The Old Captain D's On Green Springs Is Homewood's Newest Third Place
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
As The Homewood Star reported, the stretch of Green Springs Highway across from the McDonald's was, for years, the kind of corner you drove past without registering: an aging Captain D's, a gas station, a lot that had been for sale so long that multiple deals on it had already fallen through. Ashley Berkery, who has lived in Homewood for much of her life, told the paper that she remembers it as exactly that. She now calls the same address "very walkable from where I live." On a recent Friday night, the site was showing the movie Inside Out on a 19-foot screen while kids ran across artificial turf and their parents worked through orders from a wine bar, a ramen counter, and a cookie shop.
That corner is The Edge, and the gap between what it was and what it is now is the whole story. Not because a food hall opened in Homewood, but because of who closed the gap and how long the corner sat open before they did.
The four acres at 815, 817, and 819 Green Springs Highway belonged to the Shunnarah family, and by most accounts it had been available for years before anything happened to it. Berkery's comment about the property gets at something specific: Green Springs renovations had been "discussed in years past," her words, which means this wasn't a corner nobody had thought about. It was a corner where the thinking never turned into a deal.
The people who eventually closed it weren't developers from out of town. JJ and Whitney Thomas live in Edgewood, the neighborhood the property backs up to, and by their own account they spent about a year in contact with the Shunnarahs before the pieces came together. They designed their project, now called The Edge, on half the property and sold the back half to a local church that plans to build there in the coming years. The project brought a gathering space to the neighborhood where the Thomases live.
The project moved in two phases, and the sequence matters if you're trying to understand why the tenant mix looks the way it does today.
Phase 1 renovated the two existing commercial buildings into six leasable food and beverage spaces, split between four "micro" restaurants with order-and-pickup windows and two traditional spaces with indoor seating. The Thomases described the approach directly: locally owned, already-successful operators rather than unproven concepts. That phase soft-opened in August 2024, with Cookie Plug starting service on August 23 and Corbeau Bar following in mid-September. Phase 2 added a 5,000-square-foot building behind the main lot, and True40, a fitness studio offering barre, functional strength training, Pilates, and yoga, became its first tenant that spring, its fourth location in Alabama and second in Birmingham.
What's open today, more than two years after that soft launch:
The site also secured a multi-year beverage partnership with Buffalo Rock-Pepsi, and the grounds include two covered patios, a turf area with a jumbotron for movie nights, and an adjacent parking lot, which matters on a highway stretch where parking has historically been an afterthought.
"As West Homewood continues to grow, we hope to see more retail and restaurant options open up," said Tracy Colley, a West Homewood resident, in a comment reported by The Homewood Star while the project was under construction.
The most recent addition tells you the project hasn't settled into its final form. The Heavenly Donut Co. joined Suite 109 in April 2026, moving in alongside Baba Java Coffee and PopBar, which had already been sharing that same space since the original opening. That's a detail worth sitting with: The Edge isn't adding square footage to grow, it's stacking a third concept into a footprint that already held two. The food hall model here depends on turnover and combination, not expansion.
The Edge's own site still lists an open contact line for "current leasing availability," which means the roster you'd count on a Tuesday afternoon in September 2026 isn't necessarily the roster you'll count next spring. Add the sold-off back half of the original four acres, now in a local church's hands for a future build, and the corner that sat static for years is now the opposite: a piece of Green Springs that keeps changing hands and changing tenants, on a timeline nobody outside the project fully controls.
Homewood's most talked-about commercial energy for the last decade has gone to its downtown core, the stretch of 18th Street and Oxmoor Road where restaurants and boutiques cycle in and out under a lot of scrutiny. Green Springs Highway, by contrast, has functioned mostly as a drive-through corridor connecting Edgewood, West Homewood, and the I-65 interchange near Samford University. It had restaurants and a hardware store and a gas station, but it didn't have a place where residents from both neighborhoods would choose to walk to and stay.
That's the actual function The Edge is filling. Sam Daibes, who owns Sam's Deli and Grill nearby, said as much when the project was first announced, framing it as the kind of support Homewood and Edgewood businesses already extend to each other. The site sits close enough to both neighborhoods that residents from either side can walk to it, which is a different proposition than driving to a shopping center. For a corridor that had been the subject of renovation conversation without renovation action, the difference between talking about a fix and having one is now a place where you can watch a movie on a Friday night with a donut in one hand and a coffee in the other.
The corner that once measured its relevance in gas pump traffic now measures it in how many of its businesses have a line at 7 p.m. on a weeknight.
If you're the kind of person who notices when a stretch of highway starts pulling foot traffic instead of just car traffic, you already understand why corridors like Green Springs are worth watching closely. Roxanne Hale tracks these shifts across Homewood as they happen, not after they've already changed the neighborhood. Let's Connect.
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Based in Birmingham, I help clients buy, sell, build, and relocate across the region’s most sought-after communities — from Homewood, Mountain Brook, Vestavia, and Hoover to Cullman, Decatur, Huntsville, and beyond.
