"When winter comes we kind of struggle." That's how Todd Reardon, who owns Peacemaker Brewing Company on Coach Street, described what happens to his own business once the patio furniture comes off the beer garden every fall. He said it to a WHAM reporter earlier this month, standing in the same space that's packed most summer weekends and half-empty by December.
Reardon's brewery is about to get a $389,000 answer to that problem, funded through New York's Downtown Revitalization Initiative. But that grant isn't a standalone fix. It's one piece of a $9.7 million plan the city is running across ten separate projects, and almost every one of them is aimed at the same target: not more visitors in July, but more reasons for the people who already live within walking distance to stay downtown after dark, in every month of the year.
Canandaigua won its $10 million DRI award as the Finger Lakes region's Round 8 winner, selected in February 2025. The state released the specific project list in May 2026, and by this month contractors and city officials are working through the paperwork that turns a funding announcement into an actual construction schedule. The list itself is worth reading closely, because it tells you what the city thinks its downtown is actually missing.
The Six O'Clock Problem, In One Building
Start with the building at the corner of Coach and Bemis streets. It's been reinventing itself since the early 1800s, when it started as a modest outbuilding attached to the Lapham House next door. It later became a carpentry shop, then sat through a renovation between 2007 and 2010 that turned it into a pottery studio. Peacemaker moved in in 2020, four years after Reardon first opened the brewery at a different Canandaigua address.
Right now the building holds 49 people indoors. That's the whole problem in one number: a business with a loyal following and regular live music that physically cannot operate at capacity once the weather turns and the beer garden closes for the season.
The $555,000 renovation, $389,000 of it covered by the state, extends the first floor by roughly 12 feet, adds garage-door-style openings connecting the taproom to the beer garden, and converts Reardon's second-floor apartment into an event space with its own bar and a deck overlooking the patio and stage below. City officials haven't finalized the new occupancy limit, but Reardon expects it to land somewhere between 100 and 125 people, more than double what the building holds today. The project is projected to add five to eight jobs. Reardon is hoping to start construction after the brewery's 10th anniversary this coming November and finish by spring.
None of that is really about beer. It's about square footage that works in January the same way it works in July.
Nine Other Projects, Same Logic
The rest of the award follows the same pattern, once you look past the individual dollar figures:
- $1.925 million to rework Coach Street into a more walkable connector between Main and Bemis streets, tying Peacemaker's block into the rest of downtown
- $1.31 million to redo Phoenix Street with more pedestrian space, public seating areas and restrooms
- $1.248 million to renovate 100 South Main Street into new apartments with an updated facade
- $791,000 to convert the upper floors of 88-92 South Main Street into residential units
- $772,000 to reactivate the second floor of 143 South Main Street for more housing
- $870,000 to turn 97 South Main Street into a creative-arts hub
- $651,000 to preserve the city's historic City Hall
- $1.144 million to expand Central on Main, the outdoor gathering space that started as a repurposed parking lot during the pandemic and never went away
- $600,000 set aside as a small project grant fund for facade work, new retail space, and business startups
Add those up with Peacemaker's share and you get the city's $9.7 million slice of its $10 million award. Look at where the money actually lands and the pattern gets hard to miss: three separate housing conversions on South Main Street, a historic building preserved rather than demolished, and public street work designed to get people walking between blocks rather than just parking near one storefront and leaving.
Governor Kathy Hochul, announcing the award alongside similar packages for Brockport and Phelps, put the state's reasoning this way: the goal is for "the heart of their neighborhoods" to be "lively, expressive and bold," not simply preserved as a nice place to visit twice a year.
Housing Got the Biggest Combined Check for a Reason
If you tally the three residential conversions on South Main Street alone, they come to more than $2.8 million, the single largest category in the whole package, bigger than any one street project or business grant. That's not an accident. City officials involved in the plan have said the point of adding apartments above existing storefronts is straightforward: more people living downtown means more customers for the restaurants and bars that are currently built around a tourist season that runs from roughly Memorial Day to Labor Day. A resident living above 100 South Main doesn't need a summer festival to justify walking downstairs for dinner on a Tuesday in February.
A 15-member local planning committee, co-chaired by former Mayor Bob Palumbo and former Ontario County Chamber of Commerce President Tracey Dello Stritto, spent months sorting through proposals before recommending this particular mix. Not every applicant made the cut. The only other brewery-related proposal in the running, a planned microbrewery, bistro and apartment building a few doors down at 32 Coach Street, didn't get funded. Peacemaker's application succeeded partly because it could point to what it already was doing: hosting food, outdoor seating and regular live entertainment on a block the city wanted to strengthen anyway.
What Actually Changes, and When
None of this happens overnight. City officials say they're still finalizing contracts with state agencies, with those agreements expected to be in place by the end of this year. That would allow some projects, mainly the private ones like Peacemaker's expansion and facade upgrades funded through the small project grant, to break ground in early 2027. The larger public infrastructure work on Coach and Phoenix streets will take longer to design and permit.
City leaders have been candid that the full transformation is a two-to-five-year project, not a single construction season. So if you live downtown or visit regularly, don't expect to see much physical change before spring. What you will likely notice first are the facade improvements and any small businesses that open using the $600,000 grant fund, since those move fastest through the approval process. The bigger shifts, new apartments filled with residents, a rebuilt Phoenix Street, Peacemaker's doubled capacity, land somewhere in the 2028 to 2031 window.
What's worth sitting with in the meantime is what this list says about downtown Canandaigua's actual limitation. It was never a shortage of people who wanted to visit. It was a downtown built almost entirely around the six or seven weeks when the lake draws a crowd, with very little infrastructure for the other ten months. The $10 million doesn't add another summer attraction. It adds apartments people can live in year-round, an indoor stage that works in January, and a historic building the city decided was worth keeping rather than replacing. That's a different kind of investment than most downtown redevelopment stories, and it's the reason this one is worth watching past the ribbon-cutting.
If you're weighing what life near downtown Canandaigua actually looks like once these projects land, not just this summer but the winter after, Mary St.George has been tracking this market long enough to talk through what it means for your own plans. Call Mary for a Lakefront Consultation.
