"Marion has always been home to me," Aurelia Harbolt said in March, standing behind the counter of the frozen custard shop she now runs on Church Street. Harbolt is a Marion native, and she was talking about her own return to the neighborhood where she grew up and later raised her own family. What she probably didn't expect people to notice is that one of her shop's flavors, Lydia Delight, is named after the building two doors down.
That's not a coincidence. It's a clue. Over the last seven months, four different businesses have opened within a few blocks of each other in downtown Marion, and most people who've eaten at one of them have no idea the others are connected. They're not four separate signs of a neighborhood picking up steam. They're one redevelopment project, executed in phases, by one developer, on one historic building and its immediate footprint.
The building that sat empty for decades
The anchor of all of this is Lydia Lofts, at 117 E. Church St. Henry Development Group opened it on February 11 after converting an early 20th-century building that had sat vacant for years into modern apartments and short-term rental units. The renovation kept the original architectural character intact, exposed brick, original woodwork, the bones of a building that had been part of downtown Marion for a century, while adding the kind of open-concept living space that didn't exist in the original floor plan.
That's the part most residents already know, if they know anything. What's less obvious is that Lydia Lofts wasn't a standalone project. It was the first phase of something bigger, and the building's own name started showing up in unrelated places almost immediately.
The timeline nobody announced all at once
Here's how the rest of it unfolded, in order:
- February 11 – Lydia Lofts opens at 117 E. Church St., converting a long-vacant historic building into residential units and short-term rentals.
- March 6 – Whit's Frozen Custard opens at 119 East Church Street, right next to Lydia Lofts, with a custom mural inspired by Marion and a flavor called Lydia Delight on the rotating menu.
- Spring – Lazeez Grill, a fast-casual Mediterranean spot, opens in the same stretch of Church Street. Yelp reviewers describe it as sharing a wall with Whit's, close enough that customers routinely walk from one to the other for dessert after dinner.
- May 20 – Ox-B's, a Newark-based fried chicken concept, opens its seventh Central Ohio location at 172 S. Main St., a few blocks over from the Church Street cluster.
Reporting from WhatNow Columbus, drawing on Columbus Business First's coverage of the Ox-B's opening, confirms that all of it, the lofts, the custard shop, the Mediterranean counter, and the chicken restaurant on a different street entirely, are part of the same $3.5 million Lydia redevelopment project run by Henry Development Group. The building had sat empty for decades. Now it's the reason four different addresses opened within one calendar year.
Why the addresses don't match
If you've walked past Ox-B's on Main Street and separately grabbed custard on Church Street, there's no obvious reason you'd connect them. Different street, different type of business, different look. That's exactly why this is worth pointing out: a single developer's project can span more than one block and more than one kind of storefront, and still read to residents as a handful of unrelated openings rather than a coordinated push.
It also explains something about the pace of change downtown this year. It hasn't felt like one dramatic announcement. It's felt like a string of smaller ones, a ribbon cutting in February, a grand opening in March, a new sign in the spring, a fried chicken spot in May, each one landing as its own small piece of news. Strung together, they add up to a developer methodically filling a footprint that includes both residential space above storefronts and commercial space across two streets, all built around one historic building that gave the whole project its name.
What this actually changes about the block
The practical effect is that Church Street between Lydia Lofts and Whit's now functions as a short walkable stretch where people live upstairs and eat downstairs, something downtown Marion hasn't had in this form for a long time. Henry Development Group's own description of the lofts leans on exactly that: easy access to local restaurants, shops, and entertainment venues, all within a short walk of a building that used to sit dark.
For anyone who already lives in Marion, the useful takeaway isn't the redevelopment math. It's that the businesses on this block aren't competing for foot traffic so much as sharing it by design. Grab dinner at Lazeez, walk next door for a Whitser, and you've covered both ends of the same building's ground floor without crossing a street.
The next reason to be downtown
That same stretch of downtown is also where the fall calendar lands. Downtown Marion Inc. is running its first-ever Fall Festival on Thursday, October 16, from 5 to 8 p.m., with a chili cookoff, fall games for kids, local vendors, a DJ, and a scavenger hunt through downtown. It's one of two brand-new additions to the calendar this year, alongside a Cookie Walk that's joining longstanding traditions like the Christmas Parade and the tree lighting in Founders Park.
The Fall Festival arrives right after Third Thursdays wrapped for the season. That monthly series, which runs May through September and draws thousands downtown for live music and food trucks, just had its last date of the year. October 16 is effectively the next scheduled reason to be downtown on a weeknight, and it lands two blocks from a building that's spent the year quietly filling up.
None of this required a grand announcement, a ribbon-cutting for the whole project, or a press release explaining the connections. It happened in four separate stories over seven months, each one true on its own, each one missing the same piece of context. The building gave the custard flavor its name. The custard flavor is what gives the whole year away.
If you're already spending your Thursday nights on Church Street and find yourself wondering what else is changing on that block, or any other block in Marion, the MORE Ohio Team keeps close track of what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what shows up in a press release. Work With Us.
