For most of the past ten years, if a Forest Hills family wanted to spend a rainy Saturday at the Cape Fear Museum, the destination was a modest brick building on Market Street that had been outgrowing itself for a generation. That building is still there. It just is not the museum anymore. On August 17, county leaders cut the ribbon on a new 230 Grace Street campus that closes a ten-year planning and construction chapter, and the doors opened to the public the very next day. County Manager Chris Coudriet put it simply at the ceremony: "This building respects legacy." For a neighborhood that has spent a decade watching this project inch forward, that legacy now has a street address a few minutes from home.
This matters more for Forest Hills than it does for most of Wilmington, and not because of sentiment. It comes down to geography. Forest Hills was laid out in the 1920s as one of the city's first neighborhoods where the streets followed the terrain instead of a grid, built specifically so residents could reach downtown quickly by car without living inside downtown's density. That was the whole premise of the neighborhood: proximity without crowding. For years, that proximity did not have much to point to. Now it does, and it landed within the same few blocks, in the same year.
The Museum Itself Changed, Not Just the Address
The new Cape Fear Museum of History and Science is not a relocation in the sense of moving the same collection into a bigger box. According to the New Hanover County government, the public portion of the Project Grace redevelopment cost $77 million, with $21.5 million of that going specifically to the museum's design and finishing, handled by architecture firm LS3P and built by Monteith Construction. The museum's own director, Kate Baillon, told local reporters the new facility roughly doubles exhibit space and triples the education space compared to the old Market Street site.
The layout reflects that ambition. There is a 60-seat planetarium, the first the museum has had. There is Cape Fear Stories, an interactive gallery on the region's history. There is Port City Play for younger children, a Science Matters gallery, and an outdoor learning space called Curious Nature that includes a small installation of "ghost trees," a reference to the marsh die-offs tied to Hurricane Florence's saltwater intrusion in 2018. More than 400 artifacts moved into the new building, a process the museum said would take roughly seven months once the old site closed to the public on January 1.
The old Market Street building has not been abandoned. It stays open as a research facility, exhibition workshop, and collections space, which means the museum now effectively operates on two addresses instead of one. For a Forest Hills household planning a visit, the practical detail worth knowing is admission runs $10 to $16, children two and under get in free, and New Hanover County residents receive half off on the first Sunday of each month with proof of residency. The museum also held a Grand Opening Summer Soiree on August 22, with food catered by Pine Valley Market, floral design by the Cape Fear Garden Club, and planetarium stargazing as part of the evening.
Voyce Filled the Table a Neighborhood Chef Had Left Empty
Museums do not fill an evening by themselves, and the timing here is not a coincidence worth ignoring. A few blocks from Grace Street, at 11 Market Street, Chef Keith Rhodes opened Voyce Bistro in a soft launch in early January, with a grand opening at the end of the month. Rhodes spent years running Catch, the seafood restaurant that made him a two-time James Beard Award nominee and a Top Chef contestant, before closing it to search for a new home. Voyce is that new home, set inside a building with structural bones dating to 1901, a stone's throw from the Riverwalk, in a space that once housed the deli Stuffedwich.
The menu leans into what Rhodes describes as coastal cuisine with Caribbean and Pan-African influences: dishes like shrimp wontons dusted with West African peanut spice, or a seafood fried rice built on Carolina Gold rice, an heirloom grain with deep roots in the South, finished with lump crab and shallots. The restaurant's name combines his grandparents' names, Virgie and Royce, and Rhodes runs it with his wife Angela as general manager. She has said her approach to the new venture is to keep her focus close: "creating great food, great memories and moments that last." Ingredients come through local purveyors including Feast Down East and Blackburn Brothers Seafood, which keeps the sourcing story local even as the menu's influences range further afield.
The point for a Forest Hills resident is not that a new restaurant opened. Restaurants open constantly. The point is that a chef with a long-standing local following reopened permanently, in a walkable stretch of downtown that also happens to now include a major cultural institution. A museum trip and a Voyce reservation are no longer two separate errands on two separate weekends. They are the same afternoon.
The Other Direction Filled In Too
Forest Hills sits between two poles that have historically defined how residents plan their week: Landfall to the northeast, with its gate, and Wrightsville Beach to the east, with its bridge. Downtown, to the west, used to be the flattest and least interesting of the three directions. That has changed from both ends this year.
South of the neighborhood, the Cargo District has quietly built out into a second dining cluster. Cargo West, a shipping-container food hall that opened in 2025, now houses seven micro-kitchens and counting, including Zeke Smash, Mike's Vegan Grill, and Shepard Barbecue, a pitmaster previously featured on Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. In the same historic building, the coffee and gift shop Canary Yellow is working on a color-themed boutique hotel, expected to open sometime in 2026. For a Forest Hills household that hosts out-of-town family, that is a genuinely new option: a walkable, independent place to put relatives up that is not a chain hotel off Market Street.
To the east, Pine Valley Market, a Wilmington staple for two decades, expanded in 2025 with a second location near Lumina Station and the Wrightsville Beach Drawbridge, adding sit-down breakfast and lunch service along with a full bar for coffee drinks and mimosas. It is the same market that catered the museum's opening gala downtown a few weeks ago, which is a small but telling detail. A single local business now touches both ends of the radius Forest Hills sits inside: the beach side and the downtown side.
What a Season Actually Looks Like From Here
Put together, the changes read less like a list of openings and more like a redrawn map. A resident deciding how to spend a weekend now has real choices that did not exist a year ago:
- A rainy Saturday can start at the new Cape Fear Museum on Grace Street and end with lunch at Voyce, all within a few blocks of each other.
- A weeknight dinner run can head south into the Cargo District for barbecue or a smash burger without crossing town.
- A weekend brunch, or a visiting relative's first morning in town, can head toward Lumina Station for Pine Valley Market's newer location before continuing on to the beach.
- An out-of-town guest with more than a day to spend can now stay walking distance from downtown at a genuinely independent property, once Canary Yellow's boutique hotel opens.
None of this required Forest Hills to change. The neighborhood's oak-lined streets and terrain-following layout look the same as they did a decade ago. What changed is what sits at the end of those streets. A neighborhood built on the premise of downtown access without downtown density finally has a downtown worth accessing on a regular Tuesday, not just for a special occasion.
If you already call Forest Hills home, none of this requires you to do anything but notice it. But if a friend, family member, or your own household has been weighing whether this pocket of Wilmington still makes sense for how you actually spend your weekends, that is a different conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks these shifts as they happen rather than after the fact. You can browse the neighborhood's current listings and profile on the Forest Hills page, or reach out directly to Happy Clark to talk through what a move in or around this part of town would look like today.
