"We feel good. It feels like everything, all tides are kind of turning in the right direction."
That's Dan Klausner, CEO of Verdae Development, talking about the Bolden Street District, the 90-acre project his company wants to build between Laurens Road and the Swamp Rabbit Trail. He said it in an update published in March 2026, and it's the kind of quote that makes a corridor sound like it's already transforming. If you live in Parkins Mill and drive Laurens Road to get anywhere, that tide talk is worth a second look, because right now it describes two very different things happening at two very different speeds. One is a set of small, finished projects you can walk into today. The other is a much bigger vision that, as of the most recent public update, still hadn't broken ground.
Here's how to tell them apart.
The Three Doors That Already Opened
Start with what's real. The Ottaray Raw Bar & Taphouse opened December 17, 2024, at 1418 Laurens Road, filling a more than 6,000-square-foot space that had been sitting mostly dark. That address used to house the Warehouse at Midtown, a food hall opened by Thomas and Angie Wirthlin that eventually became too much to manage alongside their other project at Bridgeway Station. Taft Wirthlin, Thomas's brother, took over the space and rebuilt it around something the corridor didn't have yet.
"This is a little more chefy," he told the Post and Courier. "Even the desserts, the bread, everything is made in house."
A few blocks down, Kitchen Sync is marking ten years on Laurens Road this month, and if you want proof, Greenville Restaurant Week runs August 13 through 23, with a $35 three-course dinner menu at the Laurens Road location built around dishes like a swamp rabbit stecca toast and a shortrib-stuffed mushroom cap. That's not a rendering. That's a reservation you can make this week.
The 07, at 1010 Laurens Road, rounds out the stretch with a menu built to work for meat-eaters, vegans, and vegetarians alike, run by the same team behind the earlier concept The 05. None of these three needed a press release with a decade-long completion date. They needed a lease, a build-out, and an opening night, and all three of those already happened.
The Park That Finished Two Years Ago
If you live in Parkins Mill, you probably already know Gower Park, the 21-acre spot with walkable access from the neighborhood. What's easy to forget is how recently it changed. The park underwent a $1.4 million renovation that added two new basketball courts, three tennis courts, and ten pickleball courts, plus a repaved Evelyn Avenue and a rebuilt 65,000-square-foot parking lot. The project was funded through the city's Neighborhood Infrastructure Bond and a grant from the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, and it reopened with a ribbon cutting on April 16, 2024.
More than two years later, it's not news anymore. It's just the park. But that's exactly the point: the corridor's most concrete physical upgrade so far is a piece of neighborhood infrastructure that finished, quietly, well before any of the headline projects broke ground. If you're gauging how fast this stretch of Laurens Road is actually moving, Gower Park is your control group. It went from renovation to reopening in about eight months.
The Building That's Actually Mid-Construction
Somewhere between "already open" and "still a rendering" sits 20 Liberty Lane, the $10 million redevelopment of the old Kimbrell's Furniture building just off Laurens Road. Point Place Holdings bought the 55,000-square-foot building in 2021 and has spent the years since lining up tenants for a mixed office and retail concept. The anchor tenant will be Launchpad Greenville, a new incubator for local tech startups, alongside a third location for Barista Alley Cafe & Roastery. As of a December 2025 update, four of the nine tenant spaces had signed leases, with a laser tag company, a children's play place, and a restaurant concept built around golf simulators still in discussion but not yet confirmed.
The timeline here has moved. The original goal was substantial completion by the end of 2025 or early 2026. The most recent word on it, from December 2025, pushed delivery of suites to the first or second quarter of 2026, with the developer describing it as "looking closer to a second-quarter opening but still on track for 2026." That's a building with a crew inside it, not just a rendering online. It's just arriving a little later than first advertised.
A few blocks over, the same pattern shows up at a smaller scale. Brett Swanson, who owns the Chick-fil-A on Laurens Road and renovated the Shoppes at Gower back in 2018, is now planning facade improvements and parking lot upgrades at McAlister Marketplace, the shopping center at 62 East Antrim Drive. He bought the property in part to expand his own drive-thru. It's not a splashy announcement. It's a landlord fixing up what he already owns.
The 90 Acres That Are Still a Rendering
Then there's Bolden Street District, the project that generates the headlines. Verdae Development and its parent, Hollingsworth Funds, unveiled the vision in April 2025 for a 90-acre stretch between Laurens Road and the Swamp Rabbit Trail, describing three planned neighborhoods anchored by a central gathering space called Bolden Square. County property records put the land's current value around $180 million, and the developers have suggested that figure could grow by an additional $1.5 billion over the next several decades as the project builds out.
Those are real numbers, but they describe a horizon, not a construction schedule. As of the March 2026 update, design guidelines were still in draft form, waiting on a second round of review with the city, and civil drawings for the first phase of pad sites around Verdae Commons Drive were only just being developed. Groundbreaking, originally described as mid-2026, had shifted in that same update to "late summer 2026." Here's the table that separates the two timelines:
| Project | Status as of the latest update | What's actually built |
|---|---|---|
| Gower Park renovation | Complete, reopened April 2024 | New courts, parking lot, walking trail all in use |
| The Ottaray / Kitchen Sync / The 07 | Open for business | Full restaurants, seating, menus |
| 20 Liberty Lane (Launchpad Greenville) | Under construction, four of nine leases signed | Structural and exterior work underway, suites expected Q1-Q2 2026 |
| McAlister Marketplace facade | Planned, ownership secured | Not yet started |
| Bolden Street District | Pre-groundbreaking, design guidelines still in draft | Renderings and a preliminary site plan |
What This Means the Next Time You Drive Laurens Road
None of this means the bigger project isn't coming. A tax increment financing district was established along this stretch in 2024 specifically to help fund redevelopment like this, and a decade of stalled land values along Laurens Road is exactly the kind of condition that TIF districts exist to fix. But if you live in Parkins Mill and you're trying to figure out what your daily drive down Laurens Road will actually look like a year from now, the honest answer is that the small stuff moved first. A park finished. Three restaurants opened. A furniture store is becoming a coworking space with a coffee shop in it. The 90-acre vision that gets the press release treatment is still mostly a rendering with a shifting groundbreaking date.
That's not a criticism of the ambition. Projects this size take years to go from vision to concrete, and Verdae's own timeline puts substantial build-out over a decade or more. It's just a reminder that the fastest way to know what's real on Laurens Road is to look at what already has a door you can walk through, not what has the biggest rendering. Right now, that means Gower Park's courts, a $35 Restaurant Week menu at Kitchen Sync through August 23, and a coworking building slowly filling in behind construction fencing at 20 Liberty Lane.
If you're curious about how any of this touches home values or timing in Parkins Mill specifically, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches this corridor closely. You can find more on the neighborhood at the Parkins Mill guide, or reach out directly to Ashley Swann. Let's Connect.
