Original signature tenant could be leaving North Lexington’s Greyline Station
Julietta Market, the centerpiece of the Greyline Station development on North Limestone and Loudon, apparently is leaving.
The market is expected to announce soon that it will not renew its lease, which expires at the end of October.
The market has an unofficial July 31 deadline to commit to staying in the North Lexington shopping center or give notice that it intends to leave.
Developer Chad Needham, who owns Greyline Station, said he isn’t pushing the market out and is waiting to hear what they plan to do.
“We can’t afford to stay,” Adina Tatum, who runs the market, said. “I do have support and we do have ideas, and the market isn’t going away. We’re just in a transitional period. We’ll come back as something more sustainable.”
Julietta Market has been a key part of the 65,000-square-foot, $5 million-plus redevelopment of the former city bus garage. The 23,000-square-foot market grew out of NoLi’s popular monthly pop-up Night Market. With 60 small business kiosks, pop-up spaces and at least seven hot food stalls, Julietta was meant to give the market a permanent indoor home and give budding East End entrepreneurs and artists an entry point they could afford.
Tatum said that the non-profit that runs Julietta Market has been looking at ways to make it more viable since spring.
“We have been exploring all our options,” Tatum said. “We’re exploring what to do next, and we don’t have an idea yet, it’s kind of a challenge. But we want to have that public market feel.”
If they can’t work out a way to stay, Tatum is hoping to find a new space where they can continue the mission of helping small businesses, many minority-owned, launch and grow.
Currently there are 27 businesses in Julietta, including several food stalls in the front, Tatum said. Several local businesses including Inebriated Baker and Cafe Emporio started in Julietta Market before graduating to full-scale businesses; Cafe Emporio is across North Limestone and Inebriated Baker is in Fayette Mall.
What does this mean for Julietta’s vendors, food stalls?
It’s unclear what closing Julietta Market will mean for individual businesses that are sub-letting space, including the food vendors at the front.
The individual restaurants, bars and stores around the perimeter of Greyline are separate from Julietta Market and have separate leases.
Needham, the Greyline Station landlord, said that he hopes to offer some of the existing Julietta Market tenants a chance to stay.
“I’d hate to see them uprooted,” he said.
But long-term he hopes to “rethink the middle. We want it vibrant, want it to be community-engaging, with food, retail, art and music,” Needham said. “And we are going to try to keep it open six days a week.”
History of Julietta Market
The market opened inside the renovated city bus garage at the end of 2020 but there have been hiccups from the beginning. The privately-owned Greyline Station leased space to non-profit NoLi Community Development Corp., which planned to lease individual stalls to food and goods vendors.
Some food vendors needed kitchen space that Noli hadn’t finished and struggled to meet fire department requirements. Eventually the food stalls managed to open and the shared commercial kitchen was built out.
Noli CDC was dissolved at the beginning of 2023 and new nonprofit called Northside Common Market has taken over the lease, with Tatum as the executive director.
Tatum said that the non-profit has federal grant money that would allow them to move the kitchen if they can find a space to hold it.
She said that they hope to find a better fit for the businesses that are being incubated.
Many of the stalls only open on weekends, reducing the attraction for customers.
“We’re not getting the traffic and the visibility we need there,” she said. “We’re really looking for a space where we can have more control and we’re rebranding it to be our own, standalone, market.”
This story was originally published July 26, 2023 at 10:13 AM.
