Walk from the Sunday market booths on West Spring Street toward King Street these days and you will pass a stretch of chain-link fence in front of the old Smyrna First Baptist Church campus. Behind it sits a nine-acre lot that most people driving past probably read as just another slow-moving church relocation. It is actually the biggest thing to happen to downtown Smyrna in a generation, and most of what residents have noticed this year, a new brewery, a new wine bar, a market that is winding down its season, is happening on the half of downtown that already exists. The half that does not exist yet is what's going to define the next decade.
The Small Stuff You've Actually Noticed
StillFire Brewing, the Suwanee-based taproom that had been rumored for Smyrna for a while, finally opened for real on March 13, 2026. The grand opening ran from 4 p.m. to 11:45 p.m. with the Brent Gafford Band and Keltic Kudzu splitting the bill, and the brewery debuted a beer made specifically for the occasion, a Dirt Pile IPA, a nod to the construction it took to get there. Six months in, it is now just part of the rotation on West Spring Street.
A few doors down, Deep Roots Wine Market and Tasting Room cleared its opening health inspection with a perfect 100 on March 3 and spent the spring stocking shelves and finishing the buildout for its own launch.
Both of these are genuine additions to the Market Village strip. Neither of them is the story.
What Actually Happened on February 2
On February 2, 2026, the Smyrna City Council formally adopted the Downtown Smyrna Redevelopment Plan, the outcome of a process that started when the city closed on the purchase of the First Baptist Church property in early 2025 for $15.8 million. That nine-acre site sits directly across King Street from the Market Village most residents already know, and according to the city's own account, it effectively doubles the footprint of downtown Smyrna.
The plan calls for roughly 350 new homes split between rentals and for-sale units, a boutique hotel or office building built on top of the old church structure at Memorial Place and Church Street, a small food hall, and a bike and pedestrian path called the Jonquil Mile that would run up King Street and tie into pathways already built near the library and community center. The church's roughly 100-year-old stone chapel, part of a congregation founded nearly 140 years ago, is slated for adaptive reuse rather than demolition, preserved as a public event space next to a new green.
Luis Calvo, the planner from MKSK who walked the city through the concept, was careful about how solid any of it actually is right now. At one of the community meetings, he told residents not to expect the final buildings to match the massing shown in the renderings, and the city's own materials describe the plan as a vision document rather than a construction blueprint.
That distinction matters for anyone trying to figure out what this means for their weekend routine in 2026 versus 2029. As of the February adoption, Smyrna's next steps are procedural: deciding on a procurement process, rezoning the nine acres, updating design standards for the corridor, and eventually running a formal request for qualifications to find a development partner. The city's own framing puts developer selection on a medium-term, one to three year timeline. The church congregation stays put until its new campus on Atlanta Road, between the Reed House and SouthState Bank, is ready. When the deal closed in early 2025, the city put that relocation on a two to three year timeline, meaning the existing chapel and campus could stay active on King Street into 2027 or 2028.
The Street That Stitches Both Halves Together
Here is the detail that actually changes how you should think about downtown Smyrna today. The plan does not treat the church site as a separate development bolted onto the existing Market Village. It treats West Spring Street, the same street the Sunday market sets up on, as the connective spine for both halves. The redevelopment includes wider sidewalks and expanded outdoor dining space along West Spring Street, paired with a narrowing of the current green median, explicitly designed to extend the walkable feel of the existing Market Village up toward the new nine-acre site.
In practice, that means the small stuff happening now, StillFire's patio, the market booths, Deep Roots' tasting counter, is not separate from the big stuff coming later. It is the first phase of a street that is about to get considerably longer and busier. The version of downtown Smyrna a resident walks through in 2026 is the prototype for the version that gets built out over the next several years.
What's Already Landed, Not Just Planned
While the nine-acre plan works through zoning and procurement, a few smaller public investments have already been delivered on the ground:
- The splash pad at Riverline Park, a Ward 7 project that consolidated what had been a split splash pad and reflecting pool design into one unified water feature, was targeted for completion in January 2026.
- The Sunday Smyrna Market, the weekly gathering of 60-plus vendors that lines West Spring Street and King Street in front of city hall, is running its 2026 season from May 3 through October 18. That leaves roughly six more Sundays before it wraps for the year.
- Camp Highland's slope stabilization work along the Silver Comet Trail, which had closed a section of the trail, was substantially complete as of last December, reopening that stretch for the walkers and cyclists who use it as an extension of their Market Village routine.
- A rebuild of the aging Tolleson Pool, in service for 60 years, is in the design phase now with a new aquatics center targeted for completion in March 2027.
None of these are as visible as a new taproom, but together they explain why downtown Smyrna feels more finished this year than it did two years ago, even before a single unit gets built on the church site.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
If you already treat Market Village as your Sunday morning routine, the next few weekends are worth treating with a little urgency. The market's 2026 season closes out on October 18, and after that the Sunday rhythm on West Spring Street goes quiet until spring. Pair a market walk with a stop at StillFire or a glass at Deep Roots, and you are essentially previewing what the corridor is meant to feel like at twice its current size once the King Street side catches up.
The bigger shift to watch is not a business opening. It is the rezoning and design-standard work the city has to finish before it can even solicit developers, along with whatever comes out of that request for qualifications process once it launches. That is the kind of civic process that moves slowly and then, at some point, shows up as cranes on King Street. For now, the fences stay up, the chapel stays quiet, and the interesting part of downtown Smyrna is still the part you can already walk to on a Sunday morning.
If you are watching this corridor because you are thinking about what a home near downtown Smyrna might be worth once that nine-acre site actually breaks ground, that is a longer conversation, and one where the timeline matters as much as the plan itself. Purpose Driven Real Estate Group tracks these kinds of local shifts across Northern Metro Atlanta because they tend to move property values well before the headlines catch up. Schedule your free consultation with Amy Pedersen and the team to talk through what a corridor like this one means for your own timeline.
