Walk the west side of the Courthouse Square in Fayetteville this month and you'll notice the shade first. The Main Street Alley Plaza sits there now, benches tucked under cover, parking reorganized, a spot that used to be a cut-through and is now a place to actually stop. A block over, on the south wall of the building that houses Twisted Taco and Thai Rickshaw, there's a new mural. And on Glynn Street North, diagonally across from Gremlin Growlers, there's a hand-painted bench that wasn't there a year ago.
Three separate projects, each marked by a ribbon-cutting moment, have come to the same hundred-year-old square within a few months of one another, as Sophie Smart reports. Together, they add public art and gathering spaces to the Courthouse Square.
Two Downtowns, Different Approaches
Since Trilith opened its town center, its live entertainment venue, and its guesthouse, Fayetteville has two downtown destinations: the historic Courthouse Square, shaped in part by a 1990s Main Street revitalization effort and home to downtown businesses, and the Town at Trilith, a planned community built around walkability, curated public art, and a calendar of ticketed events. The Town most recently added a 530,000-square-foot entertainment complex, which opened its doors earlier this year.
The two places have developed on different budgets and timelines. Trilith is privately developed, with its public art and gathering spaces included from the start. The Courthouse Square is publicly funded and run through the city's Downtown Development Authority.
This summer, the square gained new public art and gathering spaces, including work by an artist whose earlier Fayetteville project was at Trilith.
A New Plaza on the Square
The Alleyway Project had been in planning for years before Fayetteville's Main Street Alley Plaza soft-opened this summer on the west side of the Courthouse Square. The finished space includes shaded picnic and common areas, reorganized parking, and the kind of small aesthetic upgrades that turn a service alley into somewhere people choose to linger. The city has said finishing touches on the adjacent alleyway were expected to wrap by late summer, but the plaza itself opened and started drawing visitors well before that final phase closed out.
At the bench unveiling nearby, Mayor Pro Tem Darryl Langford put the timeline in context, as quoted in Sophie Smart's report:
"This is an initiative we have planned for a very long time. It's good to see it finally come to fruition. This is only the beginning. There's plenty more to come."
That's not filler language from a ribbon-cutting. The plaza grew out of the city's long-running Alleyway Project, while the bench and the new mural down the block are named pieces of a separate but related document: Fayetteville's Downtown Creative Placemaking Implementation Strategy, adopted to guide exactly this kind of investment in the historic district. Different paperwork, same summer, same square.
The Mural That Replaced Itself, Sort Of
The most visible new piece on the square is Krystal Maynor's mural, "A Place to Imagine," on the wall at 119 Glynn Street South. It replaces a mural that had been there since 1993, painted by local artists Patsy and Ed Gullett and known, without much ceremony, as "The Mural." Where the Gulletts' version leaned on Fayetteville's rural past, Maynor's picks up the city's official slogan, "No Limits on Imagination," and paints the present day alongside it.
The detail worth sitting with is what happened during the painting, not just after. More than 20 local residents picked up a brush and added their own touch to Maynor's piece over the months she worked on it, a near-exact echo of what the Gulletts described about their original mural three decades earlier: neighbors stopping to paint a section themselves. Downtown Development Authority chair Nancy Musselwhite called it a reflection of "the momentum the city is currently experiencing." Patsy Gullett, invited onto the selection committee for the new piece, said much the same thing in her own words: it was a community project then, and it's a community project now.
That continuity links the two murals across three decades.
The Bench With Two Résumés
The painted bench on Glynn Street North, titled "The Space Between Us," is the work of Atlanta-based muralist Eric Nine, as Sophie Smart reports in her account of the unveiling. It's his second commissioned piece in Fayetteville. His first was a mural for Trilith Guesthouse, on the west side of the city, when that development was building out its own public art program.
Nine's two projects connect public art at Trilith Guesthouse and the Courthouse Square. The bench brings his work to the historic district through the city's placemaking strategy, rather than a private developer's budget.
Nine described his intent behind the piece simply: he hopes people don't just walk past it, but sit, talk, and leave a little more connected than when they arrived. The bench sits along a sidewalk just north of the Historic Fayette County Courthouse, close enough to Gremlin Growlers that finding a seat and a drink in the same block is now genuinely easy.
What It Means If You Already Live Here
This summer's plaza, mural, and bench bring new public art and gathering spaces to the Courthouse Square. The bench and mural are connected to the city's Downtown Creative Placemaking Implementation Strategy.
These projects also support a broader downtown goal. Senior city planning staff have framed it in plain terms: more foot traffic downtown and more reasons to stay once you're there. The Courthouse Square's new projects build on its own history and character.
If you want to see it for yourself, here's where to go:
- Main Street Alley Plaza — west side of the Courthouse Square, shaded seating and parking, open now
- "A Place to Imagine" mural — 119 Glynn Street South, on the building that houses Twisted Taco and Thai Rickshaw
- "The Space Between Us" bench — 105 Glynn Street North, diagonally across from Gremlin Growlers
Fayetteville Main Street has been running its part of this revitalization since 1990, long before the words "placemaking strategy" showed up in a city planning document. What's different now is that the square has three new reasons to explore it on foot.
We keep an eye on these shifts because they tell us something about where a neighborhood's energy is actually headed, long before it shows up in a sale sign. If you're curious what a changing block means for a specific address in Fayetteville, or you're weighing a move into the Tri-Cities corridor more broadly, the team at Intown Focus Realty knows this ground well enough to give you a straight answer.
