The Pulse Memorial Isn't the Only Thing Finally Moving in SoDo

Drive south on Orange Avenue past Kaley Street this month and you will pass a fenced dirt lot where a nightclub used to stand, and about a quarter mile later you will pass a storefront with fresh signage for a Cuban diner that did not exist a year ago. Both are real changes to this half mile of road. Only one of them took a decade to happen.

That gap in pace is the actual story in SoDo right now. Restaurants here turn over in months. The site at 1912 S. Orange Avenue took ten years to go from tragedy to groundbreaking. If you live in this neighborhood, you have probably clocked both kinds of change without connecting them, which means you are missing the more useful read: one of these clocks is catching up to the other, right as the leaves start to think about turning.

Two Kinds of Change, One Half Mile

South Orange Avenue has spent the last eighteen months swapping tenants at a pace that would be unremarkable in a strip mall and is genuinely fast for a corridor this size. New leases, new signage, new opening weekends. Meanwhile the memorial site sat behind construction fencing with no shovel in the ground for years, tangled in design committees, a dissolved nonprofit, and shifting cost estimates.

As of this fall, that second clock has finally started ticking at something close to the same speed as the first. Construction on the permanent Pulse memorial is set to begin in September 2026, with a completion target of September 2027. For the first time since the tragedy, the slowest story on this street and the fastest one are running on comparable timelines, and residents who drive, walk, or bike this stretch daily are going to feel both at once.

The Storefronts Keep Turning Over

Here is what has actually changed hands along South Orange Avenue recently, and what replaced what:

Zaza opened in the old Brick & Fire space earlier this year, bringing about 55 seats and an outdoor terrace to a menu built around founder Ruben Perez's family history, which traces back to his grandfather Don Pepe, who fled Cuba and passed down the recipes now on the menu. Sabai Thai moved into the former Dragon King space as a genuinely family-run operation, with Bill Spradlin and his wife Viradee Pissara running the kitchen and their son Alex, a former sous chef at two other Orlando Thai spots, handling the stir-fry line. Palm Beach Meats, a wagyu-focused butcher shop and restaurant, has been running steadily in the old Hungry Pants location since late 2024. Marco's Pizza and Shah's Halal Food, a New York-based chain now with four Orlando locations, filled in storefronts on the 1700 block that had sat empty since the road's multi-year utility and resurfacing project wrapped.

None of these are announcements anymore. They are open, seated, and taking orders. If your mental map of this stretch still has Brick & Fire or Dragon King on it, it is out of date by at least six months.

Hamlin House Finishes Its First Full Season

The loudest opening of the year sits a few blocks off Orange Avenue at 231 W. Grant Street. Hamlin House Paddle & Social Club opened in early 2026 and has now run through a full spring and summer of programming, which means it has moved past the "just opened" phase and into being an actual fixture of the neighborhood's social calendar.

The club is backed by Ryan and Michelle DeVos, who also co-own Major League Pickleball's Orlando Squeeze, and the 28,000-square-foot building includes:

• Seven pickleball courts, three indoors and four outdoors, two of the outdoor courts covered
• A full-service restaurant and bar with a food program developed by Chef John Fraser of JF Restaurants
• An all-day café serving coffee from 7 a.m.
• Lounge areas designed for members who show up for the food and never touch a paddle

Membership runs on two tiers, a Racquet option built around court access and a Social option built around the dining and events side, with the club citing a $5,000 initiation fee and $400 in monthly dues. The name itself is a small piece of Central Florida history: the Hamlin orange, the cold-hardy citrus variety the club is named for, was propagated from a grove near DeLand in 1879 and became one of the state's most widely planted varieties after surviving the Great Freeze of 1894 to 1895. It is an odd bit of trivia to build a pickleball club around, and also exactly the kind of detail that tells you the people behind it did their homework on the place they were building in.

