Doumar's Hasn't Moved. Everything Around It Has.

Walk to Stockley Gardens Park this October and the first landmark you'll pass is still Doumar's, still slinging waffle cones from the same spot it's held since 1904, the same year Abe Doumar reportedly invented the cone at the World's Fair. Everything within a five-minute walk of it has been in motion this year in a way that doesn't happen often in a neighborhood this settled.

That's the actual story of Ghent's fall right now. Not one big opening, not a trend piece about "the new Colley Ave." Four separate, unconnected business decisions landed within months of each other, on streets that already feed into the same festival weekend Ghent has hosted for four decades. None of them made headlines on their own. Together, they've quietly changed what a Saturday around Stockley Gardens actually looks like.

The One Thing That Didn't Change

Doumar's is the fixed point worth naming first, because it's the thing that lets you measure everything else. It's a drive-in on a corner that's stayed a drive-in through every wave of Ghent's evolution, still run by the same family, still doing the barbecue and limeades alongside the cones. If you've lived here more than a year, you already know this. What you might not have clocked is how much of the rest of the walk between Doumar's and the festival gates has turned over since last October.

The Four Blocks That Did

Start at the Ghent Market Shops at 2200 Colonial Ave, where Gran Maya opened this year after building a following at its Virginia Beach location. It's a straightforward expansion, the kind that usually means a business has already proven itself elsewhere and is betting the same crowd exists a few miles north. Fajitas, quesadillas, a Pina Rellena served in half a pineapple. Nothing revolutionary, just one more sit-down option on a stretch of Colonial that didn't have it before.

A few blocks over on Colley Ave, La Brioche reopened in a new location in late June after a stretch when its regulars weren't sure it was coming back at all. The bakery is known for hand-made baguettes and croissants, and its return matters less for the pastry itself than for what it says about the corridor: a business that could have simply closed chose to relocate and reopen instead.

Then there's Donut Dugout, which finally opened in the space that used to be Naci's Corner Cafe, a spot Ghent regulars had watched sit empty through several false starts before the donut shop actually got its doors open this year. If you'd written off that corner as permanently stalled, it isn't anymore.

And on the infrastructure side, a new Virginia ABC store opened at 1225 W 25th St with a grand opening on April 15. It's easy to skip past a liquor store opening as background noise, but the state doesn't add a new store to a corridor without expecting the traffic to justify it, and this one was built to serve Ghent, West Ghent, Chelsea and the ODU neighborhoods specifically, four names in one project description that tells you where the state thinks the demand actually sits.

Put those four together and you get a rough map: Colonial Ave gains a sit-down restaurant, Colley Ave gets its bakery back, a long-stalled corner reopens, and a new retail anchor lands two streets over. None of it was announced as a package. It reads as one anyway.

Festival Weekend, Recalculated

The Stockley Gardens Fall Arts Festival lands in the middle of all this on October 17 and 18, at the park on the corner of Stockley Gardens and Olney Road. Hope House Foundation has run the event since 1984, and this fall's edition is presented by TowneBank with more than 130 artists showing painting, glass, sculpture, photography and jewelry across the two days. It's free, it's the same footprint it's always had, and the proceeds still go entirely to Hope House's work supporting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in their own homes.

What's different this year is what happens after you walk out the gates. If you head toward 21st Street afterward, The Ghent, the self-pour rooftop bar and gastropub at 319 W 21st St, runs its own weekly rotation of night markets and book clubs on top of the usual bar crowd, so a festival afternoon can turn into an evening without anyone needing to drive anywhere. Head the other direction and you're walking straight into the stretch that's changed the most, past the new ABC store, past La Brioche's new storefront, toward Gran Maya or back around to Donut Dugout if the festival crowds haven't cleaned it out.

None of this required the festival to change at all. The festival is exactly what it's been for over forty years. It's the ten minutes on either side of it, the walk to and from the park, that looks different than it did twelve months ago.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

The easy version of this post would be a list: five new places to try, festival dates, go enjoy your neighborhood. The more useful thing to notice is that Ghent absorbed four separate business changes this year without any of them individually being a big deal, and that kind of quiet churn is usually a better signal of a neighborhood's health than one splashy opening ever is. A corridor that can lose a beloved bakery and get it back within the same season, fill a stalled storefront, and justify a new state retail location all in one year is a corridor with more foot traffic behind it than a single ribbon-cutting would suggest.

You don't need any of that to enjoy the festival weekend. But if you've noticed your usual walk taking a little longer lately because there's more worth stopping for, that's not your imagination. That's four unrelated decisions by four unrelated business owners, all betting on the same few blocks at the same time.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans in Ghent, whether that's a project on your own block or just keeping an eye on what your street is worth, the team at Conner and Company has spent years tracking exactly this kind of neighborhood-level shift. Reach out any time you want a local read on what's actually changing around you.