Drive down Broadway on a Tuesday and you will pass a boarded-up post office next to a fire station under renovation. Cut over to Main Street two minutes later and you will find a four-story apartment building with a rooftop full of fire pits, a library moving in on the second floor of a utility office, and a line for ice cream. Both of these places are, technically, downtown McCordsville. Neither one looks anything like what most people picture when they hear that word, and they are not supposed to look alike. The town is building two of them at once, on purpose, in two different registers, and understanding why explains a lot about where McCordsville is actually headed.
The One Everyone Already Knows: McCord Square
If you have noticed new activity near Mt. Comfort Road behind the CVS and the IU Health building, that is McCord Square, the town's planned mixed-use center that broke ground in late 2022 through a partnership between the town, Fishers-based Rebar Development, and Greenfield-based Pride Investment Partners. As of this spring, the tenant list read like a running inventory of what the town actually wanted: Libby's Ice Cream (a Hancock County original that opened its third location here in 2025), Rita's Italian Ice and Frozen Custard, Leo's Market & Eatery, and Maple, a breakfast and brunch spot that took over the former Le Peep space. Hancock Eye Associates, IU Health, and NineStar Connect fill out the office side.
Two apartment buildings, The Jackson and The Lucas, anchor the residential end with 205 units between them, marketed toward people who want a walkable, low-maintenance lifestyle rather than a big lawn to mow. Vernon Township Public Library announced this spring that it was on track to open a second branch on the second floor of the NineStar building by mid-summer, which means it is either open right now or close enough that it is worth checking before your next trip. The new branch is smaller than the Fortville location but adds study rooms and a program room the original never had, and patrons can borrow at one branch and return at the other.
McCordsville's assistant director of planning, Hollie Kinker, described the goal plainly to the Daily Reporter this spring: the town is aiming for "a destination that feels authentic to McCordsville, rather than a collection of national chains." That is a specific bet, and it shows in the tenant mix. There is no drive-through coffee chain here yet. There is a family-owned ice cream shop and a rebranded local diner.
A Second Center Nobody's Talking About Yet
While McCord Square fills in, the town is quietly working on a completely different kind of downtown a few blocks away on the old Broadway corridor. In May, the town council awarded an $886,549 bid to Mattingly Construction to renovate the former post office on West Broadway, a building that also served as a barbershop at one point. It sits next to a new community center taking shape inside the old volunteer firehouse, and the plan is for the post office building to become a small local history exhibit space, including a 1906 Leader automobile, one of the few surviving examples of a car brand that was manufactured in McCordsville for exactly two years before disappearing from the record.
Council president Greg Brewer has been explicit about what he wants Broadway to become over time: curbing, drainage, sidewalks, and a shift from residential lots toward boutique shops and small restaurants that people can park once and walk between. That transition has not happened yet. Right now the corridor is mostly historic homes and a construction zone. But the town bought the Round Barn Inn on Mt. Comfort Road at the end of 2025 with an eye toward turning it into a history or agriculture park, potentially with programming tied to McCordsville Elementary, which sits nearby.
| McCord Square (Main St.) | Old Town Broadway | |
|---|---|---|
| Character | New construction, mixed-use, apartments over retail | Historic buildings, small lots, in progress |
| Open now | Ice cream, breakfast, offices, apartments, library branch | Community center (in renovation) |
| Coming | Central Green Park, additional lots for retail | Post office history exhibit, boutique/restaurant corridor |
| Anchor | The Jackson and The Lucas apartments | Round Barn Inn preservation project |
Why Two, Not One
The obvious question is why a town this size is building in two places instead of pouring everything into one strip. Part of the answer is sitting in traffic data. The intersection of Broadway and Mt. Comfort Road carried 16,605 vehicles a day in July 2025, up from 12,297 in 2019, and the widening project meant to fix it has slipped from a 2026 target into 2027 because of coordination delays with CSX and INDOT over the adjacent rail crossing. That intersection is the bottleneck between the two halves of town, and until it is fixed, concentrating everything on one side of it just means longer lines to get to the other.
Spreading development across two centers is not a workaround for a broken plan. It is closer to the town hedging its bets while the road catches up. McCord Square gets to grow now, on land that was already flat and buildable, while Old Town Broadway gets the slower, more careful treatment a historic corridor with narrow lots and an active rail crossing actually needs. Residents on the Broadway side are not stuck waiting for a downtown. They are watching a different one come together at a different pace, just up the road.
The Market Moved, and That Tells You Something
For a few years, the town's Sunday market ran out near Depot Street, close to Scarlet Lane Brewing Company and Trax BBQ, pulling in a modest crowd of craft vendors. It has since relocated to McCord Square at 5811 Main Street, and the scale changed with the address. The Market in McCordsville now draws more than 70 vendors on its bigger dates, along with food trucks, community groups, and live music, with free admission and parking throughout its May-through-October run. The final session of the season typically lands in early October.
A market moving from a brewery parking lot to the middle of a planned town center is not a small detail. It is the clearest sign of where the town expects its gathering spot to actually be, and it lines up with what Kinker told the Daily Reporter this spring, that McCord Square is already functioning as the town's center even while it is still being built out in phases.
What's Still in the Works
A few things are close but not finished. Central Green Park, planned for a spot inside McCord Square, is still in the design phase as of this year. Old School Park is heading into a second phase of improvements. The town has six more lots at McCord Square waiting for construction, including one that could become a new town hall between the two existing parks. None of it is finished, and Kinker's own read on the project is that developments like this take time to mature. What is already true is that a resident on the McCord Square side can get ice cream, see an eye doctor, and pick up a library book within a five-minute walk, something that did not exist here two years ago. A resident on the Broadway side is about to get a piece of local history back, car and all.
Two downtowns, two timelines, one town figuring out how to grow without losing the parts of itself worth keeping.
If you are curious what any of this means for property values or timing around McCord Square and Old Town Broadway, Emily Dyer Humphrey has been tracking central Indiana's north and northeast suburbs for over a decade. Reach out to schedule a consultation and get a straight answer, not a sales pitch.
