Downtown Cary and Fenton: How a Suburb Built a Real Downtown
The town everyone wrote off as a sea of cul-de-sacs and chain restaurants just built two of the best public spaces in the Triangle. Here’s what actually happened.
For years, Cary was the punchline. “Containment Area for Relocated Yankees,” people joked — a master-planned grid of beige subdivisions, top-rated schools, and strip malls you drove through to get somewhere with more personality. It was the place you lived if you wanted your kids zoned for a good school and didn’t much care about character. Downtown? What downtown? There was a sleepy stretch of Academy Street, a hardware store, a drugstore with a lunch counter, and not much reason to stop.
That story is over. In the span of about two years, Cary did something most American suburbs talk about endlessly and almost never pull off: it built a real, walkable, this-is-where-you-go-on-a-Saturday downtown. Not a fake “lifestyle center” with piped-in jazz and a fountain nobody sits near. An actual gathering place. Two of them, technically — the new Downtown Cary Park and the Fenton development a few minutes east. Here’s what’s there, why it works, and where to eat.
Downtown Cary Park — Cary
327 S Academy St
Start here, because this is the piece that changed everything. Downtown Cary Park opened in November 2023 as a seven-acre public park dropped right into the center of town, and it’s genuinely excellent in a way that civic projects rarely are. The town reportedly spent north of $50 million on it, and you can tell — this isn’t a patch of grass with a gazebo.
There’s a Great Lawn that hosts free concerts and movie nights, an interactive fountain and splash area that’s mobbed with kids all summer, an elevated walkway and a tree-canopy structure that gives you a view over the whole thing, a dedicated dog park, and shaded seating everywhere that actually invites you to linger. There’s an on-site café and bar — The Café at Downtown Cary Park — so you can grab a drink and post up.
Go on a weekend morning before the heat, or come back for a Friday-night event when the lawn fills up. Parking is in the nearby town decks (there’s a deck on Walker Street and street parking around Academy) and it’s free, which is the kind of detail that tells you the town built this for residents, not for revenue. Bring the dog. Bring a blanket. This is the new town square, and it works.
Academy Street & The Cary Theater — Cary
122 E Chatham St (theater)
The park didn’t appear in a vacuum — it anchored a downtown that already had bones worth building on. Academy and Chatham Streets form the historic core, and the walk between them has gotten genuinely pleasant. The Cary Theater is a restored 1940s movie house that now runs indie films, live music, and local productions in an intimate single-screen room. Check their calendar before you assume there’s nothing to do in Cary on a Tuesday.
A block away, the Page-Walker Arts & History Center (119 Ambassador Loop) is a restored 1868 hotel that now functions as a small history museum and event space — worth a wander if you want to understand that Cary wasn’t always subdivisions. It was a railroad town first.
Ashworth Drugs — Cary
105 W Chatham St
Here’s the soul of old Cary, and it’s still standing. Ashworth Drugs has operated a working soda fountain and lunch counter since 1957, and it is exactly what you hope it is — vinyl stools, a grill, milkshakes made the slow way, and an orangeade that locals will fight you over. Order a grilled pimento cheese and a cherry Coke from the fountain and eat at the counter. It’s cash-friendly, unpretentious, and the antidote to everything glossy about the new development a few miles east. The fact that this place survived — and that the new downtown grew up around it instead of bulldozing it — is the whole story of what Cary got right.
Fenton — Cary
101 Fenton Gateway Dr (off Cary Towne Blvd, near the I-40/Cary Towne interchange)
Now the new money. Fenton opened in 2022 on the site of the dead Cary Towne Center mall — a perfect bit of symbolism, a dying enclosed mall reborn as an open-air mixed-use district — and it’s where Cary’s dining scene suddenly got serious. Anchored by a Wegmans (the grocery store people drive across county lines for), Fenton packs in a roster of restaurants that would hold their own in downtown Raleigh or Durham.
The walkable layout, the apartments and hotel stacked above the retail, the central green space — it’s textbook new-urbanist development, and unlike a lot of these projects, the restaurants are actually good. This is no longer a place you drive through. It’s a place you make a reservation for.
Where to Eat at Fenton
Colletta — Italian, big and handsome, fresh pasta and wood-fired everything. Good for a date or a group; loud in the best way. The cacio e pepe and any of the pizzas are safe bets. Make a reservation on weekends — you will not walk in at 7 on a Saturday.
Superica — Tex-Mex from chef Ford Fry, and one of the most reliably fun rooms in the development. Order the enchiladas, the queso, and a frozen margarita, and don’t overthink it. Patio seating when the weather cooperates.
O-Ku — upscale sushi with a sleek room and a long sake list. This is the spot for when you want to be impressed. Sit at the bar and let them steer you.
Crawford Brothers Steakhouse — the special-occasion play. Steaks, raw bar, the works. Bring your wallet and your appetite.
True Food Kitchen — the lighter, brighter option when the table can’t agree. Seasonal, veggie-forward, big enough menu to keep everyone happy.
A practical note: Fenton parking is in decks and surface lots and it’s free, but on a busy weekend night the closest decks fill up. Park one deck farther out and walk — the whole point is that it’s walkable.
Why This Actually Matters
Plenty of suburbs build “downtowns.” What usually results is a sterile outdoor mall with a Cheesecake Factory and a fountain that exists to be photographed, not used. The reason Cary’s version works is that it did two things at once: it poured serious public money into a genuinely great free park that belongs to residents, and it let private development build the dining and density around it — while keeping the old stuff, the Ashworth Drugs and the Cary Theater, alive in the middle.
The result is a downtown with actual range. You can take the dog and the kids to splash in a free fountain on Saturday morning, eat a $4 pimento cheese at a 1957 lunch counter for lunch, and have a real dinner with a cocktail list at night — all within a few minutes of each other. That’s not a lifestyle center. That’s a town.
Cary used to be the place you drove through on your way to somewhere with personality. It went and built the personality. Annoying, honestly, for the rest of us who enjoyed the joke — but credit where it’s due.
The Cary Downtown Rules
- Park once. Both the park decks and Fenton’s lots are free and walkable — pick a spot and stay on foot.
- Daytime is for the park, nighttime is for Fenton. Don’t try to do both well in one trip unless you’ve got a full day.
- Make reservations at Fenton on weekends. The good rooms fill up.
- Don’t skip Ashworth. It’s the easiest thing to drive past and the most worth stopping for.
- Summer evenings on the Great Lawn are the move. Check the park’s event calendar before you go — there’s usually something free.
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