Walk past 2429 14th Street on a Saturday morning now and you smell biscuits instead of rubbing alcohol. For 65 years the building held Triplett Day Pharmacy, the kind of place where the same cashier remembered your kids' names and your grandmother's blood pressure medication. In June 2026 it reopened as The Downtowner, a breakfast and lunch spot from Mississippi restaurateur Robert St. John, who has called the menu heritage cuisine built around the food his grandmother made. It's his 27th restaurant and his first on the Gulf Coast.
That single reopening would be a nice local story on its own. What makes it worth writing about is what else happened on the same three blocks in the ten weeks before it.
Four Reopenings, One Season
Between late April and early June 2026, downtown Gulfport quietly filled in four separate storefronts that had sat empty, underused, or shuttered for years. The Markham Hotel, built in the 1920s and stripped of its life as a full-service hotel decades ago, took additional damage from Hurricane Katrina before reopening this spring after a top-to-bottom renovation. Its ribbon-cutting landed on April 23, 2026. Inside, The Library Restaurant and Bar now runs breakfast, weekend brunch, dinner, and a nightly bar and tapas menu under exposed brick and the building's original woodwork.
A few blocks over, Neighbors Tap & Table opened in May 2026, a small-plates and cocktail concept from TikTok creator Matthew Bounds and his husband, CJ Bryant. Then came The Downtowner in June. And underpinning all of it is a restaurant that opened roughly a year earlier and proved the concept could work here at all: Siren Social Club, tucked inside the boutique Hotel Vela, run by chef Austin Sumrall and his wife Tresse, who also operate the well-regarded White Pillars in Biloxi. Siren Social Club landed on Esquire's list of the Top 33 New Restaurants in America for 2025 and was part of Mississippi's first-ever Michelin Guide selection, in the inaugural American South edition.
Here's the corridor as it stands right now:
| Business | Building | Opened / Established | What it replaced or restored |
|---|---|---|---|
| Siren Social Club | Hotel Vela | 2025 | New boutique hotel construction |
| Markham Hotel & The Library Restaurant | Markham Hotel, 14th St. and 23rd Ave. | April 2026 | Vacant hotel building, closed for decades |
| Neighbors Tap & Table | Downtown storefront | May 2026 | Long-vacant commercial space |
| The Downtowner | Triplett Day Pharmacy building, 2429 14th St. | June 2026 | 65-year pharmacy |
Four different owners, four different concepts, four buildings that had nothing to do with each other operationally. That's not a coincidence. It's a pipeline.
The Bus That Started It
In 2024, the Gulfport Main Street Association loaded prospective investors onto Coast Transit Authority buses and drove them past 25 vacant properties downtown, asking each rider to picture a business at every stop. Kristen Garriga, the association's executive director, later said the tour surfaced a smorgasbord of ideas for what the district was missing and what residents actually wanted to see. Neighbors Tap & Table came directly out of that brainstorm.
That detail matters if you've been downtown long enough to remember when this stretch went quiet. Gulfport's city center had a real nightlife scene after Hurricane Katrina, but it lost momentum as neighboring towns redeveloped faster and the pandemic emptied out what was left. Carole Lynn Meadows, who chairs the Gulfport Redevelopment Commission, put it plainly: people are starting to see the possibilities here again. Bill Lavers of the Harrison County Development Commission called the shift from five years ago to now remarkable.
Why 14th Street and Not the Beach
Gulfport has always had waterfront restaurants. What's different about this cluster is that none of it is beachfront. The Downtowner, Neighbors Tap & Table, and the Markham are all inland, on 14th Street and the blocks around it, within easy walking distance of Gulfport's Amtrak stop, which came back online when the Gulf Coast rail line resumed service in the summer of 2025.
That's a genuinely new kind of foot traffic for this part of downtown. A restaurant strip built around a train platform behaves differently than one built around a beach parking lot. People arrive on a schedule, they're often already on foot, and they're looking for something within a two or three block radius rather than driving to a destination. The four openings above sit inside that radius almost exactly.
What's Open Now and What's Still a Construction Site
It's worth being precise here, because the biggest headline out of downtown Gulfport this year isn't open yet and won't be for a while. Channel South, the $105 million mixed-use project rising on the old Great Southern Hotel site at the corner of U.S. 90 and 49, broke ground in March 2026. Construction on the publicly funded parking garage started in December 2025 and is expected to wrap sometime in 2026, but the residential and hospitality pieces, including the 114-room Hotel Holden under Marriott's Tribute Portfolio brand and roughly 17,600 square feet of street-level retail and restaurant space, aren't slated for delivery until 2027.
So if you've heard people talking about a new hotel and restaurant scene downtown and gone looking for it near U.S. 90, what you'll find right now is a construction site and a parking structure taking shape, not a place to eat dinner. The restaurant wave that's actually usable tonight is the one a few blocks north: the Markham, Neighbors Tap & Table, The Downtowner, and Siren Social Club.
A Loop You Can Actually Walk Right Now
If you're mapping out a Saturday downtown, here's what's currently open on the ground, not on a rendering:
- Breakfast or lunch at The Downtowner, 2429 14th Street, inside the old pharmacy building
- Small plates and cocktails at Neighbors Tap & Table
- Brunch, dinner, or a nightcap at The Library Restaurant and Bar inside the Markham Hotel
- A special-occasion dinner at Siren Social Club inside Hotel Vela, if you want the Michelin-recommended version of the night
Three of these four didn't exist five months ago. The fourth, Siren Social Club, is only about a year old itself and still the newest thing on Gulfport's Michelin radar. All of them exist because a nonprofit ran a bus tour, a handful of independent owners took a chance on buildings other people had written off, and a train started stopping here again.
The bigger project down the street is still years from mattering to your Saturday plans. This smaller cluster already does.
If you're keeping an eye on what's happening in Gulfport, whether that's a new restaurant on 14th Street or a shift in what a particular block is worth, Coast of MS Homes tracks both sides of it. Reach out anytime you want a straight read on the neighborhood, or get a free home valuation if you're curious what your corner of Gulfport looks like on paper right now.
