American Tobacco Campus Is Filling In From Two Directions at Once

Walk the lawn at American Tobacco Campus on a Friday evening this August and you will hear live music drifting from somewhere near the Lucky Strike water tower before you see the stage. You will also notice the smell of hardwood smoke coming from a building that didn't have a kitchen in it two months ago. Both of those things are new this summer, and they are not the same story, even though they are happening on the same sixteen acres.

The restaurant wave gets the attention because it's the kind of thing people post about. But underneath the new menus, something else moved into ATC this year that has nothing to do with dinner: office tenants. A startup hub that started here in 2010 came back. A countywide business organization announced it's relocating its headquarters onto the campus. That combination, food on one side and institutions on the other, is why this particular stretch of downtown Durham feels different right now than it did a year ago. It isn't one trend. It's two trends landing on the same property at the same time.

Two Grand Openings, Six Weeks Apart

Start with the part you can taste. Lutra Cafe and Bakery, which had been selling its sweet buns and cinnamon rolls out of pop-up tents and coffee shops around the Triangle for years, finally opened its own storefront on June 26 in the Noell Building at ATC, at 312 Blackwell Street. The bakery is run by chef-owner Chris McLaurin, who spent time at Rose's and worked as chef de cuisine at Poolside Pies inside Ashley Christensen's restaurant group before striking out on his own. That's the kind of pedigree that tends to draw a line out the door on a Saturday morning.

Then, on August 10, East of Texas held its grand opening in the Reed Building, six and a half weeks after Lutra's debut. The Tex-Mex and barbecue spot soft-opened on July 31 after making the jump from Winston-Salem, where owner Claire Calvin built her reputation with a restaurant called The Porch before deciding downtown Durham was worth a second location. The Reed Building space runs close to 5,600 square feet, big enough for the smoked meats, tacos, and margarita program the concept is known for back in the Triad.

Neither of those is a one-off. Ment Beverage Co, the company that grew out of Honeygirl Meadery, moved into ATC as part of a larger rebrand and expansion that added cider, beer, sake, and non-alcoholic options to what used to be a mead-only lineup. The sake is notable on its own: it's the first produced in Durham, made with rice grown in eastern North Carolina. And Fullsteam Brewery, Durham's original craft brewery, has a taproom in the works for the Powerplant building right between the water tower and the smokestack, adding another anchor to a stretch of campus that used to sit mostly empty after 6 p.m.

The Other Kind of Move-In

Here's the part that doesn't show up on a food blog. In June, American Underground reopened at American Tobacco Campus, taking over 40,000 square feet across Bays 9 and 10 of the Washington Building. That space includes open coworking, private offices, a botanical library, and a podcasting studio. What makes it worth mentioning isn't the square footage. It's the timeline. American Underground first launched in the basement of this same campus back in 2010. Sixteen years later, it's back, in a much bigger footprint, in the same building complex.

The previous October, the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce had already announced it would relocate to a 7,000-square-foot second-floor space, also in the Washington Building. That puts the region's leading economic development organization inside the same walls as a startup hub and a growing restaurant row, which is an unusual mix for what most people still think of as a place to catch a Bulls game or grab a slice of pizza.

That last image isn't an exaggeration. Discover Durham's own retrospective on the campus, written by a Durham native who grew up watching the buildings sit vacant in the early 2000s, put it plainly: for a long time, the main reason to visit was a ballgame or a calzone from Mellow Mushroom. That Mellow Mushroom is still there. It's just no longer the whole reason to show up.

Eli Bell, the director of leasing for CBC Real Estate, which oversees the campus, described the goal behind ATC's newest performance venue this way: the space is meant to bring "people together through music, performance, and storytelling." That sentiment applies just as well to the restaurant and office tenants filling in around it. The campus isn't choosing between being a workplace and being a gathering spot. It's building both at once.

What This Actually Changes About a Friday

None of this matters if it doesn't change how you spend an evening, so here's the practical version. ATC and the concert series Live at Bay 7 team up most Friday nights through the summer for free live music near the water tower, ranging from jazz to bluegrass to rock depending on the week. There's no ticket and no registration. You bring a chair or a blanket and pick a spot on the lawn.

What makes that easier than it used to be is the Bullpen, Durham's downtown social district, which lets you carry a drink between participating businesses instead of finishing it before you leave. The rules are specific: you get a marked cup with the date and time of purchase, drinks are allowed from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week, and the district stretches from the Durham Bulls Athletic Park all the way to Duke's East Campus and the Golden Belt district. In practice, that means you can grab a to-go cocktail from one of the ATC bars, walk it over to the concert lawn, and finish it while a band plays under the water tower, all without breaking any rules.

If baseball is more your speed, the Durham Bulls play right next door at DBAP, and Friday Night Fireworks, presented by bioMérieux, follow select home games throughout the season. You don't need a ticket to catch the show either. Established viewing spots outside the ballpark include the grassy area behind Diamond View 3, the patio at Ponysaurus Brewing, and Tobacco Road Sports Café, all a short walk from the ATC lawn. Parking is complimentary for up to two hours at any of the three campus decks, which is long enough for dinner and a set of music before you have to feed the meter.

What's Next

The free concerts don't stop when the summer series winds down. Duke Arts returns to American Tobacco Campus for its sixth consecutive year with a new series of Wednesday night concerts running from September 9 through September 30. This year's lineup is curated by Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Tift Merritt and focuses on the women singer-songwriters who have shaped the region's musical tradition. It's free, open to all ages, and staged under the same water tower where the Friday shows happen all summer.

That handoff from one free concert series to the next is a small detail, but it says something about how the campus is being run. Nobody is treating ATC as a seasonal attraction that goes quiet in the fall. The programming is built to keep going, which only makes sense if the restaurants, the coworking space, and the Chamber of Commerce office next door are also planning to stick around.

A campus that used to be a stop before or after a game is now a place people show up to on a random Tuesday for a work meeting, then come back to on Friday for tacos and a free show. That's not a bigger version of what American Tobacco Campus used to be. It's a different kind of place entirely, and it took shape in well under a year.

If you're the kind of Durham resident who tracks these changes because you're weighing what comes next for your own home here, or you're curious what a shifting downtown does to values in the surrounding blocks, Keith O Realty keeps a close eye on exactly this kind of local movement. And if you just want a read on what your place might be worth in today's market, our free home valuation tool is a good place to start.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.