The Art Deco building at 1132 Noble Street sat empty for years.
Kress Mercantile Co opened there July 11, 2026 — twenty indoor vendors under one roof, the plaster ceiling restored, the original terrazzo floor visible again. Two blocks north, Justin Hall has been selling Anniston-themed gifts out of an 1895 Victorian brick building since December. Jean Ellison runs a music school on the corridor. Jerod Snider has been roasting coffee and building community at 1400 Quintard since 2021.
Nobody planned this together. But if you stand at the corner and look down the block, it looks like something is happening.
It is.
The building that became Old Noble was Griffin's Jewelers before that. Before that it housed Holly's Department Store, with a dance hall on the second floor in the 1920s. Justin Hall bought it in 2021 with his fiancé Kevin Cheatwood — three years of renovation before a single customer walked through the door. Eleven thousand square feet. Nineteen-foot ceilings. An aluminum facade from the 1950s plastered over the original 1895 brick.
When they pulled the aluminum off, the brick was still there.
Justin noticed the gap around 2019 — there was nothing Anniston-themed to buy in the entire county. No gift shop that sold the place to itself. The one that used to fill that role, the Rabbit Hutch, was long gone. So he bought a building and spent three years fixing it.
He named the shop Old Noble, which probably nods to the Old Noble movie theater — another thing the city already lost. You could read the name as grief. You could also read it as a declaration: old things are still here, still worth something, still worth naming.
The Kress building is a different kind of story.
S.H. Kress & Co. was a five-and-dime chain that built in hundreds of Southern downtowns between 1900 and 1930 — always Art Deco, always quality construction, always the most architecturally significant building on the block. When the chain collapsed, the buildings stayed. Most of them became something else. A few became nothing.
The one on Noble Street is now Kress Mercantile Co — a collective of twenty vendors, the kind of space where a handmade candle shares a counter with vintage Alabama enamelware and someone's grandmother's recipe in a mason jar.
These buildings have a way of outlasting the businesses that built them. The city keeps losing things and the architecture keeps surviving.
What's coming next is something I'm part of, so I'll say it plainly: we're calling this corridor the Noble Street Collective.
Not a brand. A name. A way of making the thing that's already here legible to people who don't yet know to look.
Gather Ground — a private, vetted producer market — will run in the First Center courtyard at 1400 Noble. Market days, local makers, people who grow things and build things and cook things selling directly to the people who want them. No city politics. No middleman. Just the transaction and the conversation that comes with it.
The name for the corridor is new. The people in it have been here.
I ran the Anniston Downtown Farmers Market for a season. I know what it looks like when someone drives forty minutes to sell jam at a folding table and makes enough to cover the gas back home. I know what it looks like when they make enough to cover the gas and the groceries and feel something they haven't felt in a while.
I know what it looks like when the market goes away and they have nowhere to go.
Gather Ground exists because of what I learned running that market. The vendors are the product. The place is the frame. Noble Street is the address.
Come see what's being built.
The Noble Street Collective — Old Noble, Kress Mercantile Co, The Music Box, Called Coffee, and Gather Ground — is in downtown Anniston. Market days at First Center start this fall. Get on the list.
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