American Tobacco Campus Doesn't Need a Bulls Game Anymore

On a Wednesday afternoon in June, Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams cut a ribbon that had nothing to do with baseball or a Broadway tour stop. The occasion was 40,000 square feet of coworking space in the Washington Building at American Tobacco Campus, a botanical library and podcasting studio included, at 324 Blackwell Street across from Bay 9 and 10. Michael Goodmon, Executive Vice President at Capitol Broadcasting Company, spoke alongside the mayor.

For twenty years, the reason most of us crossed Blackwell Street was on a schedule. Bulls game at seven. DPAC curtain at eight. This August, that math is changing, and the campus itself has been announcing it in pieces for months.

The Ribbon Wasn't for a Restaurant

The tenant is American Underground, and its return to ATC is less a debut than a homecoming. The organization's current footprint on Durham's Main Street covers roughly 25,000 square feet and supports about 850 members across 250 companies. Its founding logic, as executive director Laura Zabinski has described it, was that growing businesses in Durham keeps people working, staying, hiring, and spending in the same place they live. The new ATC location doesn't replace that Main Street presence so much as give the organization a second gear.

"Sixteen years ago, we took a bet on Durham's entrepreneurial spirit, and Durham paid it back tenfold."

That's Goodmon, speaking at the same ribbon-cutting. It's a line about a coworking lease, but it doubles as a fair description of what's happening to the whole campus this year.

The Chamber Followed the Coworking Space

American Underground isn't moving into ATC alone. The Durham Chamber of Commerce is also planning a move onto the campus, which means two of the city's core business-infrastructure organizations will sit inside what used to be a stop for a game and a beer. ATC already carries legacy office tenants like GSK, WUNC, and Burt's Bees/Clorox, plus a childcare location, which makes the campus function for daily life and not just for work hours.

There's a detail here that only makes sense if you already live nearby: the same campus is home to Ekhaya, an intimate restaurant from chef and restaurateur couple Chef Zweli and Leonardo Williams, the same Leonardo Williams who was holding the ribbon in June. The mayor who showed up to open a coworking space also has a table a few doors down. That's not a coincidence worth over-reading, but it's the kind of overlap that tells you the campus has stopped being a place people visit and started being a place people run their week from.

Tomorrow, the Food Side Catches Up

If the work side of ATC turned a corner in June, the food side turns one this week. East of Texas soft-opened July 31 and holds its grand opening August 10 in the Reed Building, which is tomorrow as this is written. The Winston-Salem restaurant, known for Tex-Mex house-smoked barbecue and outdoor dining, is taking a 5,579-square-foot space on campus.

It isn't opening into a vacuum. Lutra Cafe and Bakery opened this summer at 312 Blackwell Street, in the Noell Building, giving the campus a daytime bakery that doesn't depend on an evening event to draw a line out the door. And the meadery that's been quietly evolving since late 2024 finally has a name that fits its new range: Honeygirl Meadery rebranded as Ment Beverage Co. after moving and expanding its facilities, adding cider, beer, sake, Delta-9 drinks, and non-alcoholic options alongside its original meads. The sake is the first produced in Durham, made with rice grown in Eastern North Carolina, and the tasting room sits inside ATC's social district.

Here's how the tenant mix breaks down as of this week:

Two of four are open. One opens tomorrow. One is still framing walls. That last column matters, because it means the campus is honest about being unfinished rather than pretending it's already arrived.

A Campus Built for a Wednesday, Not Just a Saturday

None of this works without one structural fact: ATC sits inside the Bullpen Social District, which means a drink bought at one business can legally travel with you as you walk the campus. That single rule is what turns a cluster of separate businesses into something closer to a continuous stretch you can move through without planning a route.

Put a normal week together with what's already open and it looks something like this:

• Morning: a desk at American Underground, coffee from whichever counter is closest that day
• Midday: lunch at Lutra, or a plate to go if the line's long
• Evening: a to-go cocktail from a Bullpen business, carried across the brick paths under the Lucky Strike Water Tower
• Occasional weekend: a Bulls game at the park that opened in 1996, or a show at DPAC, which followed in 2008 and became the campus's other cultural anchor

Last fall, Virge Yoga closed out Move-A-Bull, Durham's largest open-streets event, with an hour-long class in the outfield, which is as good a sign as any that the ballpark itself has stopped being reserved for baseball alone.

What's Still Being Built

None of this reads as finished, and it shouldn't. Fullsteam's taproom, a 9,000-square-foot space set between the water tower and the smokestack, is still under construction, and Fullsteam, Lutra, and East of Texas were all originally announced together as 2026 additions, with two now open and one opening this week. A few blocks south, a separate and much larger project is underway: an 11-acre expansion with 353,000 square feet of office space, a 343-unit residential tower, and 104,000 square feet of retail anchored by a prepared-foods grocer. That's a different phase of ATC's growth entirely, but it points the same direction as everything else on this list: toward a campus that assumes people are there on an ordinary Tuesday, not just when there's something on the marquee.

For years, American Tobacco Campus asked a simple question of anyone walking through: what's the occasion? This August, for the first time, the honest answer for a growing number of Durham residents is nothing in particular. Just a Wednesday, a desk, a sandwich, and a drink carried across the brick on the way home.

If you're curious about what daily life actually looks like in different corners of Durham and the wider Triangle, that's the kind of ground-level detail Nev Nelson spends time tracking neighborhood by neighborhood. Explore more on the Durham neighborhood guide, and when you're ready to talk specifics, Let's Connect.