On the same Thursday night that pep rally banners were going up along Samford Lawn, a much smaller crowd filed into the Auburn Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on Thach Avenue for the Sundilla Concert Series. The Tray Wellington Band played banjo-driven bluegrass to a room of maybe a hundred people, advance tickets twenty dollars, fifteen for students, available at Spicer's Music and Ross House Coffee. A few blocks away, orange and blue was already going up for Friday.
That overlap is the whole story of fall downtown. One calendar is loud and easy to see from a mile off: football Saturdays, the marching band, the crowd noise that carries over the treetops toward Beaumont on game nights. The other calendar is quieter and mostly invisible unless you already live close enough to walk it, a rotation of concerts, a museum show, a new food hall vendor stall that has nothing to do with the scoreboard. Beaumont sits about a mile from Toomer's Corner, close enough that both calendars are equally walkable, which means the real question for a fall weekend isn't which one to pick. It's which one is running on a given night, because this week they land on the same evening.
Two Traditions, One Friday
Friday, September 25 carries a double booking downtown. Auburn University's Homecoming Parade steps off that evening, and the City of Auburn's street-closure notice puts parking along the parade route off-limits starting at 3 p.m., with a pep rally on Samford Lawn right behind it. That same Friday also happens to be a standing weekly fixture: Come Home to the Corner, the entertainment-district event the city runs every Friday evening before a home game, with live music and extended shopping hours downtown. Auburn hosts Vanderbilt at Jordan-Hare the next day, so the Friday-before ritual was already on the books before Homecoming layered on top of it.
For anyone walking in from Beaumont, that's a useful thing to know a day out rather than discovering it at the corner of College and Magnolia. Downtown Auburn has more than 1,300 public parking spaces spread across the district on an ordinary week. On a week when a parade route closes streets at 3 p.m. and a weekly entertainment district event runs until 9, the ordinary math for finding a spot doesn't hold, and getting there on foot stops being the backup plan and becomes the plan.
The New Kitchen a Block From Beaumont
If the loud calendar means football, the quiet calendar has been busy building out its own gathering spot. Hey Day Market opened inside the Tony and Libba Rane Culinary Science Center on South College Street, a food hall with nine vendor stalls, a full-service bar, a coffee roastery and a taproom under one roof. The lineup runs from Cuban sandwiches at La Cubanita to Malaysian street noodles at Khoodles to poke bowls at POKEMEN, plus a stall called The Bar that doubles as a five-hole mini-golf course on an outdoor green space the market calls The Lawn.
It's the kind of stop that doesn't care whether Auburn wins or loses that weekend, because it's built for a Tuesday lunch as much as a Saturday crowd. The name is a nod to Hey Day, a decades-old Auburn tradition dating back to World War II meant to unite the student body in a friendly atmosphere, which is a fitting pedigree for a room designed to hold students, faculty and neighbors from the surrounding blocks at the same tables.
Old Standbys Keep the Sidewalk Level
New openings tend to get the attention, but the sidewalk-level businesses that have been open the longest are still doing the same job they've always done. Momma Goldberg's has served steamed sandwiches from its original Magnolia Avenue location since the deli was founded in Auburn in 1976. Byron's Smokehouse has been open since 1989, when Glen and Stephani Gulledge started the restaurant. Big Blue Bagel has held its spot on College Street, blue awning and all, since 2000, close enough to campus that the line at breakfast can run long. Staks Pancake Kitchen, owned by Auburn alumni Brian and Kim Wirth, has built its own following downtown for brunch built around buttermilk pancakes and made-from-scratch biscuits.
Meanwhile the newest addition to the downtown dining skyline sits several stories up. Olivine opened on the rooftop of the AC Hotel with Italian-inspired plates, house-made pastas and wood-fired dishes, pairing a view over downtown with a menu that reads more like a special occasion than a weeknight stop. Between a rooftop that's brand new and a bagel counter that's been open since before most current Auburn students were born, the walk from Beaumont into downtown covers about twenty-five years of the same few blocks changing hands without changing character much.
A Museum That Doesn't Track the Score
Not everything worth walking to downtown has a kitchen attached. The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University is currently showing Jontay Kahm: Personified Existence, on view now through December 6. A museum show on a six-week runway is a different kind of fall event than a parade or a kickoff, the sort of thing that's still there the Tuesday after a loss, still there through November when football gets tense, an option for an evening that has nothing to do with what happened at Jordan-Hare that weekend.
That's really what separates the two calendars downtown. The football calendar is intense and short, built around a handful of Saturdays each fall. The other one runs continuously underneath it, a concert series that keeps booking touring acts on ordinary Thursdays, a food hall built for daily lunch traffic, a museum exhibit with a closing date measured in months rather than a single weekend. Living close enough to walk to either one means never really having to pick a side.
This particular Friday just happens to make both calendars visible at once. The parade steps off, the entertainment district lights up for its regular weekly run, and somewhere between the two, downtown Auburn keeps doing what it does every week regardless of who's playing at home.
If you're walking into downtown this week, plan around the 3 p.m. street closures if you're driving in for the parade, and know that Friday night traffic downtown will be running on both calendars at once. The team at Three Sixty Real Estate spends plenty of time on these same blocks between Beaumont and Toomer's Corner, and we're always glad to compare notes on what's new down there.
