If you drive East Lake Avenue often enough, you've probably slowed down at 117 to check the marquee. For most of the past year and a half, it's said nothing worth reading. Now it says The Abigaile, and depending on how attached you were to what used to be there, that's either good news or a small loss you're still getting over.
Either way, the story of that one storefront turns out to explain more about downtown Auburndale right now than any single new restaurant could on its own.
The Marquee Says The Abigaile Now
The space belonged to Crave & Copper, the craft brewpub that opened in October 2019, survived a fire two months later, and came back in September 2022 with a bigger kitchen and an outdoor patio built for live music. It closed again, and this time it stayed closed.
Chef Tina Calhoon is the one betting on that address next. Her restaurant, The Abigaile, is a full-service Modern American concept with roughly 80 seats inside and another 80 outside, an indoor and outdoor bar, and a covered bandstand built for Friday and Saturday night music. Early menu talk includes confit wings in Nueske's bacon fat, a chicken shawarma salad, and a sea bass finished with verbena beurre blanc. It's 100 percent female owned, with Calhoon as chef and her husband Tim running the business side.
The original target was a mid-June 2026 opening. As of this writing, that date has come and gone without a confirmed opening announcement, which anyone who watched Crave & Copper's own comeback drag through insurance delays and pandemic supply problems will recognize as familiar territory. A construction update posted to the restaurant's Google profile back in November read simply that construction had finally begun. Downtown Auburndale build-outs rarely land on the first date anyone puts on them.
Calhoon has been candid about why she's willing to take on a space with that history. She's counting on the businesses that opened up and down the block to help lead a revitalization of downtown Auburndale.
The Two Blocks Doing the Heavy Lifting
Walk a few minutes in any direction from Auburndale Downtown Park and you'll see what she means.
- Haven Coffee Roasters, at 202 N Park St, opened a flagship café roughly five times the size of its original Winter Haven location, with an in-house bakery and a 35-kilo roaster replacing the 10-kilo machine the brand outgrew.
- Baxter's Quality Meats, at 101 W Polk Ave, gave Troy Baxter's meat and seafood delivery business its first storefront, after years of running it out of, in his own words, a pickup truck and a fishing cooler.
- Auburndale Ice Cream opened for scoops in July 2025 at the front of the BrackShack Kick' Yo Butt BBQ Bar & Grill on E Lake Ave, one more reason to park downtown instead of driving past it.
None of these opened in isolation, and none of them are chains that landed here because a site selection algorithm liked the traffic counts. They're small, owner-run businesses that picked this particular stretch of downtown on purpose. Jonathan Lane, who runs Haven Coffee with his wife Lynsey, put it plainly when asked why Auburndale: they saw growth, they saw desire, and they saw a park out front worth building around.
A Storefront That's Failed Before, Which Is the Point
Here's the detail that makes 117 E Lake Ave worth paying attention to instead of just another opening announcement. This isn't a fresh, untested address. It's a location that already burned down once, came back once, and still couldn't make it work a second time. A brand-new operator studied that record and signed the lease anyway.
That's a different kind of vote of confidence than a press release about a shiny new build. It means someone looked at downtown Auburndale's failure rate on one specific corner and decided the surrounding momentum, the coffee flagship, the meat market, the ice cream counter, the foot traffic from the park, was strong enough to outweigh the address's own track record. If you've lived here long enough to remember the fire, or the reopening, or the second closing, that's the part of this story that should actually move the needle on how you think about downtown's trajectory.
The Park Isn't Just a Backdrop
None of this is happening in a vacuum from city hall, either. The First Saturday Downtown Auburndale Market runs every month at Auburndale Downtown Park, with more than 40 local vendors setting up for a free community morning that's become a fixture for anyone who wants to shop local without driving to Lakeland or Winter Haven.
A few minutes away, the city is in the middle of a $20 million redevelopment at Lake Ariana Park, led by SpringerVoss Construction with The Lunz Group as architect, that will relocate the Civic Center to the site of the old Mac's Beach and add a boat dock, picnic pavilions, and beach volleyball courts. City Manager Bobby Tillman has called Lake Ariana a focal point of Auburndale, and it's easy to see why once you notice how much of the city's public investment is clustering around the same lake the coffee flagship and meat market and new restaurant are clustering around too. Assistant City Manager Amy Palmer has pointed to the city's population passing 20,000 as a driver of that momentum, and downtown's business openings track right alongside it.
Put the market, the park redevelopment, and the private openings on the same map and the pattern gets hard to miss. Downtown Auburndale isn't growing evenly across the whole city. It's growing in one walkable radius centered on the park, and the businesses moving into it know that about each other even if nobody's said it out loud until now.
What This Means for Your Next Saturday
If you're already local, none of this requires a decision from you, just an update to your routine. Grab coffee and a pastry at Haven, pick up dinner protein at Baxter's, catch the First Saturday Market if you haven't in a while, and keep an eye on that Abigaile marquee for whenever the doors finally open. The wait has been long enough that when it happens, it'll feel like the whole block finally clicked into place.
For anyone weighing what this kind of downtown momentum actually means for the neighborhood long term, that's the conversation we have with buyers and sellers in Auburndale every week. If you want a local read on what's changing block by block, Engel & Völkers Lakeland - Lisa Matheny is always happy to talk it through, no pressure, no obligation.
