Ed Hilton used to get his coffee at Triplett-Day. For decades, that meant walking into a downtown Gulfport pharmacy at 2429 14th Street, one with a soda counter tucked behind the register, and ordering from whoever was behind it that morning. When the building reopened this June as The Downtowner, a diner from Hattiesburg restaurateur Robert St. John, Hilton was the first person in line. He wasn't there for a grand opening. He was there because the counter was back.
That single detail says more about what's happening in downtown Gulfport right now than any press release does. This isn't a wave of new construction landing on empty lots. It's three of downtown's long-dark landmarks all switching back on in the same stretch of months, after decades of sitting closed, damaged, or half-forgotten. If you live here, you've probably noticed the traffic pattern around 25th Avenue changing, or heard that some old building finally has lights on again. Here's what's actually behind it.
Three Buildings, One Season
Downtown Gulfport spent a long time waiting on its anchors. Three of them came back within months of each other:
- The site of the Great Southern Hotel, at 25th Avenue and West Beach Boulevard, sat empty for years after the hotel that once welcomed generations of Gulf Coast visitors was gone. It broke ground again in March 2026 as Channel South.
- The Markham Hotel, a 115-room property at 14th Street and 23rd Avenue that first opened in 1927 and closed in 1970, took further damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 while it sat vacant. It reopened this spring.
- The Triplett-Day Pharmacy building, the one with Ed Hilton's coffee counter, closed in 2020 after generations as a downtown fixture. It reopened in June 2026 as The Downtowner.
Three different owners, three different decades of dormancy, all resolving at once. That's not a coincidence so much as it is a threshold. Mayor Hugh Keating has said the city has gotten more aggressive about clearing derelict properties to make downtown appealing to investors again, and proximity to the Port of Gulfport, Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport, the rail line, and Interstate 10 gives developers a reason to look twice. Once one landmark moves, the case for the next one gets easier to make.
What Channel South Actually Is
Channel South, also called Gulfport Town Center, is the biggest of the three by a wide margin. It's a $105 million mixed-use project from AnderCorp and Bellamare Development on 4.34 acres at the old Great Southern Hotel site. The first phase includes 136 apartment residences, roughly 17,637 square feet of street-level retail and restaurant space, a 294-space public parking garage, and a 114-room Marriott Tribute Portfolio hotel that will carry the name Hotel Holden.
Construction started in December 2025. The parking garage is on track for completion this year, with the residential and hospitality pieces following through 2027. The project's developers have said Channel South is expected to open in August 2027, so this is a multi-year build, not a next-season opening. The funding behind it explains some of why it's happening now: the project draws on the Mississippi Legislature, the Gulf Coast Restoration Fund, and the Mississippi Development Authority, alongside the Gulfport Redevelopment Commission. That's public money tied specifically to rebuilding the coast, landing on a site with a name residents already recognize.
Developer Sunny Sethi has described the appeal in plain terms: get people living downtown, and the retail and restaurant space downstairs starts to make sense on its own. Whether that plays out as planned is still a couple of years off. What's already true is that the crane on 25th Avenue isn't going anywhere soon.
The Counter That Came Back
The Downtowner is the smallest of the three projects and, for a lot of residents, the one that will matter the most day to day. Robert St. John has opened 27 restaurants over a long career built mostly in Hattiesburg, including Crescent City Grill and The Midtowner. This is his first on the Mississippi coast, and by his own account, he'd had his eye on downtown Gulfport for six years before finally committing to the space.
The restaurant keeps a dedicated Triplett-Day Room featuring photographs and memorabilia from the pharmacy's run, and it's built around what St. John calls heritage cuisine, recipes drawn from his own family. He's said the goal was a place where everybody in the community, regardless of age or background, could sit down for pancakes or biscuits in the morning.
"It's just real food for real people. It's the cuisine my grandmother made."
The Downtowner serves breakfast and lunch, with hours running from 7 a.m. into the early afternoon. For a building that had been dark since 2020, having a line at 7 a.m. again is its own kind of milestone.
New Doors Beyond the Construction Fence
Downtown isn't the only part of Gulfport adding new places to eat. A few blocks and a few miles apart, the pattern of long-vacant buildings finding new operators is showing up elsewhere too.
Siren Social Club opened downtown as a tropical, speakeasy-style restaurant and bar, adding a different kind of evening option to a stretch of the city that hasn't had much late-night variety in years.
Out on the Cowan-Lorraine corridor, restaurateur Jourdan Nicaud, who already runs Bacchus on the Beach in Pass Christian and Bacchus on the Bayou in Ocean Springs, took over the waterfront building on Bayou Bernard that had housed Flamingo Landing for only two years before it closed. His team targeted a spring opening for Bacchus on the Bluff, bringing the same oyster-forward menu and Monday night pork chop special that built the other two locations, plus a boat launch for water access.
None of this is downtown proper, but it's the same underlying story: a building that had one short-lived tenant, or none, now has an operator with a track record elsewhere on the coast.
What's Already on the Fall Calendar
If you're looking for a reason to walk downtown once the construction settles into background noise, there are two dates worth circling.
- September 12: the 35th Annual Blues & Heritage Festival, doors at 6 p.m. and the show starting at 7, at the Good Deeds Community Center in Gulfport.
- September 19: the second annual Gulfport Arts Festival, a free, one-day event in downtown Gulfport hosting local artisans and musicians working in pottery, painting, stained glass, jewelry, and woodworking.
The Arts Festival is a newer addition, launched last year by the artist council at the Gulfport Arts Center after members noticed other coastal towns were doing more to celebrate their local art scenes than Gulfport was. This year's event poster, a digital illustration by 27-year-old Gulf Coast resident and graphic designer Kaitlyn Brewer, was chosen through the festival's first poster contest. Council president Lori Michel has described the coast as a place that draws artists in for the climate and the community, and the festival as a way to introduce them to the co-op housed in the Gulfport Arts Center's home, the historic Carnegie Building.
Reading the Pattern
None of this means downtown Gulfport is finished changing. Channel South alone runs through 2027, and a project of that size tends to shift plans as it goes. But the useful thing to notice, if you live in or near downtown, isn't any single opening. It's that a hotel closed since 1970, a pharmacy closed since 2020, and a hotel site vacant even longer than that all came back to life within the same handful of months, funded and operated by people with actual stakes in the outcome rather than speculative money passing through.
That's a different kind of growth than a strip of new construction going up on open land. It's downtown filling in the gaps it already had, one recognizable address at a time. If Ed Hilton's coffee order is any indication, the people who remember what these buildings used to be are exactly the ones showing up first.
If you're watching this stretch of Gulfport and wondering what it means for property values, timing, or what a specific block is actually worth right now, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks this market closely. Prosper Realty can walk you through it, and if you're curious what your own home might be worth as downtown continues to change, start with a Get a Free Home Valuation request.