The Slow Clock Catches Up

The Pulse memorial's path to this September has been anything but smooth. The original nonprofit overseeing the project, onePulse Foundation, dissolved in 2023 after scrapping its first design. A city-appointed Pulse Memorial Advisory Committee took over the project in 2024. In July 2025, Orlando's City Council approved contract negotiations with Gomez Construction, a Winter Park-based firm, alongside a roughly $12 million budget split between Orange County and the city.

Demolition of the original nightclub structure finally began on March 18, 2026, with crews preserving the top portion of the sign that had hung over Orange Avenue for 22 years. By mid-May, the design had reached 60 percent completion, with renderings showing an Angel Ellipse honoring each of the 49 victims, a reflecting pool positioned where the club's dance floor once stood, and a 3,500-square-foot visitor pavilion designed by Borrelli + Partners. Portions of the original building's concrete are being saved and worked back into the new structure.

"Grief never ends. Nobody wants to hear that, but it does evolve," said Borrelli + Partners senior associate Dan-Michael Trbovich at the May design meeting.

By June, Gomez Construction's Stephen Corrow confirmed the team was aligning subcontractors and preparing to start building in September, with a final price point to be set that same month. City officials have described their own contribution at different points as $7 million and, more recently, $7.5 million, a small but real shift that reflects a project whose costs have kept moving as bids come in. What has not moved is the timeline: construction starts this month, and the city is targeting completion by September 2027.

For anyone who drives, walks, or bikes this stretch of South Orange Avenue regularly, that means passing an active construction site here for roughly the next year, right in the middle of a corridor that has otherwise spent that same year filling storefronts rather than fencing them off.

The Anchors Nobody's Debating

Not everything in SoDo is turning over. Timucua Arts Foundation, the concert venue built inside a converted home near Boone High School, is marking a quarter century of programming this year. In April, it launched a new monthly series called Timucua Talks, held the first Wednesday of every month, covering topics from art and aging to mental health and AI. The foundation has an event called Now Now scheduled for September 18, giving residents an actual date to put on the calendar rather than a vague recommendation to "check out a show sometime."

À La Cart SoDo, the food truck park at 2207 E. Michigan Street, opened back in May 2024 and has simply kept running since, with eight semi-permanent vendors covering everything from Filipino-Hawaiian plates to Spanish tapas to smash burgers. It predates almost everything else in this story and has not needed a reopening, a rebrand, or a design update to stay relevant.

These two are worth naming specifically because they are the counterweight to everything above. SoDo's restaurant scene will keep turning over. Its biggest civic project will keep evolving as construction progresses. Timucua and À La Cart are the parts of the neighborhood that are simply present, year over year, while the rest of the block figures out what it wants to be next.

What This Means If You Live Here

• The four storefront swaps on South Orange Avenue are done deals, not announcements. Zaza, Sabai Thai, Palm Beach Meats, Marco's, and Shah's are all open now.
• Hamlin House has moved past its opening buzz into a normal operating rhythm, with lunch starting at 11 a.m. and dinner at 5 p.m. daily.
• Expect an active construction zone directly on South Orange Avenue near the memorial site through roughly September 2027. Build in a little extra time if this is part of your regular route.
• Timucua Talks meets the first Wednesday of every month, and Now Now is on the calendar for September 18 if you want a specific date to start with.
• À La Cart SoDo remains open daily for lunch and dinner if you want a low-stakes way to sample four or five cuisines in one visit.

SoDo has called itself "up and coming" for long enough that the phrase has started to lose meaning. What actually changes that label is not another restaurant opening, it is the slowest, hardest project on the street finally moving at the same speed as everything around it. That is happening this September, for the first time in a decade.

If you own property along this corridor and want a clearer sense of what a fast-turning commercial strip and a major civic project mean for rental demand or resale timing in your specific block, the team at Evolve Property Group tracks this neighborhood closely and can walk you through what it means for your address. Get a Free Rental Analysis to see where your property stands right now.