Somewhere on North Salem Street this month you will pass a banner that reads "Downtown Apex is open for business." It has hung there since spring, a plain statement that only needed saying because Salem Street has spent nine months being harder to get to than it used to be. One-way traffic. A pause in the spring for electrical redesign. A completion date that keeps sliding.
Then on September 19, the town closes an entirely different street on purpose, and for one day getting downtown is the easiest it has been all year.
That is the part worth sitting with before you plan the rest of your month. Festa Italiana North Carolina takes over Hunter Street and the Town Hall Campus from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., with vendors set up along Hunter between Ambergate Station and Laura Duncan Road and the parking lots between Town Hall and the John M. Brown Community Center closed starting midnight the night before. That sounds like more disruption, not less. But because the town and Festa Italiana NC plan for it, with posted detours, a downtown parking map, and GoApex Route 1 running its normal route that day, the access is cleaner than an average Tuesday grocery run down Salem.
Why September 19 Is the Reset Button
Compare the two versions of downtown side by side. On a normal day this fall, North Salem Street between Saunders and West Chatham is restricted to one-way southbound traffic, a condition that has held since the Salem Streetscape project broke ground in January. Through traffic gets routed to NC 55 and Hunter Street instead. Sidewalks stay open on both sides, but the corridor itself asks more of drivers than it used to.
On Festa Italiana Saturday, the closure moves to Hunter Street and the Town Hall Campus, a footprint the festival has used for years and one the town has gotten practiced at managing. The Saunders Lot, expanded last year by 152 spaces, a 40 percent jump in downtown's total capacity, sits close by and gets clear signage pointing visitors to it. If you ride GoCary Route 9, the stop by the Historic Apex Depot on Center Street is unaffected either way, since that route was built to skip the construction zone entirely when it launched service to Apex last November.
This is the eighth year for Festa Italiana in Apex, and this year a portion of the proceeds go to ALS United North Carolina. The day includes a Galbani cooking demonstration stage, a cannoli eating contest, live music, and a kids' area, but the detail that matters for planning purposes is smaller: alcohol only counts if it was purchased inside the festival boundary. The Local Spot, downtown's regular social district that lets you carry a drink between participating shops on Salem and Chatham, does not extend into the festival footprint. Two separate systems, two separate sets of rules, on two sides of the same town campus.
The Street That's Been the Hard Way Since January
The reason September 19 feels like relief is that the rest of the calendar has been the opposite. Apex Town Council awarded the Salem Streetscape project a $4.7 million construction contract last December, roughly $1.75 million more than what the town had already budgeted, and work began in earnest come January. The plan itself is not controversial. Curbless brick pavers, new lighting, street trees, and a gathering space at Salem and Saunders are the kind of improvements most residents wanted from the town's 2019 Downtown Master Plan. The disruption in getting there is the part nobody loves.
By spring, the project had stalled for several weeks over an electrical design issue, according to Mayor Jacques Gilbert, who told WRAL at the time that the pause was pushing the schedule back without changing the eventual outcome. He also said the project remained on track to finish by October and return Salem Street to two-way traffic. Whether that holds is worth watching. A construction timeline that had one pause already this year can have another, and residents planning a fall or holiday visit downtown should treat October as a hope rather than a guarantee.
For the shop owners along Salem Street, the math has been more direct than a construction calendar. Steven Perticona, who manages Anna's Pizzeria on Salem, told WRAL foot traffic has been down somewhere between 10 and 20 percent since the one-way restriction went in. Textile artist Cynthia Mollenkopf, who has run Cocoon Gallery on Salem since 2017, described a similar pattern to IndyWeek, estimating her own sales dipped around 10 percent during the heaviest construction months. Both said they expected the finished streetscape to be worth it. Neither pretended the in-between stretch has been easy.
What Opened While You Were Detouring
The interesting part is where new investment has actually landed this year, because very little of it went to Salem Street itself.
Popovers Cafe opened at 219 N. Salem Street, right in the middle of the construction zone, run by Mustafa and Juliette Ozturk, who built the shop's pastry menu around family recipes on both sides. That one took a bet on staying downtown through the disruption rather than around it.
Everything else opened at the edges. Kaara Modern Indian Restaurant landed at 2700 Stokesdale Avenue, well off Salem, with two dining halls, a private room, and a full bar. Foxtail Coffee opened a second Apex location at 1451 Richardson Road in Sweetwater Town Center, a mile from its original spot near downtown, giving the growing southwest side its own coffee stop instead of pulling that traffic back toward Salem. Lime & Lemon added a late-night lounge concept at 2025 Creekside Landing Drive, with its own separate entrance and a 200-plus capacity room built for DJ sets rather than daytime dining.
Meanwhile TapStation, the family-friendly brewpub built into the old Holt & Sons service station at 320 S. Salem Street, has stayed put through all of it. The building's garage-inspired decor and rooftop patio bar were designed years before the streetscape project started, and the owners have kept the doors open on a stretch of street that has tested every other business around it. If you want proof that Salem Street can still pull a crowd, a Saturday afternoon at TapStation's picnic tables is it.
Read together, the pattern says something the sales numbers alone do not. Apex's downtown food and drink scene did not shrink this year. It just stopped clustering exclusively on Salem Street while the street rebuilds itself underneath the businesses that chose to wait it out.
The Rest of September, If You're Planning Around It
The town has stacked a fair amount of programming into this same stretch, most of it at the Halle Cultural Arts Center a block off Salem. The Watercolor Society of North Carolina holds a gallery reception there on September 11, the same day as the town's Patriot Day Ceremony at the Downtown Service Memorial. SuperFun Saturday runs at the Halle the morning of September 19, right before Festa Italiana takes over Hunter Street that afternoon, and the Apex Community Dance follows the evening before. The Triangle Environmental Symposium, a multi-part series that includes a session called "From Wasteland to Wonder," runs sessions on September 3, 10, and 17.
None of that requires navigating Salem Street at all. The Halle sits close enough to Town Hall that a resident could treat September 19 as one continuous downtown day: SuperFun Saturday in the morning, Festa Italiana into the evening, and a stop at TapStation or Popovers on the way home if Salem's sidewalk traffic looks manageable.
That is really the whole read on downtown Apex this month. Salem Street may or may not be back to two-way traffic by the mayor's October target, and betting the whole fall on that date is optimistic given the spring it just had. But the calendar has already built you an alternative. Use the town's own event days, the ones with the closures on Hunter Street instead of Salem, as your reset points, and let the rest of the corridors around downtown, Stokesdale, Sweetwater, Creekside Landing, pick up the slack in between.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks these shifts because you're weighing whether this stretch of Wake County still fits your next few years, or you know someone eyeing a move to a town that keeps rebuilding itself in public, that's the kind of on-the-ground read DiProfio Homes likes to talk through. No pressure, just a conversation about what a place is actually like to live in right now.
