Walk into Camp North End on a Friday night this September and you'll find a queer icon dance party spinning until midnight on a rooftop that didn't exist a month ago. Room Service still runs its usual crowd downstairs. Two floors up, a temporary bar called Bar Fly has pool tables, darts, and a rotating frozen slushie machine crammed onto a rooftop above Keswick Avenue. It's the kind of oddball addition that has defined this 76-acre stretch of old Ford plant and Gama Goat military-truck buildings since it started filling back in with tenants: small, specific, run by people you could probably meet if you stuck around long enough.
That's worth noticing right now, because the company that just took over as Camp North End's lead developer has a documented habit of eventually replacing exactly that kind of business with something more recognizable.
What Just Opened, and Who's Behind It
Bar Fly is the newest addition, and it tells you something about how this place still operates. It opened in late August above Room Service, the work of Rachel Hopkins, who also owns Room Service and Black Moth Bars, teaming up with Jackie DeLoach, who owns Hattie's Tap & Tavern. It's billed as a temporary concept, running through September with weekend events, and it sits at 701 Keswick Ave, reachable by a staircase on the side of the lounge below it.
Back in April, chef Darius Johnson opened Sage & Citrus at Camp, adding locally sourced grain bowls and smoothies to a food lineup that already includes Free Range Brewing and Hex Coffee. Add in Tipsy Pickle, which paired six pickleball courts with a food menu inside the complex, and you get a pattern: nearly everything landing at Camp North End lately is a first or second location for someone local, not a fourth or fifth for a regional chain.
That pattern isn't an accident. Camp North End has functioned as an incubator since it reopened as a mixed-use site, home to more than 95 businesses and organizations, most of them local. The site's owners, ATCO Properties & Management and partner Shorenstein Properties, built that reputation on purpose, and it's the reason a longtime tenant like DUPP&SWAT could grow up here rather than needing to start somewhere with lower rent and less foot traffic.
The Landlord Charlotte Actually Talks About
Here's the part that's changing. In February, Atlanta-based Jamestown took over as lead developer at Camp North End, arriving with land entitlements for up to 3.2 million square feet of future development across 41 acres of the site's parking lots and unused historic buildings. For comparison, everything restored and open at Camp North End so far, the murals, the food stalls, the office space, the Kinship apartments, adds up to roughly 500,000 square feet across 35 acres. Jamestown's entitlements alone are more than six times the size of what currently exists.
Jamestown isn't new to this kind of project. The firm previously owned Birkdale Village and co-owns Optimist Hall, and it's known for signing the same tenants across its properties, brands like Botiwalla and Honeysuckle Gelato showing up at more than one Jamestown site. Camp North End's own reporting on the deal noted that Jamestown envisions more apartments and retail that leans toward wellness and home decor, with more openness to national brands than the site has shown up to now.
That's not a knock on the company. It's a different growth model than the one that got Camp North End here, and it comes with a specific tension that longtime tenants are already naming publicly. When the ownership change was announced, DUPP&SWAT wrote a letter to the QCity Metro editor asking for transparency and protection for the creative businesses that built the site's identity:
"Charlotte deserves development that honors the people who shape its soul."
Jamestown president Michael Phillips has said supporting existing tenants is part of the company's approach, pointing to driving foot traffic and providing marketing help. ATCO and Shorenstein are staying involved as partners too, which has eased some of the concern that the character could shift overnight. But a site with entitlements for six times its current footprint doesn't fill that space with more of exactly what's already there. It fills it with whatever pencils out at scale, and that's rarely a single-owner rooftop bar with a pool table.
Why the Timing Matters If You're Going This Fall
None of this means Bar Fly or Sage & Citrus are going anywhere tomorrow. Construction on the new phases could start later this year, according to Jamestown, but plans and timelines haven't been shared publicly yet. What it does mean is that the version of Camp North End open right now, heavy on solo operators and first-time concepts, sits at a specific moment. The mix you'd find on a random Saturday this fall reflects years of the ATCO and Shorenstein incubator model, before the scale of Jamestown's entitlements has had a chance to reshape who can afford to be here.
If you already have a favorite spot at Camp, or you've been meaning to check one out, this is the season to do it without assuming it'll look the same in three years. A few of the names carrying that current mix:
- Bar Fly – rooftop bar above Room Service, pool and darts, open through September as a temporary concept
- Sage & Citrus – grain bowls and smoothies from chef Darius Johnson, opened this past April
- Tipsy Pickle – food paired with six pickleball courts
- Free Range Brewing and Hex Coffee – two of the longer-running anchors in the food and drink lineup
- DUPP&SWAT – one of the site's longest-tenured creative businesses, and the one that's been most vocal about what comes next
The site itself is free to walk through and open around the clock, though individual businesses keep their own hours, and weekends draw noticeably bigger crowds than weekdays. If you're headed over, the surface lots fill up fast on a Saturday night, but the newer parking garage almost always has room, with the first two hours free.
The Bigger Pattern in North Charlotte
Camp North End's situation isn't happening in isolation. It sits in the same conversation as Birkdale Village and Optimist Hall, two other Jamestown properties where the tenant mix eventually consolidated around brands the company already had relationships with elsewhere. Whether that happens here, and how fast, depends on decisions that haven't been made public yet. What's already public is the scale of what's possible, and the letter from a tenant who's watched the site grow asking that whatever comes next still leaves room for the people who built its reputation in the first place.
For anyone who already calls this stretch of Charlotte home, or who's weighing how neighborhoods on the north side of the city compare to life around Lake Norman, that kind of shift is worth watching closely. If you're curious how areas like this fit into the broader Charlotte real estate picture, it's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these patterns for a living.
That's exactly the kind of local read Terese Odell brings to clients across Charlotte and Lake Norman, whether you're deciding where to grab dinner this weekend or thinking further ahead about where you want to live next. Schedule a free consultation any time you want a second set of eyes on how a neighborhood is actually changing.
