Brown Bark Park Stays the Same. Six New Doors at Friendly Center Didn't.
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Walk the loop around Brown Bark Park on any Saturday morning and you could set your watch by it. Dogs pull toward the water station, kids drop bikes at the top of the sledding hill in winter and the concrete court in summer, and somebody has usually left a paperback in the little take-one-leave-one box by the trail. The park measures 24.8 acres by the city's own count, with a stream cutting through the middle and a multipurpose concrete court tucked near the edge. It has looked and felt this way for years.
Two miles away, at the intersection that gives the neighborhood its shopping center, almost nothing has stayed the same since last September. Six businesses opened at Friendly Center and The Shops at Friendly Center as part of one leasing push, and a seventh followed on its own within the same stretch of months. Hamilton Forest residents are living with both realities at once: a park that refuses to change and a commercial strip at its doorstep that just went through its busiest stretch in recent memory.
The city lists Brown Bark Park's official footprint as 24.8 acres of open space with a stream running through it and a multipurpose concrete court for residents to use. What that description leaves out is the texture longtime residents actually talk about: the skateboard ramps kids have used for years, the small neighborhood library where you take one book and leave one, and a sledding hill that has a reputation well beyond the neighborhood's own streets.
That reputation has a name attached to it. Sue Polinsky, who has lived in Hamilton Forest since 1986, has spent decades opening her home to the kids who sled the park's best hill.
"For decades, we've been the house where there was hot cider outside and a bathroom inside, plus a dryer."
Robert Bell, who moved to Hamilton Forest from Fisher Park in 2003, points to the same park as the place where you'll always find a group of kids playing soccer, with nearby Cascade Park just as packed on Saturday mornings. Bell also traces one of the neighborhood's steadier traditions back to a handful of residents who started the Brown Bark Benefit & 5K years ago. It still runs through the park today, raising money to help people experiencing homelessness.
None of this changed in 2025 or 2026. That is the point. The park is the fixed variable in a neighborhood where almost everything commercial around it moved.
Friendly Center announced its plans in April 2025, when CBL Properties confirmed four new restaurants and two retailers were on the way. What followed was a steady, month-by-month rollout rather than one grand opening:
That is six new doors from a single leasing push, all landing within about three months of each other. Local coverage from WFMY News 2 captured the mood at the time, with shoppers noting the visible construction and buzz building through the holiday season as each restaurant neared its opening date.
None of this arrived by displacing something the neighborhood already loved. First Watch took over a vacated Qdoba. North Italia moved into the old post office building. Cooper's Hawk filled a space left behind by NY & Co. The new wave slotted into turnover, not teardown.
That distinction matters if you already shop here. Fleming's Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar, Pieology Pizzeria and the Regal Greensboro Grande Theater are all still exactly where they've always been. So are the anchors that have defined Friendly Center for a generation: Macy's, Belk, Barnes & Noble, Whole Foods and the 72,000-square-foot Harris Teeter that opened as the chain's largest store in North Carolina back in 2006. Caribou Coffee and REI round out the mix. The center added six businesses without asking residents to give up any of the ones they already relied on.
A seventh business arrived on its own timeline, months after the leasing wave had already run its course. Owner Julie Summers relocated her boutique, Poppy & Co., to Friendly Center in July 2026 after six years in Eden, North Carolina, bringing her father and co-owner Phil Stanton along. Summers dropped out of college years ago to open the original store, and the Friendly Center location is the first time the shop has added its own coffee and smoothie bar. Stanton has said he is confident many of their longtime customers will make the drive from Eden to shop at the new location.
A boutique adding a coffee bar in the same shopping season that a national restaurant group filled three storefronts and a piercing studio moved in next door is not a coincidence. Both read the same signal about where Greensboro shoppers are already spending their afternoons.
Living in Hamilton Forest right now means holding two timelines in your head without either one crowding out the other. Brown Bark Park keeps the same slow, familiar pace it has kept for years: the same stream, the same sledding hill, the same 5K that raises money for neighbors without homes, the same soccer games at Cascade Park on Saturday mornings. Friendly Center, two miles away, just moved through its densest stretch of new openings in a long while, adding seven businesses in less than a year without touching a single storefront residents already counted on.
Neither pace cancels the other out. That is the actual shape of the neighborhood this year: a park that didn't need to change, sitting a short drive from a shopping center that just proved it still could.
Emma Skelton lives and works in these Greensboro neighborhoods and keeps a running list of what's changing, and what isn't, block by block. Work With Emma whenever you want a local read on Hamilton Forest, Friendly Center, or anywhere else in the Piedmont Triad.
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