Drive down Randolph Street this month and the buildings look almost exactly like they did five years ago. Same brick, same Italianate cornices, same wide street that's made downtown Garrett easy to walk since the 1880s. What's different is who's answering the phone inside.
Shorty's Steakhouse is now Salvatori's. The Auburn-Garrett House of Pancakes belongs to Salsa Grille. Timmy's Pizza reopened as Boxcar Pizza. The Flower Pot has new owners. None of these are new buildings. All of them are new hands on old locks. If you've lived in Garrett long enough to remember what used to be where, you've probably clocked one or two of these changes without connecting them into a pattern. They are a pattern, and it's a more telling one than a ribbon-cutting.
The list nobody read as a list
Mayor Todd Fiandt laid most of it out during a recent update on downtown investment, and reading the names together tells a different story than reading them one at a time. RBT Group bought the old Arise Tax building and remodeled it into The Grind coffee shop, then restored the building at the corner of King and Randolph as its own headquarters. Façade grants helped fund upgrades at The Hair Shed, a storefront owned by Craig and Kim Lepard, Hometown Taxes on East King Street, and the buildings now housing Boxcar Pizza and the Garrett House of Pancakes. Salvatori's took over Shorty's Steakhouse. Salsa Grille bought the Auburn-Garrett House of Pancakes. Noble Roots is run by people who don't live in Garrett at all. The Flower Pot sold last year to Maryann Hollenbeck and her husband, who kept the business running under the same name.
Fiandt's own read on it, from that same update, gets at why this matters more than a fresh coat of paint: these buyers are the ones who see value in the city, as he put it, whether or not they've ever lived here.
That's the tell. New construction is a bet on demand that doesn't exist yet. Buying an occupied storefront and keeping it open is a bet that the demand is already there and just needed better management. Garrett's downtown is mostly running on the second kind of bet right now, and that's a steadier signal than a groundbreaking would be.
Here's the same list, mapped:
| Storefront | Previous name | Current owner |
|---|---|---|
| Corner of King & Randolph | Various | RBT Group headquarters |
| Former Arise Tax building | Arise Tax | The Grind (RBT Group) |
| Steakhouse on Randolph | Shorty's Steakhouse | Salvatori's |
| Pancake house | Auburn-Garrett House of Pancakes | Salsa Grille |
| Pizza shop | Timmy's Pizza | Boxcar Pizza |
| Flower shop | The Flower Pot (prior owners) | Maryann Hollenbeck and husband |
The 1951 screen that almost didn't come back
The biggest version of this pattern isn't even downtown. It's on State Road 8, where the Auburn-Garrett Drive-In has been showing movies since it opened in 1951 as the Tri-Way Drive-In, before a screen upgrade during the Cinemascope era gave it its current name. In August 2022, a storm tore the screen apart. Replacing it wasn't cheap, and the drive-in stayed closed from that August until May 2025, missing nearly three full seasons before reopening.
This year's season opened Friday, May 15, with a double feature of "Michael" followed by "The Housemaid," and the following weekend brought "Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu" paired with "The Devil Wears Prada 2." Gates and concessions open at 6:45 p.m., the first film starts at dusk, and admission runs $10 for anyone 12 and up, $5 for ages five to eleven, free under four. The lot still holds 420 cars, the same capacity it's carried since a 1970s expansion. Indiana has the fourth-most drive-in theaters left in the country, and Garrett's is one of the ones that came back from the brink instead of closing for good.
It's the same story as downtown, just older and bigger. Nobody built a new drive-in. Someone kept the old one alive.
The museum setting its own pace
Not everything in Garrett is a handoff story. The Garrett Museum of Art, at 100 S. Randolph Street, has been running its own quiet schedule independent of the downtown ownership churn. It opened one exhibition in May and another on Friday, July 10, followed the next day by an artist talk featuring photographer Brian Ach. That's two full exhibition turns in a single summer, which is a working rhythm for a small-town museum, not a one-off event calendar entry.
The museum matters here because it's proof that Garrett's downtown revival isn't purely a real estate story. Someone has to program a gallery twice in one season, and someone has to show up for an artist talk on a Saturday afternoon in July. That's cultural infrastructure building alongside the storefront reshuffling, in the same three blocks.
What the city didn't have to hand off
The one piece of Garrett's downtown-adjacent life that nobody needed to buy is Feick Park, the city's largest recreation space, sitting on the south side of town with baseball diamonds, basketball courts, and a pool with a waterslide. The city notes it's the only outdoor pool in DeKalb County, which means on a hot August weekend, Garrett's pool is pulling from a wider radius than just its own population of roughly 6,700.
Public infrastructure doesn't change hands the way a pizza shop does. It doesn't need a new owner to see value in it, because the city already committed to it years ago. That stability is worth naming precisely because everything else on this list involved someone deciding to take a risk.
Two tracks of growth at once
While downtown changes ownership, the north side of town is doing something different: building from scratch. Saddle Ridge, a new subdivision along Randolph Street on the north end of Garrett, will bring 40 new homes from Fort Wayne-based developer Kiracofe Homes LLC. That's new construction responding to demand that's already shown up elsewhere in town. An earlier 129-home development filled in roughly three years, which is the kind of absorption rate that tells a builder it's worth breaking ground on another one.
So Garrett right now has two growth stories running in parallel. Downtown is filling in through ownership changes on buildings that already exist. The north side is filling in through new lots on land that didn't have houses on it before. Both are legitimate signs of a town people are choosing, but they're not the same signal, and conflating them flattens what's actually happening here.
What this means if you're already here
If you skipped Heritage Days this year, the parade and fireworks are done for the season, but the town's bigger story is still open for the rest of the summer. Drive-ins in this part of the state typically keep double features running into fall, so there's likely still time to catch one on State Road 8 before the season winds down. The museum's exhibition that opened July 10 is worth a walk down Randolph Street if you haven't made it there yet, though a gallery this size doesn't always post its closing date far in advance, so it's worth a quick call before planning a visit. The pool at Feick Park remains the only outdoor pool in DeKalb County, so on a hot August weekend it's pulling swimmers from more than just Garrett. Blue Moon opened for its seasonal run back on March 20, and seasonal spots like it in this region typically stay open into mid or late fall depending on the weather, so a stop there after a movie or a museum visit isn't out of season yet.
None of this requires you to be shopping for a house to care about it. But if you're the kind of resident who's noticed the name changes on Randolph Street and wondered whether they add up to anything, they do. A town where existing buildings keep changing hands to new owners willing to bet on them, while new subdivisions fill in around the edges, is a town with more than one kind of confidence behind it.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own property, whether that's a home near downtown or something out toward Saddle Ridge, Daniel Morken has been tracking Garrett's market as closely as its storefronts. Request your home valuation and get a straight read on where things stand.
