Tuesday nights at Gather COLA now mean trivia at 6 p.m. with Palmetto Trivia, then music bingo on Wednesday at the same hour, both free, both loud enough that you can hear them from the sidewalk on Pickens Street before you see the building. Walk a block over and Segra Park's lights are on for a Fireflies game. Walk another few minutes and you're at Coastal Crust for a wood-fired pizza that didn't exist in this district five weeks ago. What you still can't do, on any of those nights, is stop for a gallon of milk on the way home. That errand still means getting back in the car.
That gap is not an oversight. It is the shape of how BullStreet actually got built, and it explains something about the neighborhood that a scroll through "new restaurants in Columbia" roundups will not tell you: the fun parts of this district arrived years before the practical ones, and the practical anchor everyone kept asking for is only now breaking ground.
The Order Things Actually Happened In
BullStreet broke ground in January 2015 on the old South Carolina State Hospital campus, 181 acres a mile from the State House that had sat mostly vacant since the state began trying to sell it in 2004. The first big public-facing piece landed fast: Segra Park, originally Spirit Communications Park, opened in 2016 as home to the Columbia Fireflies, the Single-A affiliate of the Kansas City Royals. It won Ballpark of the Year in its debut season and Ballpark of the Decade in 2020.
Then the pace slowed. The Babcock Building, the old main asylum structure now converted into 208 apartments, survived a 2020 fire and didn't fully reopen until 2023. Page Ellington Park, a 20-acre green space with a dog park, a two-acre pond, and more than 1,600 feet of daylighted stream, opened in 2021 and is named for a formerly enslaved man who became a self-taught architect and community leader.
It took until December 5, 2025, almost eleven years after that first groundbreaking, for the district to get anything resembling a dinner destination that wasn't a single sit-down restaurant. That was the opening of Gather COLA, Columbia's first food hall.
What Actually Opened This Year
Gather COLA is a 32,000-square-foot, two-story, open-air space at 2191 Pickens Street, with its main walk-up entrance around the corner on Freed Street near the Starbucks. Ten food vendors, two bars, and three retail spaces fill it. The lineup includes Melt Cheesesteaks & More, a new concept led by longtime local bartender Matthew Koleske, Gyromania Grill (a Greek spot expanding in from its original Elgin location), and Kiki's Chicken and Waffles, the soul food name that made the semifinal round of a national food award in 2024. Upstairs, Session Taproom pours a rotating beer list and Remedy handles craft cocktails. Crumbl Cookies, Ageless vintage clothing, and The Avenue flower shop round out retail.
The coworking company SOCO built out 24 private offices and a shared workspace on the second and third floors, its third Columbia location after a flagship on Lady Street in the Vista and a first BullStreet outpost that opened back in 2016. Memberships start at $199 a month for 24/7 access and run to $699 for a private office, which tells you something about who this space is aimed at: people who already work near here and wanted somewhere better than a coffee shop table.
Eight months later, on August 4, 2026, Coastal Crust opened its sixth South Carolina location at 2158 Pickens Street, a few doors from Gather COLA, bringing wood-fired pizza and an Italian-leaning menu to a stretch of the district that a year earlier had none. And in June, the Southern women's clothing chain DressUp announced it will open its first Midlands storefront at BullStreet this fall, next to Methodical Coffee in the West Lawn building, its 17th location overall and third in the state after Greenville and Charleston.
None of that existed a year ago. All of it showed up inside a single twelve-month stretch, after a decade of comparatively quiet construction.
The Piece That's Still Missing
Here's what hasn't opened: a grocery store. In December 2025, the same month Gather COLA debuted, Publix announced a 50,325-square-foot store at the corner of Bull Street and Colonial Drive, next to the REI Co-op. Columbia Mayor Daniel Rickenmann called it "real relief" for what he described as a long-standing grocery desert downtown, and pointed out that the city hadn't seen a major supermarket investment since a Publix opened on Gervais Street in 2004, more than two decades earlier. City Councilman Tyler Bailey, who chairs the BullStreet Commission, put it more bluntly.
"This has been the number one request of Columbia residents for BullStreet since its inception."
Since its inception. That's the whole decade. And even the December 2025 announcement was not an opening date. Groundbreaking was penciled in for summer 2026, which means more than 1,000 people already living in the district, plus the thousands more in surrounding neighborhoods the city says will use this store, are still waiting on a construction schedule before anyone bags groceries here. No opening date has been made public.
Compare that to how fast the ballpark went from shovel to gate: about a year and a half, groundbreaking in January 2015 to an opening season in 2016. The retail and dining side of BullStreet has consistently moved faster than the side that handles the boring, essential stuff. A boutique can lease a storefront and open in a season. A 50,000-square-foot grocery store needs permitting, site work, and a construction schedule that runs well beyond the ribbon-cutting news cycle.
What This Actually Means for Your Week
If you live near BullStreet right now, your week probably already reflects this. Tuesday trivia or Wednesday bingo at Gather COLA is an easy walk. So is a Fireflies game at Segra Park most summer evenings, or a Saturday pizza run to Coastal Crust. Page Ellington Park's dog park and walking trails cover the outdoor half of a weekend. Fall will add DressUp to the retail mix if you're already planning to swing by Methodical Coffee.
The weekly grocery run is the one thing on that list still routed through REI's parking lot and out to whichever Publix, Lidl, or Kroger sits closest to your other errands, probably on Rosewood, Forest Drive, or out toward Harbison. Given how long the ballpark-to-apartments-to-food-hall sequence took to unfold here, that errand is not likely to move onto this side of Bull Street anytime soon.
None of this is a knock on the district. It is, if anything, a fairly normal pattern for a mixed-use redevelopment this size: entertainment and food draw the foot traffic first, foot traffic proves out the retail leases, and the retail leases eventually make the grocery anchor's numbers work. Robert Hughes, the district's master developer, described the Publix deal as "another big step" in the transformation, not the first one. He's right. It's just a later step than a lot of people expected when the ballpark opened a decade ago.
For anyone weighing property near BullStreet, that sequencing is worth understanding on its own terms. A neighborhood that has spent a decade building its social and dining life before its grocery infrastructure is not unfinished. It is mid-build, in a specific and fairly common order, and the next twelve months (construction crews at the Publix site, a fall opening for DressUp, whatever comes after AMAROK's planned $69 million headquarters project) will keep changing what a walk through this part of Columbia actually feels like.
If you're trying to figure out what a specific block near BullStreet, the Vista, or anywhere else in the Midlands actually offers day to day, not just what a listing says, that's the kind of on-the-ground read Bowen & Associates puts together for buyers and sellers across the region. Reach out for a straightforward read on what's actually changed nearby, or start with an instant home valuation if you're weighing a move of your own.
