Walk down Main Street this week and you'll notice something that wasn't there in June: pavement wide enough for two strollers to pass without one stepping into traffic. The Phase 3C sidewalk project reached substantial completion in mid-July, and for the first time in longer than most residents can remember, the stretch of Route 17 through the historic district actually invites walking instead of discouraging it.
That timing matters more than it looks. For years, Glastonbury has quietly run on two separate downtowns. Main Street carried the history, the churches, the Welles-Turner library, the sense of a town center. Somerset Square, a mile or so away on Glastonbury Boulevard, carried the actual foot traffic, because its sidewalks were built for it and Main Street's weren't. If you wanted to walk somewhere for dinner without getting in the car, you went to the shopping center, not the historic strip.
This summer, both places are changing at the same moment, and that's the part worth paying attention to.
What Actually Finished On Main Street
The town announced in a July 17 update that sidewalks along Main Street opened to the public on Thursday, July 16, marking what Patch called a major milestone for the long-running project. The work isn't fully closed out. The town has handed contractor B&W Paving & Landscaping a punch list that still needs finishing, including painting sidewalk markings at the intersection of Main Street and Chestnut Hill Road/Red Hill Drive, and clearing construction materials from the laydown area at Earle Park and the American Legion Hall.
None of that is a reason to wait. The sidewalks are open now, CTDOT acceptance is the remaining formality, and the corridor between the historic core and the rest of downtown is walkable in a way it wasn't in the spring.
Somerset Square Didn't Wait Around
While Main Street was under construction, Somerset Square kept moving. The 115,000-square-foot outdoor center on Glastonbury Boulevard has been filling vacancies since Tennessee-based Poag Shopping Centers bought the property in late 2023 for $30.1 million, when it sat at roughly 85 percent occupied. Poag's stated plan was to bring new energy to the plaza, and the last year of leasing shows what that's meant in practice: restaurants, not retail.
Three additions define the current wave:
- Tiger Belly Noodle Bar, led by chef Kiyen Keung, is coming to Somerset Square with Japanese ramen and Vietnamese pho alongside a sushi bar. It's the concept's second location after the original opened in Granby in 2016.
- Bareburger opened a 2,309-square-foot fast-casual restaurant next to Chipotle and finished a patio addition for outdoor seating.
- Colony Grill, the 90-year-old Stamford pizza chain known for its thin-crust, hot-oil-topped pies, confirmed it's taking the former Coldwater Creek space at 130 Glastonbury Boulevard. The build-out calls for seating more than 175 guests indoors, a full bar with 12 tap lines, and a large outdoor patio. It's set to open later this year, and it will be the chain's sixth Connecticut location and its eleventh overall.
Put those three next to each other and the picture is a shopping center that's been quietly repositioning itself as a dining destination for the better part of two years, whether or not Main Street's sidewalks ever got fixed.
Two Corridors, One Season
Here's the part that hasn't shown up anywhere else: these two projects, one municipal and slow-moving, one private and restaurant-driven, are converging on the same few months. Main Street just became walkable again in July. Somerset Square is about to add its third new full-service restaurant in under two years. For the first time in a while, both strips are getting more interesting to residents at the same time, instead of one filling in for what the other couldn't offer.
Practically, that means an evening out doesn't have to be an either-or choice between the historic district and the shopping center. It means a walk down Main Street toward Earle Park, once the last of the punch-list work clears out that laydown area, connects to a town that's also handing you three new places to eat within a few minutes of each other on the Boulevard.
The Riverfront Concerts Are Winding Down
The other piece of this season is already in motion and won't last much longer. The Riverfront Music Series, co-hosted by the Town of Glastonbury and the CT River Valley Chamber of Commerce, has been running free concerts on Wednesday evenings behind the Riverfront Community Center at 300 Welles Street all summer. The 2026 lineup included three headliner tribute acts in July: a Journey tribute called Legend that got cancelled outright on July 15 due to smoke and air quality and had to be rescheduled, and a Stevie Nicks tribute, The Stevie Experience, the following week. The Glastonbury Town Band filled the remaining Wednesdays, including a performance on August 5.
The series uses free parking and shuttle service from 180 and 200 Glastonbury Boulevard, which sit adjacent to Somerset Square. Food trucks and Farmers Market vendors set up on-site for the headliner nights. It's a small detail, but it's another thread tying the two ends of town together this summer: the parking lot for a free outdoor concert at Riverfront Park is the same lot serving the restaurant wave a few hundred yards away.
With the headliner nights and the Town Band's summer rotation now behind it, the series is closing out for the year, and it's the last stretch of free outdoor concerts on the town's calendar until next summer.
What's Coming Once Summer Ends
The next big anchor on the calendar is already locked in. The 51st Annual Glastonbury Apple Harvest and Music Festival runs October 16 through 18, and organizers expect the same scale that's made it a regional draw for half a century, with more than 23,000 attendees, live performances from over 50 emerging artists, a KidsZONE, an expanded Harvest Pub, and the Grannie's Pies booth that's become a fixture of the weekend. It's held near the same downtown corridor that's spent this summer getting easier to walk.
By the time the festival opens in October, Main Street's punch list should be closed out, Colony Grill should be closer to its opening date, and the town will be moving into the one weekend a year when both ends of Glastonbury are packed with people on foot at once.
The Actual Takeaway
None of this is a coincidence that residents need to track closely. It's just worth naming: Glastonbury's two commercial strips have operated on different timelines for years, one held back by infrastructure, the other filling in the gap with restaurants. This is the first season where both are moving forward together, and the town's walking map looks different because of it.
Meghan Girard keeps close tabs on these kinds of shifts because they're exactly the sort of detail that shapes how a neighborhood lives day to day, long before it shows up in a market report. If you're a Glastonbury homeowner curious how changes like these tend to move the needle for buyers, or if you're weighing a future move in town, Meghan Girard is always glad to talk through what's changing and what it means for you.
