Have you walked past 2200 East Main Street lately and noticed the chain-link is gone?

For the better part of two years, that stretch between Bexley City Hall and the Gateway has been a construction site: cranes, plywood, a fence line that forced foot traffic into the street. This August, the fence came down. The Fitzgerald, the mixed-use building that replaced the old Trinity Lutheran Seminary apartments, officially opened. And in less than two weeks, the same corridor closes again, this time on purpose, for Bexley Summerfest on Sunday, September 6.

Those two facts aren't unrelated. The building that just opened was built, in part, to solve a problem the festival makes worse every year: where do you put several hundred extra cars on a street that was never designed for a block party. Understanding how those two things fit together tells you more about what's actually changing on Main Street than either one does alone.

The Building That Took Two Years Finally Has an Address

The Fitzgerald sits on roughly three acres that Continental Development Ventures bought from Capital University, the site of the seminary's former apartment building. What's there now is 226 studio, one, two, and three-bedroom residences stacked above about 11,000 square feet of ground-floor restaurant and retail space and roughly 12,500 square feet of office space, all wrapped around a structured parking garage.

Frank Kass, the Bexley native who founded Continental Development Ventures, called it exactly the kind of project his firm likes to build, one that belongs to its neighborhood. It's his third significant project in his hometown, following the Market District-City Hall project and the Gramercy Building. The first residents have already moved in, and property manager Coastal Ridge Real Estate says what people notice on the first tour is the location, steps from everything that makes Bexley, Bexley.

That's a fair description of the address. What it leaves out is why the garage matters more than the apartments do if you already live here.

The Parking Garage Wasn't a Bonus. It Was the Deal.

Before construction started, the lot at 2200 East Main was owned by Capital University and Trinity Seminary, which meant it generated no property tax at all. To get the project built, the city granted Continental Development Ventures a Tax Increment Financing arrangement, structured specifically to fund one public improvement: a parking garage open to anyone visiting Bexley Square or the Fitzgerald, not just tenants.

A TIF doesn't hand a developer free money. It lets the city redirect the new property tax revenue the project generates toward the public infrastructure the project requires, in this case roughly 300 structured spaces, without asking taxpayers to cover it up front. The site went from tax-exempt to a source of both new housing and new public parking capacity on a street that has never had enough of either.

That garage matters most exactly one weekend a year, and this year that weekend lands just under three weeks after the ribbon-cutting. Summerfest closes the same stretch of Main Street to cars entirely. For the first time, anyone driving in for the festival has a public garage to park in that didn't exist last September.

Summerfest Returns September 6, and It Isn't Quite the Same Festival

The event itself has been reshuffled more than once. What started as separate traditions, the city's Labor Day Block Party, Hops & Gather's Brewfest, and a standalone Art Fest, now runs as one afternoon called Bexley Summerfest.

This year it lands on Sunday, September 6, from 3 to 8 p.m., centered on East Main Street and Drexel Avenue. The essentials:

• East Main Street closes between College Avenue and Pleasant Ridge Avenue from noon to 9 p.m.
• Drexel Avenue closes between East Main Street and Sherwood from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.
• More than 50 artist booths line the closed blocks as part of Artfest, now in its third year.
• Brewfest, organized by the nonprofit Hops & Gather, pours craft beer from regional breweries with proceeds going toward Alzheimer's research.
• The Egg Drop, a longtime crowd favorite, and a lineup of food trucks round out the afternoon.

New for 2026 is a Mini-Makers tent, the festival's first dedicated space for elementary and middle-school-aged artists. Five young Bexley artists, Simone Limbach, Harriett Dunstan, Hadar Skolnik, Lyra Schuerman, and Oliver and Seneca Streicher, will have their own booths alongside the adult vendors they've probably been watching set up for years.

None of that requires the Fitzgerald to function. But if you've ever circled the side streets off Main looking for a spot during Summerfest, you already know why the timing of that new garage isn't incidental. The busiest parking day of the year just got several hundred spaces less painful, purely by coincidence of two projects landing in the same month.

The Restaurant Nobody Can Eat at Yet

The Fitzgerald's retail space is still filling in, but its anchor tenant is already locked: Hudson 29 Kitchen + Drink, the Cameron Mitchell Restaurants concept with existing locations in Upper Arlington and New Albany, will open its third Central Ohio location here in spring 2027. Plans call for a 5,500-square-foot restaurant with 178 seats, including 42 on a covered and heated patio.

Cameron Mitchell Restaurants president David Miller has said guests can expect the Hudson 29 menu they already know, paired with a space designed to reflect Bexley's character rather than a copy-paste of the other two locations. It's a small detail, but it tells you the company is treating this less like a franchise expansion and more like a neighborhood restaurant that happens to share a name with two others.

Spring 2027 is still a ways off, which means this fall's Summerfest crowd will walk past a storefront that's leased but empty. That's worth knowing now, before the space fills in and everyone acts like it was always there. The stretch of Main Street between the seminary's old apartment building and the festival's usual parade route is mid-transformation, and this September is the exact moment you can still see both versions of it at once: the finished building standing empty on the restaurant side, and the street outside closing for the same crowd that will eventually fill it.

What This Actually Means for the Next Few Weeks

Main Street has spent two years absorbing the noise and detours that come with a three-acre construction project. That phase is over. What replaces it isn't quiet. It's a festival that closes the same blocks on purpose, backed by a garage that exists because the city insisted a private development also solve a public problem.

If you're heading to Summerfest on September 6, park in the new garage near the Fitzgerald before you circle the neighborhood streets out of habit. If you're curious what East Main Street looks like without scaffolding for the first time in years, this is the week to see it. And if the pace of change on this stretch, from an $85 million redevelopment to a merged festival tradition to a restaurant that's still months from opening, has you wondering what it means for property values or timing a move, that's a longer conversation.

Michelle Balzer has been tracking Bexley's Main Street corridor block by block for years, from the seminary land sale through the TIF hearings to the festival calendar. If you want to talk through what any of this means for your own plans, schedule a personal market consultation and bring your questions about the neighborhood you already know.