For most of the past four years, the windows at 901 Caroline Street stayed papered over. Anyone who walked past the corner where Goolrick's had scooped ice cream and mixed sodas since 1869 got used to seeing brown paper instead of a soda fountain. Then in late July, the paper came down. Goolrick's reopened at the end of the month, and the building that's reputedly home to the longest-running soda fountain in the country was lit up again on a Friday night like the gap had never happened.
That reopening is easy to read as a one-off, a beloved landmark coming back from a long renovation. It's actually the clearest example of something that's been happening in smaller ways all over downtown Fredericksburg this year. A storefront going dark here rarely means the block is losing a tenant for good. More often it means the space is between owners, and someone is already measuring the windows.
Four Years Behind Papered Glass
The renovation at 901 Caroline was not a quick refresh. Building owner Jarrell Properties Inc. and a team of local contractors spent four years on the 1808 structure, keeping the original tin ceilings and adding hand-laid tile flooring rather than starting from scratch. The kitchen is now led by Executive Chef D'Andre Sykes, who began his career in 2017 at Fredericksburg's Fahrenheit 132 before working in Nashville and Chicago, including stints at Elske and Jeong. The menu he built for the reopening nearly mirrors the traditional Goolrick's fare: chicken and egg salad sandwiches, salads, hand-mixed sodas and milkshakes, the same list of things people have been ordering there for generations.
Four years is long enough that a business could plausibly have decided not to come back. Instead the same name went back on the same building, serving nearly the same menu, in the same room with the same ceiling. That's not the pattern people usually assume for a shuttered downtown storefront. It's worth asking what else downtown has been doing with its empty spaces this year, because Goolrick's isn't the only address that spent time dark before it came back.
The Habit of Filling Its Own Gaps
Downtown Fredericksburg has had a handful of storefronts sit empty in 2026, and in almost every case, the next tenant came from somewhere else on the same few blocks rather than from outside the district entirely.
| Address | What left | Time dark | What came back |
|---|---|---|---|
| 901 Caroline St | Goolrick's soda fountain, pre-renovation | About 4 years | Goolrick's, same name, same building |
| 417 William St | Joshua Lawrence Salon, closed March 14 | About 6 months | FORT, imaginative-play toy store |
| 205 William St | Wild Hare Cider | Under a year, still finishing out | Curio's planned expansion space |
| Eagle Village (fire-damaged section) | Multiple tenants, 2024 fire damage | About 2 years | Lee's Cleaners, a Goodwill store, a laundromat, Automation Personnel Services |
| 2018 College Ave | Previous restaurant tenant | Not specified | La Casita Del Sabor, Salvadoran and Mexican |
The pattern isn't that downtown never loses a business. Joshua Lawrence Salon closed after eight years at 417 William Street, and that's a real loss for whoever had been getting their hair cut there since 2018. The pattern is what happens next: within about six months, a children's toy retailer called FORT had moved in and opened its doors, relocating from its longtime building on Herndon Street, which is now on the market for $810,000. The block didn't sit empty long enough for anyone to start calling it a dead storefront.
A Wine Bar Buys the Space Next Door
The clearest case of downtown recycling its own real estate is happening right now at 205 William Street, two doors from where it's already operating. Wild Hare Cider had been in that space before closing, and Curio's owner, Johnny Puckett, leased it not long after. In an email about his plans, he described the project as being in the early planning phase for "a food-forward hospitality concept" meant to complement the existing wine bar next door.
By September, Fredericksburg Free Press was filming inside the still-developing space for its Biz Beat Clips series, describing it as a plan to bring life back to a storefront that had been sitting vacant. The two buildings share a rear courtyard, which means Puckett isn't just adding a second location across town. He's stitching two adjacent storefronts into one operation, using the wall between them as connective tissue rather than a property line. That's a different kind of expansion than a business leaving downtown for a shopping center, and it's the same logic that put Goolrick's back in its original building instead of relocating to somewhere newer and cheaper to run.
What a 2024 Fire Actually Took
Eagle Village tells a slower version of the same story. A fire late in 2024 damaged a section of the shopping center, and for most of the time since, that section sat closed while insurance and construction sorted themselves out. By September 2026, tenants were moving back in. Lee's Cleaners relocated into the rebuilt space from the newer building at Eagle Village that the University of Mary Washington had purchased, after UMW decided not to renew commercial leases there. Alongside Lee's Cleaners, the rebuilt section now includes a Rappahannock Goodwill Industries store, a laundromat and an Automation Personnel Services branch.
Not everything that left came back. Play It Again Sports, which had occupied space there before the fire, will not reopen at that location. A shopping center recovering from fire damage isn't a guarantee that every previous tenant returns. But two years after the fire, the section is filling back in rather than sitting as a permanent gap, and the tenants filling it are drawn from businesses already operating nearby, not chains moving in from outside the area.
The Six Months Nobody Tracked
It's easy to notice when a storefront is dark. It's much harder to notice how quickly it usually stops being dark, because nobody walking past 417 William Street in April was counting the weeks until FORT's opening weekend in September. The salon's eight-year run ended, the toy store's move from its Herndon Street building had already been planned in July, and the gap between the two was ordinary enough that it barely registered as news until the new store's doors opened.
That's the part of downtown Fredericksburg that doesn't show up in a quick walk through the historic district. The storefronts that look empty on any given week are, more often than not, mid-transition rather than mid-decline. Wild Hare Cider's old space isn't vacant because nobody wants William Street real estate. It's vacant because the business two doors down is in the process of taking it over.
What This Means for Your Next Walk Down Caroline Street
If you're walking Caroline or William Street this fall and you pass a dark window, the honest answer is that you don't know yet whether it's a business that's gone for good or one that's between its old life and its next one. Goolrick's took four years to answer that question. FORT took about six months. Curio is still finishing its answer right now, two doors from where it already operates.
What the last year's worth of storefront activity does tell you is which way to bet. A wine bar leasing the space next door, a toy store moving three blocks over instead of leaving downtown, a fire-damaged shopping center section filling back in with familiar names rather than sitting condemned. None of that guarantees any specific dark window will relight. It does mean that in downtown Fredericksburg, a closed sign has been more often a placeholder than a period.
Next time you're downtown, walk past 901 Caroline and look at the tin ceiling that survived four years of renovation, then keep going to 205 William and see how far along the Curio expansion has gotten. It's the same habit both places, just at different stages.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood by watching what moves into its old buildings, you already understand more about downtown Fredericksburg than most listings will ever tell you. When you're ready to talk about what that means for a home nearby, Catharine Brown knows this stretch of the city block by block.
