Downtown Auburndale Is Filling In Four Storefronts at a Time

Walk the corner of Lake Avenue and Park Street this month and you'll notice two things that don't usually happen together. First, the old Crave & Copper building at 117 E Lake Ave has papered-over windows on both sides of its front door, not one. Second, a block over on Park Street, a coffee shop the size of a small event venue has been running full tilt since last November, with three of its neighbors moving in around the same time. Auburndale's downtown isn't adding restaurants the way small towns usually do, one lease at a time, with a year or two of empty storefront in between. It's filling in by the building, in twos and fours, and both of the two-block radius around the park are doing it at once.

That's worth pausing on if you already live here, because it changes what "downtown" means for your weekend in a way that a single new restaurant never would.

One Vacancy Just Became Two Restaurants

The building at 117 E Lake Ave has a history that makes its current split feel almost inevitable. Crave & Copper opened there in October 2019 as a project of The Florida Brewery, built inside the shell of the old Hudson Hotel, a 1920s building whose upstairs rooms had already become office space. Six weeks after opening, an electrical fire in the wall gutted the kitchen. The restaurant didn't reopen until September 2022, and even then it took years of insurance wrangling and pandemic-era supply problems to get there. Chef Matt Oakley, who ran the kitchen with his wife Stacey, put the ambition behind the whole project simply when they reopened: "We wanted something that was going to put Auburndale on the map." By late 2025, Crave & Copper had closed again, this time for good.

What's replacing it isn't a single new tenant. It's two, splitting the same address as next-door neighbors. On one side, restaurant owner Philip Williamson is bringing back his Bebos name with a full-service Cajun concept, aiming for a first-couple-weeks-of-September opening. The menu leans into shrimp and grits, jambalaya, and po'boys, the same Louisiana style that built the original Bebos brand in Winter Haven. On the other side, chef and owner Tina Calhoon is opening The Abigaile, a modern American restaurant with a flexible, regularly-changing menu of fish dishes, craft cocktails, and whiskey, plus roughly 160 seats split between an indoor dining room and an outdoor patio with its own bar. The Abigaile's outdoor space includes a covered bandstand built for live music on Friday and Saturday nights, with daytime performances on weekends too.

One closure, two full restaurants, sharing a wall. That kind of split doesn't happen because a landlord got lucky twice. It happens because a building downtown suddenly has more demand for space than it has square footage to offer.

The Coffee Shop That Outgrew Winter Haven, By a Lot

A block away on Park Street, the same pressure shows up in a different form. Haven Coffee Roasters opened its Auburndale flagship on Park Street last November, and the numbers behind that move are worth sitting with. The company started in a 900-square-foot space in Winter Haven in 2021. The Auburndale location is over five times that size, at roughly 5,000 square feet, with its own 1,000-square-foot roasting facility and a roaster upgraded from 10 kilos to 35. Owners Jon and Lynsey Lane didn't build a bigger café. They built a production hub, with wholesale roasting as part of the plan alongside the counter service.

Auburndale Mayor Dorothea Taylor Bogert framed the opening in terms that get at why the location matters as much as the size:

It's a great addition for families visiting the park, locals wanting a place to work or meet downtown and individuals who want a great coffee or pastry on the way to work.

The address matters here. Haven sits on Park Street, overlooking the park itself, catty-corner from Beef 'O' Brady's. And Haven didn't open alone. Coverage of the opening named three more businesses landing on the same short run of storefronts near the park: Adler's Burgers as its third location, a cocktail lounge, and Baxter's Quality Meats. None of the three had a confirmed opening date as of the reporting, but all three were already described as part of the same build-out.

So the pattern repeats. Just as 117 E Lake Ave turned one closure into two restaurant openings, the Park Street corner turned one coffee flagship into a four-business cluster. That's two separate multi-tenant buildouts, blocks apart, in the same stretch of downtown, in the same year.

What's Actually Opening, Where

Only Haven has a confirmed opening on the books so far. The rest are close enough behind, based on the most recent reporting available, that the two-block stretch between Lake Avenue and Park Street is on track to add six new points of activity to one shuttered brewpub's footprint inside of a year.

Meanwhile, the Highway Is Growing a Different Way

Not everything new in Auburndale is happening downtown. Out on US Highway 92 West, Culver's has filed applications with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation for a new location, with the site currently under construction and no opening date set yet. That's a national chain following the same corridor that already carries the town's ALDI, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar.

The contrast is the point. Downtown's growth is coming from people who already had a business here and decided to bet bigger on this specific two blocks: Haven expanding fivefold, Williamson reviving a name he'd already built once, Adler's opening a third location instead of a first. The highway's growth is a chain deciding Auburndale's population supports one more location. Both are real. They're just not the same kind of growth, and they don't compete for the same trip.

The Other Side of Town Runs on Its Own Calendar

If downtown is filling in with restaurants, the edge of town has its own rhythm built around Camp Margaritaville Auburndale. The resort holds a Paradise Market most months, a Sunday morning event with more than 40 local vendors selling everything from baked goods to handmade items, always free to attend. On other Saturday nights, the resort runs line dancing sessions led by DJ Gonzo and instructor Felicia Jones, drawing both regulars and first-timers onto the floor.

That's a second social anchor in Auburndale that has nothing to do with the park corner, and residents who've settled into a Saturday routine around Camp Margaritaville may not have noticed how much has changed six or eight minutes away downtown.

What This Means If You Already Live Here

The practical shift is simple: for the first time in a while, you can do more in downtown Auburndale without moving your car. Coffee at Haven is already a settled fact. A burger near the park, dinner and live music at The Abigaile, and jambalaya next door once Williamson's kitchen opens in September are all close enough to plan around. That's not a weekend built around driving between separate parts of town. It's a couple of blocks doing work that used to take a whole afternoon of errands.

Whether that pattern holds depends on whether foot traffic downtown keeps pace with what's opening. Six businesses filling in over one year is a strong signal that people who know this market are betting yes. For now, the corner of Lake and Park is worth a second look, even if you've walked past it a hundred times before.

We follow changes like this closely at Premier Realty Network because they shape what daily life actually feels like in Polk County, long before they show up in any listing description. If you're curious how a shift like this could affect your own street or your home's place in the neighborhood, reach out to our Lakeland-based team for a complimentary home consultation.