What Changed On Laurens Road While Gower Waited For Its Trail
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Walk out the back gate of Gower Estates, the pocket of the Parkins Mill and Gower area anchored by the neighborhood pool off Laurens Road, on a Thursday evening and the restaurant row is close enough to smell. Half a mile, maybe less, depending on which street you're on. Ottaray's raw bar is pulling oysters. Kitchen Sync is running its dinner service two doors down. None of it is more than a ten-minute walk by the odometer, and none of it is actually walkable, because the sidewalk runs out well before the crosswalk does and the Swamp Rabbit Trail, which was supposed to solve exactly this problem, still doesn't reach the neighborhood.
That gap between what's changed on Laurens Road and what hasn't changed in how Gower gets there is the actual story this season. The restaurants have moved fast. The infrastructure meant to connect a walkable neighborhood to a walkable commercial strip has not moved at all, at least not yet, and the reason why says something real about how the corridor works.
The space at 1418 Laurens Road used to be The Warehouse at Midtown, a food hall opened by Thomas and Angie Wirthlin. It sat quiet for months while the couple focused on their other project, City Market at Bridgeway Station. Thomas's brother, Taft Wirthlin, had spent five years wanting to open a full-service seafood restaurant in Greenville. He took over the lease, gutted the food-hall concept, and opened The Ottaray Raw Bar & Taphouse in December 2024, named for the city's old Ottaray Hotel. The space now runs a front dining room, a 22-seat bar, and a private back room, with lunch, dinner, and a weekend brunch built around a Bloody Mary loaded with oysters, crab claws, and shrimp. From an empty lease to a full seafood menu took about as long as it takes to plan a wedding.
Two doors down, Kitchen Sync has marked a full decade in business, split between its original Laurens Road location and a second spot on the Eastside. This month, running August 13 through 23, 2026, the restaurant offered a $35 three-course dinner for Restaurant Week South Carolina, one of the specific promotions that rotates through the corridor's calendar. Kitchen Sync sits on the same stretch as Grazeland, Fork and Plough, The Jones Oyster, and Scoundrel, a run of restaurants that has reshuffled its lineup more than once in the years since the Warehouse at Midtown first opened, all within a five-minute drive of the Gower pool.
A commercial lease on Laurens Road can turn over in the time it takes a city trail spur to get through a bidding process.
Back in 2023, Greenville's mobility coordinator laid out plans for three neighborhood connectors that would tie into the Green Line extension of the Swamp Rabbit Trail: one for Nicholtown, one for Verdae, and two feeding Gower specifically, at the Industrial Drive and Henderson Drive intersections with Laurens Road. The hope at the time was to permit and bid the work by the end of that year, with construction starting in early 2024.
By the following fall, the plan for Gower had narrowed to a specific fix: improving the pedestrian crossing at Henderson Road and Laurens Road, right next to the Mazda dealership, so the trail could route through an easement to reach the Green Line. That's still just a crossing improvement, not a built path, and the timeline kept sliding. The most recent public update on the project, reported by the Greenville Journal in early 2025, said the design work for all three spurs, including Gower's, had been completed, and the city was preparing to open bidding on a roughly $2.5 million construction contract that spring. No groundbreaking date for the Gower connector has surfaced since.
Compare that to the Legacy Park extension nearby, a separate trail segment being built by the Verdae development itself rather than through the city's contracting process, with its own private construction schedule and no public bid to wait on. A developer building on its own land can set its own timeline. A neighborhood waiting on a municipal contract runs on a different clock, one that doesn't answer to a restaurant's opening night or a summer swim season.
None of this means Gower is cut off. The existing pedestrian crossing at Henderson and Laurens works today, it's just a street crossing, not a dedicated path, so anyone walking to Ottaray or Kitchen Sync is doing it along a road shoulder rather than a greenway. For a car-free loop that doesn't involve Laurens Road traffic at all, Gower Park itself offers a paved three-quarter-mile walking loop around the baseball diamonds, tennis and basketball courts, and playgrounds, with parking or the grassed shoulder as the starting point. It's not the Swamp Rabbit Trail, but it's the neighborhood's own answer for anyone who wants pavement under their feet without crossing a four-lane road to get it.
For the actual Green Line, the closest confirmed access remains the sections that already opened years ago near Cleveland Park and further along Laurens Road toward Verdae, which means a short drive rather than a walk for most Gower addresses until the spur project clears its bidding phase.
While the trail waits on a contractor, Gower's social calendar keeps running on its own schedule, mostly organized around the neighborhood pool. The swim team there has picked up more than twenty division championships over the years, one of the more consistent records in Greenville County recreational swimming. Beyond the pool, the HOA runs a full slate of gatherings that don't need a trail to happen:
As the calendar turns toward fall, these are the events that actually structure a Gower resident's year, not a future trail spur. The restaurant row solves for a Thursday night out. The HOA calendar solves for everything communal in between. The trail, whenever it finally breaks ground, will solve for the half-mile in the middle that currently requires a car.
That's the real shape of this neighborhood right now. It has a commercial strip that reinvents itself on a private timeline and a public infrastructure project first announced back in 2023 that, as of the last confirmed update, was still sitting in a bidding process a year and a half ago with no reported groundbreaking since. Both of those facts are true at the same time, and only one of them is likely to change before next summer.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like Gower or Parkins Mill actually offers day to day, beyond the listing photos, that's the kind of detail worth knowing before you make a decision. Patrick Furman and The Furman Group spend as much time tracking what's actually happening on the ground in these corridors as they do tracking comparable sales. Let's Connect if you want a read on this neighborhood, or any other in the Upstate, that goes past the surface.
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