"It really says about the strong community of New Glarus, it is a corner block of New Glarus," Mike Nevil said this year, describing the building he used to run a pizzeria out of before selling it in 2023. He was talking about the New Glarus Hotel, the corner of First Street and Sixth Avenue that's been wrapped in scaffolding for the better part of two years. Nevil is right that it's a corner block. What he didn't have to say is that it's one of three corner projects reshaping downtown right now, and none of them are running on the same schedule.
This year's Oktoberfest just wrapped, four days of festival tent, ceremonial keg taps, and alphorn players working the crowd on First Street. Visitors who walked past the hotel saw the same closed doors they saw last year. Visitors hoping to tour New Glarus Brewing's Hilltop campus found a temporary gift shop on Hoesly Drive instead, because Hilltop has been closed to the public since around Christmas 2024. Meanwhile, a five-course dinner with five wine pairings marked the festival's opening night at Canter Inn, a restaurant that didn't exist a year ago. Three projects, three timelines, and the gap between "the construction is done" and "you can walk in" turns out to be the actual story.
What "Finished" Means at Hilltop
New Glarus Brewing broke ground on its $55 million Hilltop expansion on October 29, 2024. The addition adds roughly 65,000 square feet, a second brew hall, a distillery, and a beer garden where the parking lot used to be. Architect Katherine May, daughter of founders Dan and Deb Carey, has said the project is on track to finish construction by fall of this year.
Fall 2026 is now. But the brewery isn't reopening to visitors this fall. May and the Careys have said the public won't be welcomed back until summer 2027, because the winter and spring after construction wraps go to moving in equipment, hiring, and getting operations running before anyone pours a pint on-site. In the meantime, the original Riverside facility on the north side of town has stayed open for tours, and a temporary tasting room and gift shop at 218 Hoesly Drive has covered the retail side, open Tuesday through Saturday.
That's an eight-month gap between a finished building and an open one, and it's worth sitting with, because the same gap is showing up at the other end of downtown for different reasons.
The Corner That's Been Empty Longest
The New Glarus Hotel has been closed longer than the brewery's Hilltop campus. Its restaurant shut down in 2021, and the pizzeria that had been running out of the ground floor closed not long after. The building sat empty until New Glarus Hotel Group, led by Dan Roe, Leah Roe, and Christina Bleifuss, bought it in February 2024. The project's price tag is $7 million, funded through a mix of about two dozen local investors, outside backers, and a $1 million tax increment financing grant from the village. Village Administrator Lauren Freeman has said the community support behind that TIF grant came because the hotel is tied to the town's history in a way few other buildings are.
The building earned a listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 2025, which helped unlock additional grant funding for the restoration. What's coming back is specific: the Sunken Bar, the Yodel Room supper club, eight boutique guest rooms upstairs, and a music stage renamed for Roger Bright, the bandleader whose group made the hotel's dance hall a fixture starting in the 1960s. The building's yodeling tradition goes back to that era too, carried forward when Hans Lenzlinger took over in 1974, which is why the new restaurant is named for it rather than for anything more generic.
As of the most recent public update, the hotel group is targeting a reopening in late November. That's a full year after the brewery's construction wraps and roughly fourteen months after Canter Inn opened its doors a few blocks away. Same downtown, same general timeframe of investment, three very different finish lines.
The Same Grant That Paid for a Victorian Porch
Canter Inn is the one project on this list that's already open, and it's worth understanding how it got there, because the answer connects back to the same public financing tool underwriting the hotel.
Jon Nodler and Sam Kincaid opened Canter Inn in October 2025 inside a restored 1902 Queen Anne Victorian at 119 Fifth Avenue, a building that had most recently housed Kristi's before that business relocated to Second Street. Nodler and Kincaid brought real credentials with them: their Philadelphia restaurant Cadence had earned recognition from Food & Wine and Bon Appétit before they decided to build something new in Green County.
Restoring the Victorian's wraparound porch meant undoing years of neglect, including outdoor carpeting that had rotted out the structure underneath. Nodler and Kincaid used the village's Facade Improvement Grant to help cover that work, a program that matches 50 percent of qualifying storefront costs up to $6,000. That grant program exists because it's funded through the same tax increment financing district that's putting $1 million toward the hotel down the street.
That's the piece that's easy to miss if you only track one project at a time. The village isn't waiting for private tourism dollars to rebuild downtown on their own. It's using one financing mechanism at two different scales, a six-figure grant for a single storefront porch and a seven-figure grant for a 173-year-old landmark, and both are showing up on the same three or four blocks within about a year of each other.
What to Watch For This Fall and Winter
For anyone keeping track of the actual calendar, here's where things stand as of this Oktoberfest weekend:
- Canter Inn: open since October 2025, now running its first full year including an Oktoberfest opening-night dinner, seating around 40 in the main dining room plus a bar and seasonal porch.
- New Glarus Hotel: construction ongoing, targeting a late November 2026 reopening for the Yodel Room, Sunken Bar, and eight guest rooms at 100 Sixth Avenue.
- New Glarus Brewing's Hilltop campus: construction expected to finish this fall, but the public won't be allowed back in until summer 2027. The temporary tasting room at 218 Hoesly Drive remains the place to visit in the meantime.
None of these dates are guaranteed. Historic restorations especially tend to slip, and the hotel group has already moved its target more than once since the project was announced in 2024. But the pattern holds regardless of the exact week things open: a building being finished and a building being open are two different milestones, and downtown New Glarus is currently sitting in that gap on three separate fronts at once.
If you've been wondering why the corner at First and Sixth still looks closed despite all the visible work, or why the brewery gift shop moved to Hoesly Drive, this is why. The town isn't behind schedule. It's just running three different clocks toward the same finish line, and this fall is the season where two of the three are finally within sight.
Have a question about a specific address or building in New Glarus, whether it's the old hotel, a storefront on Fifth Avenue, or something out toward the Sugar River Trail? MHB Real Estate knows this stretch of Green County well. Get started.
