a building that is genuinely occupied in some places and genuinely dark in others, and the gap between those two states tells you more about how Main Street actually works than the press release did.

What's Actually Running Right Now

The residential side is real. Leasing began this summer, and as of a recent tour by Columbus Underground, the building was at 12 percent occupancy with 16 percent of units leased, spread across 32 different floor plans. Units range from a 563-square-foot studio starting around $1,422 a month to a three-bedroom penthouse near $4,678. If you want a sense of what's still coming available, current listings show studios and one-bedrooms opening up for October, November, and December move-ins, which tells you this is still very much a building filling in, not one that's full.

Coldwell Banker Realty already has offices operating inside The Fitzgerald, on the same block where the company has been part of Main Street's daily rhythm for years now. That office space is live. So is the leasing office itself, running daily tours.

What isn't live yet is the part most people assumed was the whole point.

The Storefront That's Still Dark

Hudson 29 Kitchen and Drink, the Cameron Mitchell Restaurants concept anchoring the ground floor, signed its lease for the space and is targeted to open in spring 2027. That's not a delay. That was always the plan. But it means the restaurant everyone's been asking about, the one that showed up in every headline about the project, won't have its lights on for another six to eight months at minimum.

OhioHealth is scheduled to move into the building's medical office space this October, which will make it the second confirmed tenant to actually occupy the building this year. Here's roughly how the timeline breaks down if you're trying to figure out what you'll actually encounter walking by between now and next spring:

So if your mental image of "The Fitzgerald is open" includes a restaurant with a line out the door, adjust it. What opened in August was housing and office space. The retail energy that will eventually make the corner feel finished is still five to six months out.

"The Fitzgerald is exactly the kind of project we love to build: one that belongs to its neighborhood," said Frank Kass, founding partner of Continental Development Ventures, at the ribbon cutting.

Who's Actually Moving In

Here's the part that surprised me more than the square footage. According to the leasing staff Columbus Underground spoke with during that early tour, much of the interest so far has come from Bexley residents looking to downsize, not from outsiders discovering the neighborhood for the first time.

That reframes the building. The Fitzgerald replaces a 60-unit apartment complex that used to house Trinity Lutheran Seminary and Capital University students on land the university sold to Continental after putting it out for proposals. What's rising in that footprint now isn't a growth valve pulling new residents in from outside. It's closer to an internal pressure release valve, letting longtime Bexley homeowners trade a house for an apartment without leaving the zip code they've lived in for decades. If that pattern holds as more units lease up, it means the building's biggest effect on the neighborhood isn't new foot traffic on Main Street. It's a quiet reshuffling of who lives in which kind of home, all within blocks of where they already were.

Main Street Doesn't Pause for Construction

None of this has interrupted the rest of the street's calendar, which is worth knowing if you've been assuming the whole corridor is in flux.

Two doors down, Newfangled Kitchen has been serving its specialty meatloaf sandwiches, the Fang, the Reuben, the Southern Melt, since Eric and Laura Dennison opened the counter-service spot in the old C'est Si Bon space back in 2018. Eric spent eight years as general manager at Katzinger's Delicatessen in German Village before starting his own shop, and the sandwich shop's presence on East Main hasn't shifted an inch while the Fitzgerald rose around it.

The Drexel Theatre is running its September "A Case of the Mondays" series with a rotation of James Bond films, and its Trivia at the Drexel night is back on the calendar for October 20. The Main Event, the city's Friday-night outdoor movie series on Capital's lawn, closes out its 2026 season on September 19 with a live set from The Conspiracy Band followed by a screening of The Goonies.

Further out on the calendar, Jeffrey Park hosts an evening built around the fall foliage on October 9, and Bexley's Trick-or-Treat night is set for October 29, following the date the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission recommends each year for the region.

Reading the Corner Correctly This Fall

If you live in Bexley, the honest read on 2200 E. Main is this: a large, long-watched construction project has crossed into its next phase, but "next phase" means offices and apartments right now, with the dining anchor everyone actually wants to walk into still five or six months away. The people filling those apartments so far look less like newcomers and more like neighbors moving a few blocks in the same direction. And everything else that makes Main Street feel like Main Street, the sandwich counter, the Friday movie nights, the Bond marathon at the Drexel, hasn't paused to wait for any of it.

That's usually how these things go in a neighborhood this size. The building changes first. The street catches up to it slowly, tenant by tenant, season by season.

If you're one of the Bexley homeowners weighing the same kind of move those early Fitzgerald leases suggest, whether that means trading square footage for simplicity or just wanting to know what your house is worth in a market that's visibly changing block by block, Debbie Parris is happy to talk it through. Request Your Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready to see where you stand.