Ask someone who has lived in Moore for more than a decade what's happening with downtown, and you'll probably get a shrug before you get an answer. The city put out a formal Old Town Moore revitalization plan back in 2019, with renderings of wider sidewalks, mixed-use buildings, and a Main Street corridor built for walking rather than driving through. For years, the honest response to "what's actually changed" was some version of not much. Longtime residents comparing notes on it as recently as 2024 described the progress as scattered, a handful of storefronts here and there, with nobody claiming Old Town had become the kind of place people wandered into on purpose.
That's no longer the full story. Something shifted in the past year, and it didn't show up as one ribbon-cutting. It showed up as three or four unrelated things happening at once, close enough together that anyone paying attention to Moore right now can feel the difference even if no single headline captured it.
What "New Energy" Actually Means on Main Street
The clearest signal came from inside City Hall itself. Assistant City Manager Deidre Ebrey, talking to Moore Monthly about the district earlier this year, put it plainly:
"There's a new level of energy in Old Town with businesses that have come online lately."
That energy has an origin point. A grant from the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, tied to the state's Main Street program, gave the city the marketing and planning support to start acting on the 2019 plan instead of just filing it. Ebrey described the city working with a team of community marketing professionals to bring new attention to Old Town's historic core, and framed this moment as the point where the city's resources and the district's momentum finally line up.
One of the most concrete decisions to come out of that push isn't a new building at all. It's the choice to preserve one. The two-story structure locals still call the Old School Building sits at the heart of Old Town, and rather than modernize away its distinctive black metal exterior staircases, the city is keeping them intact specifically because they're part of the building's identity. As Romines, quoted in the same Moore Monthly piece, put it, the goal is for the building to keep reflecting its place as the heart of Old Town Moore. That's a small architectural decision, but it says something larger: the city isn't trying to erase what Old Town looked like for the past century. It's trying to give people a reason to notice it again.
That noticing is already happening in small ways. Cosmic Flora Crystals, a boutique metaphysical shop, has settled into the Main Street footprint near 101 W Main St, adding a genre of retail that Old Town didn't have a few years ago and giving the district a reason for a Sunday afternoon visit that has nothing to do with running an errand.
Two Different Places Are Doing the Work
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only follow Old Town news: the district's Main Street corridor isn't the only place in Moore where public life is concentrating this fall. A few minutes away, Moore Central Park has quietly become the city's other anchor, home to the Moore Public Library, The Station recreation center, and the events calendar the Parks and Recreation Department runs out of that campus.
The clearest example lands next month. The city's Fall Marketplace returns to the Multipurpose Pavilion at Moore Central Park, 700 S Broadway Ave, on Saturday, September 26, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The lineup is simple and local:
- Coit's Food Truck handling food
- Okie Bean Coffee running the coffee truck
- Vendor booths coordinated through the Parks and Recreation office
It's not a downtown event, and that's worth sitting with for a second. Old Town Moore and Central Park are two separate places doing two separate jobs right now. Main Street is where the city is investing in preservation and small retail. Central Park is where the city already built the civic infrastructure, the library, the rec center, the pavilion, and where residents already show up without needing to be convinced. Moore's fall calendar this year runs through both of them, not one or the other, and that split is a more accurate picture of the city's growth than any single downtown press release.
The Restaurants Filling In Around It
The food scene tells a similar story of momentum arriving from more than one direction. LoQmé, at 101 NE 23rd St, blends American comfort food with Mediterranean influences, putting gyros and hummus on the same menu as burgers and wings. It's a small, specific bet that Moore diners want more than the drive-through chains that have lined the highway corridors for decades, and it's succeeding without being anywhere near the Old Town footprint.
Crimson Melt is the more unusual story. The restaurant was founded by Ashontay Owens, a career firefighter who currently serves as Fire Chief for the 137th Special Operations Wing in Oklahoma City, alongside Cori Owens, who spent more than 13 years in federal civilian service at the Pentagon. Their concept turns gourmet grilled cheese into a full menu built around what they call Crimson Melts, and the restaurant describes its build-your-own melt bar as the first of its kind in the state of Oklahoma. It's a veteran-founded business built explicitly around raising awareness for the mental health challenges facing first responders and military families, which gives it a different kind of local relevance in a city with as much military-adjacent population as Moore has.
Neither of these restaurants needed Old Town's revitalization plan to open. That's the point. Moore's food scene is filling in on its own timeline, independent of which government grant funded which sidewalk, and that independent growth is arguably a healthier sign than a single subsidized anchor tenant would be.
A Very Different Kind of Proof
If storefronts and food trucks feel like modest evidence, there's a much bigger number sitting a few miles away that points in the same direction. McKesson, ranked fifth on the Fortune 500, broke ground this year on a $179 million, 330,000-square-foot distribution hub in the North Moore Industrial Park. It's a pharmaceutical and healthcare logistics facility, not a downtown retail project, and it has nothing to do with Main Street's sidewalks or Central Park's pavilion. But it lands in the same twelve months as everything else described here, and a company of that size doesn't choose a location on a whim.
That's the actual thesis worth sitting with if you live in Moore: the momentum right now isn't concentrated in one place or one project. It's a small metaphysical shop and a firefighter's grilled cheese restaurant on one end, a fall market at a city park in the middle, and a nine-figure Fortune 5 logistics investment on the other. None of those three things were coordinated with each other. All three landed in Moore in the same window. That's a different kind of evidence than a single ribbon-cutting, and it's a lot harder to dismiss as one lucky headline.
If you've lived here long enough to remember when the 2019 plan was just a PDF on the city's website, this fall is the first stretch where the gap between what was promised and what actually exists has narrowed enough to notice on a normal Saturday.
If any of this ever turns into a real estate question for you, whether that's what a preserved Old School Building means for the block around it or how a McKesson-sized employer tends to ripple into local housing demand, that's a longer conversation than a blog post can hold. Real Serene and Rachael Silverstein are glad to have it whenever the time feels right, over coffee rather than a cold email.
