Drive down North Roan Street this month and you will pass a steakhouse with candlelit date-night nooks, a Puerto Rican bar and grill that opened with a bounce house and free t-shirts, and a four-tenant food hall going into the old Shoney's building. Park downtown instead, walk two blocks on Main Street, and you will find an antiques shop that just moved into a bigger space, a yarn store teaching spinning classes, and a brewery from Kingsport setting up shop on Spring Street. Both of these are Johnson City right now. They are not the same story, and treating them as one blurs what is actually happening to the place where a lot of us eat, shop, and spend Tuesday nights.
The easy headline is that downtown is booming. Lora Eshbach, chair of Connect Downtown and owner of The Generalist, told WJHL that Johnson City has welcomed 19 new businesses and seen four expand between 2025 and 2026, and that the district's vacancy rate has fallen from 27 percent in 2017 to 9 percent today. That is a real number and a real trend line. But the businesses behind it are splitting into two distinct corridors that grow, look, and get to by completely different means.
The Number Everyone Is Quoting
The vacancy figure is worth sitting with for a second, because a district that was more than a quarter empty in 2017 sitting at 9 percent now is not a small shift. Eshbach connects it directly to how people spend time downtown, not just how many storefronts are filled.
As WJHL reported, Lora Eshbach said, "We've seen a 30% year-over-year growth in our sales, and I attribute that so much to people are spending more time downtown walking."
That quote matters because it locates the growth specifically in foot traffic on Main Street, not in car traffic anywhere in the city. It is a walkable-core story. The businesses filling that 18-point vacancy drop are not, for the most part, the restaurants making headlines out on the Roan Street corridor.
What's Filling Main Street
The Main Street side of downtown's growth looks like small, independently run retail and a handful of legacy businesses doubling down. Sentimental Journey Antiques opened a new location on West Main Street on September 5, expanding across the street from its original spot after reporting 34 percent growth in sales and foot traffic since it first opened in 2025. A few blocks over, newer storefronts have filled in fast: All Things Fibre at 240 East Main Street, Calli Rose at 327 East Main, and Maybell and Mine, a new addition Johnson City Press covered this July. The Moon Coffee and Tea House is relocating just down the street from its current spot rather than leaving downtown altogether.
Then there is the beer. 6ix Grist & Grind Brewhouse, a craft brewery that has spent the last two years building a following in Kingsport, is opening a second location at 117 Spring Street downtown. Co-owner Cory Anderson told WJHL the decision came from people walking into the Kingsport taproom and saying they wished the brewery were in Johnson City. It is projected to open later this year, which puts it on roughly the same timeline as the antiques shop and the fiber store: small businesses, walkable addresses, foot traffic driving the sales numbers Eshbach cited.
What's Filling Roan Street
The other half of downtown's growth story is happening a mile or two away, on a corridor built for cars, not sidewalks. Oak & Anchor Grill opened earlier this year in the former Bayou Boys space at 1805 North Roan Street, with owner Jen Gambill describing the steakhouse's candlelit date-night nooks as a deliberate departure from the area's usual dinner options. Down the road at 1000 South Roan Street, 787 Bar & Grill brought Puerto Rican-style food to Johnson City with a grand opening that doubled as a community giveaway, complete with a bounce house and free food for kids. Raising Cane's had targeted a summer 2026 opening for its Johnson City location. Toasted Yolk Cafe, a Texas-based brunch chain, is under construction at the former Fuddruckers site on Knob Creek Road.
The biggest single addition to this corridor is still ahead of us. The Roan Commons, going into the old Shoney's building, will bring four businesses under one roof this November: Taiwan On Bubble Tea, Dae Gee Korean BBQ, Drive & Draft Golf Simulator and Bar, and The Taste Tester Cheesecake Bakery. Dae Gee is based in Colorado, and its co-owner told WJHL this will be the chain's 13th location and the first in a city of Johnson City's size, with a chance it becomes a central kitchen for the East Coast. That is a Roan Street story through and through: bigger footprints, drive-up parking, restaurant chains testing a new market.
Here is the split laid out plainly:
Main Street corridor | Roan Street corridor | |
|---|---|---|
Access | Walkable, on-street parking | Car-dependent, strip parking |
Business type | Independent retail, small brewery | Restaurant chains, steakhouse, food hall |
Recent additions | Sentimental Journey Antiques, Maybell and Mine, 6ix Brewhouse | Oak & Anchor Grill, 787 Bar & Grill, The Roan Commons |
Growth signal | 30% YoY sales growth, vacancy down to 9% | New chain openings, new construction |
The $66 Million Bet on the Walkable Side
While the restaurant openings have been happening on Roan Street, the largest single investment in downtown's future is going into the Main Street side of the ledger. The Johnson City Development Authority selected Lansing Melbourne Group to redevelop the John Sevier Center, a 1924 building originally built as a luxury hotel, along with the adjacent Downtown Centre parking structure. The plan calls for more than $66 million in investment, turning the Sevier Center into a 136-room boutique hotel with retail, event space, fine dining, and a rooftop bar, while the Downtown Centre adds roughly 38,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space. A groundbreaking is tentatively set for October 2026, with a grand opening targeted for May 2028.
That timeline matters if you live here and want to know which version of downtown to expect two years from now. The small-scale Main Street growth happening today, the antiques shop, the fiber store, the brewery on Spring Street, is what the walkable core looks like while it waits for a project that size to land.
How to See Both This Fall
If you want to watch this split in real time rather than read about it, the next few weeks make it easy. The Taco Trek season wraps up with its final ride of the year on the first Tuesday of October, rolling from Trek Bicycle on West Market Street through the Tree Streets and back to Holy Taco on Main. Later in the month, Main Street Days Festival returns downtown with live entertainment, food trucks, and artisan vendors filling the same blocks where the antiques shop and the fiber store just opened.
Neither of these events happens on Roan Street. That is not an accident. The festival calendar, like the sales growth Eshbach described, lives on the side of downtown built for walking.
Whichever corridor you find yourself in more often, it helps to understand why it looks the way it does and where the next round of investment is likely to land. If you are curious what any of this means for a specific block, a specific building, or a property you have your eye on in Johnson City, Ivey Scott knows this market corridor by corridor. Let's Connect.
