Sea Monkey Opened On New Year's Eve. Isaly's Still Says "Coming Soon."

Walk down Smallman Street on a Friday night this month and you'll pass four businesses that didn't exist a year ago. Turn onto Penn Avenue two blocks later and you'll pass a storefront that has said the same thing in its window since March: "Coming Soon. Summer 2026." Summer has come and gone.

That gap isn't one slow contractor or one stuck permit. It's the clearest evidence this year of how change actually moves through the Strip District, and it's worth understanding if you want to read the neighborhood's storefronts instead of just walking past them.

The Corner That Moved in Months, Not Years

Start at Smallman and work your way toward Railroad Street and you'll count five separate ownership groups that opened five separate concepts in under a year, most in under six months.

Sea Monkey landed next to Coop DeVille with a New Year's Eve opening, the Richard DeShantz Restaurant Group's Mediterranean and Asian fusion concept built for shareable plates, high-end cocktails, and a room designed to run late. A few blocks over, Von Elrod's brought its self-pour bar and restaurant format to 1447 Smallman Street after testing the concept in Wexford first, a template that let the company skip the guesswork before committing to a Strip District lease. Roaming Bean, long known as a coffee truck, took a corner spot at Smallman and 15th and became a brick-and-mortar without giving up the truck. Down at 2703 Penn Avenue, Bubs' Lounge opened as a hookah and cigar bar next door to Preeti's Pitt, started by Preeti Tuli as a memorial to her late son, Ahmir "Bubs" Tuli.

Then there's the Railroad Street trio. Pat and Nancy McDonnell, well known Pittsburgh restaurateurs, soft-opened Atria's, Juniper Grill, and the 1930 Cigar Bar together at 2350 Railroad Street ahead of a formal grand opening planned for April 1. The detail that makes this one worth noting: Atria's had been a strictly suburban brand since its PNC Park location closed nearly a decade ago, and Juniper Grill, previously found only in Cranberry, Peters, Pleasant Hills, and Murrysville, opened its first city location here. Two suburban-only brands chose the Strip for their return to Pittsburgh proper, and both were pouring drinks within months of announcing.

Same Neighborhood, Different Clocks

Line these projects up against Isaly's and against the one redevelopment deal moving through City Hall, and the pattern gets obvious fast.

Five private restaurant and bar concepts, all open. Two projects tied to something bigger than a single lease, both still waiting.

Why the Bars Move Fast

The businesses on the left side of that table share a structural advantage that has nothing to do with hustle or capital. They're moving into commercial space that's already built out for food and drink service. A single ownership group signs a lease, pulls permits for a kitchen or bar buildout and a liquor license, and opens once the work is done. There's no public vote required, no historical standard to match, no second party whose approval the timeline depends on. That's why Von Elrod's could pilot in Wexford and then execute a near-identical opening on Smallman Street, and why the McDonnells could run three concepts through soft opening to grand opening in a matter of weeks.

Why Isaly's Doesn't

Isaly's is not simply leasing four walls and installing a bar. Jim and Leslee Conroy, who own O'Hara-based Conroy Foods, bought the entire Isaly's brand back in 2015 and have spent the years since positioning themselves as stewards of a Pittsburgh deli and ice cream institution rather than operators of a new restaurant. The Strip District shop at 2111 Penn Avenue, a 3,500-square-foot space in the former Boulevard Glass & Metal building, is being built out with reference to an original Isaly's deli operations manual, with the Conroys consulting the Heinz History Center to get the details of the deli counter and ice cream parlor right rather than approximating them.

That's a fundamentally different kind of project than filling a storefront. It's also one where the timeline has already slipped once. Reporting from last November noted the opening had been pushed back even as the owners kept 2026 as their target, and the "Summer 2026" signage that went up in the window this past March came and went without an announced opening. Recreating a specific historical identity, down to the equipment and the recipes, simply doesn't move at lease-and-license speed, no matter how much goodwill the brand carries into the neighborhood.

The Slowest Clock Belongs to City Hall

If Isaly's represents the middle speed, the slowest belongs to a project a few blocks away that most residents haven't clocked yet. The long-vacant former Office of Municipal Investigations Building at 2608 Penn Avenue is the subject of a redevelopment plan from the Urban Redevelopment Authority, which issued a request for proposals back in March 2026 and, this past July, entered exclusive negotiations with a firm called TAGLYZ LLC on a $4.35 million mixed-use plan. The proposal would add a third story to the existing structure and split the ground floor into two commercial spaces meant for small business tenants.

Exclusive negotiations are not a signed development agreement, and a signed development agreement is not a groundbreaking. Public redevelopment deals like this one move through board presentations, negotiation periods, and financing before a single permit gets pulled, which means residents should expect this corner of Penn Avenue to sit closer to its current state for a while yet, even as the deal itself represents real progress. The same month that story broke, the Post-Gazette also reported on plans for new townhomes adding variety to a Strip District housing stock that's largely been warehouses converted to apartments, another sign that construction and adaptive reuse in this neighborhood run on a longer calendar than its restaurant scene does.

Reading Your Own Block

None of this means one kind of project matters more than another. It means the "coming soon" sign in a window tells you almost nothing until you know which category it belongs to.

• A private lease with an established operator behind it (a restaurant group, a proven concept from another market) moves in months. That's the Von Elrod's and Atria's model.
• A brand rebuild tied to historical accuracy or archival material moves on a longer, less predictable clock, often a year or more from the first lease announcement. That's Isaly's.
• Anything routed through a redevelopment authority, an RFP, or a board vote moves slowest of all, and the only reliable way to track it is to follow the public negotiation itself rather than guess from a storefront sign. That's 2608 Penn Avenue.

If you're trying to gauge when Isaly's will actually pour its first Skyscraper cone, the Isaly's Nation social pages remain the most direct source, since the brand has used them for every update so far. If you're curious about 2608 Penn Avenue, the URA's board agendas are the place to watch, not the building's windows.

Both a scrappy self-pour bar and a hundred-plus-year-old deli brand and a city redevelopment authority all wanting a piece of the same handful of blocks isn't a contradiction. It's a decent sign of a neighborhood that different kinds of investment still take seriously, even when they arrive on completely different schedules.

If you're watching a neighborhood like this one closely enough to notice which storefronts are moving and which aren't, you're already thinking the way a buyer or seller here should. Black Key Partners tracks these blocks the same way, corner by corner and lease by lease. Request a Concierge Consultation when you're ready to talk about what any of it means for your own plans.