The Corner of Fourth and Front Is Turning Into Downtown Medford's Busiest Block
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Drive down Front Street past Fourth and you will hit chain link fencing where a restaurant sign used to hang. That corner has sat empty since 2022, when the restaurant that operated there for sixteen years closed for good. For roughly four years now, it has been the kind of gap that downtown regulars learn to walk around without noticing.
That is changing this year, and not because one building got a new tenant. Two separate things are happening on parallel tracks, one driven by a single family reinvesting in a corner they already know, the other driven by city money aimed at empty storefronts a few blocks over. They happen to be landing in the same twelve months, which is why downtown Medford will look meaningfully different by the time the holidays arrive than it did in January.
The empty lot at Fourth and Front is becoming Jay's on 4th, a food-plex redevelopment inside the former New Far East restaurant building. The name is a nod to Jesse Nuñez and his son Jesus, the father-son team who own the property and are building it out with help from architect Elijah Jordan of Portland-based Structure Vision LLC. The Medford Landmarks and Historic Preservation Committee approved their renovation plans in early April 2026, and the project is on track for a November 1, 2026 opening, possibly sooner.
Jesse Nuñez is not a stranger to this stretch of downtown. He grew up in Michoacán, Mexico, moved to Fresno as a teenager, and came north to the Rogue Valley in the late 1990s, working his way up from dishwasher to chef at a small Italian restaurant in Eagle Point. He later bought Ashland's former Miguel's and reopened it as El Paraiso in 2006, picked up La Fiesta in Jacksonville in 2019, and that same year took over what is now Medford's El Paraiso, just down the block from the corner he is now redeveloping. He described the decision plainly:
"Medford needs a nice outdoor setting, and I owned a neighboring business. It's such a great corner and seeing it sit empty with trash everywhere and nothing happening got my attention and made me realize something nice could go here."
That is an owner betting on a block he already has skin in, not a developer betting on downtown in the abstract.
The reason that bet makes sense is that the corner was never actually dead, just one empty lot inside an otherwise busy stretch. Old Spaghetti Factory sits directly adjacent at 147 N Front St, having taken over the space left by Porters after that restaurant closed unexpectedly in May 2024. A few doors down, Common Block Brewing has been pulling people into the historic 1947 Monarch Building, a former feed store and later Lithia Motors showroom, for more than a decade now, run by Alex and Danielle Amarotico of Standing Stone Brewing in Ashland. Over on Central Avenue, the Copper Plank still operates out of the old Elks Lodge, sign and all, a detail regulars have learned to explain to first-timers who assume they have the wrong building.
None of that foot traffic showed up because of Jay's on 4th. It was already there. What the Nuñez project does is fill the one visible gap in a strip that has otherwise been working for years, which is a different kind of bet than opening in a neighborhood still trying to prove itself.
The second track has nothing to do with that corner and everything to do with a policy decision made in January. On January 8, 2026, the Medford City Council unanimously approved an ordinance establishing a downtown Economic Improvement District, a long-term funding mechanism for shared services and activation across the core. Alongside it, the Downtown Medford Association launched a Storefront Activation Program, funded by $25,000 from the city's Community Initiative Fund, aimed squarely at the three to five vacant storefronts inside a defined boundary: roughly the west side of the Bear Creek Bridge to the east side of Oakdale, and south of 6th Street to north of 8th.
The first grant went to Sean Rimes, who opened Paradise Footwear on March 3, 2026, in the former Norris Shoes location at 221 East Main Street. That grant program is why the empty-storefront math downtown has been shifting all year in a way that has nothing to do with any one restaurant's opening date.
Between January and midsummer, downtown Medford picked up a run of new small businesses that would have been unremarkable individually but add up to something noticeable as a set:
None of these sit on the same corner as Jay's on 4th. Most are two or three blocks away, on Main and Fourth rather than Front. That is the point. They are not evidence of one project's ripple effect. They are evidence of a separate, city-funded push to fill vacancies that had been sitting empty for reasons that had nothing to do with the Nuñez family's corner.
What makes this year distinct from a normal slow churn of openings and closings is that both tracks are converging on the same calendar. A private family finishing a project it has been planning since early spring. A public program handing out its first rounds of grant money on a separate, unrelated timeline. Neither one caused the other. But a downtown regular walking from Fourth and Front to Main Street this November will pass a food plex that did not exist in January, a skate shop that did not exist in March, a bar that did not exist before its March grand opening, and a pizza spot that was still just an announcement in May.
That is a different downtown than the one most Medford residents have in their head from a year ago, and it did not happen because of one signature project. It happened because two unrelated forces, one private and corner-specific, one public and vacancy-specific, both landed in 2026.
If you have not walked Front and Main together lately, this is the fall to do it. The corner that sat behind chain link for roughly four years is finally getting its next chapter, and it is opening into a stretch of downtown that has quietly filled in around it while nobody was looking at any one building in particular.
Curious what a changing downtown means for property values or timing if you are thinking about a move in or around Medford? Mayra Valencia knows this stretch of town block by block. Let's Connect.
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