If you've walked down Main Street this month, you've probably noticed the plywood came off the windows at 90 Main. For most of the summer, the old TD Bank building sat boarded up while crews worked inside, and the guessing about what was going in there had become its own kind of neighborhood pastime. On August 4, the guessing ended. Main & Mill opened its doors for the first time, quietly, on a Tuesday, to a building that had been closed to the public since the bank shut its doors in early 2021.
A few blocks over on Marshall Street, the same thing happened two months earlier. And around the corner at Hotel Downstreet, it happened last year. Three restaurants, three formerly stalled or underused storefronts, all filled in within about fourteen months. The easy read is that North Adams is having a moment. The more accurate read, once you look at who actually signed each lease, is that nobody new showed up at all.
The building that sat behind plywood
Main & Mill belongs to Colleen and Sean Taylor, the siblings who have run Freight Yard Pub for decades and who also own Trail House Kitchen & Bar on State Road, Craft Food Barn on Curran Highway, and the Store at Five Corners in South Williamstown. Main & Mill is their sixth restaurant, and it's the one that took the longest to happen. The TD Bank building sold for $600,000 in late 2021 to Ginko on Main Street LLC, a company managed by Jack and Suzy Wadsworth, who also own the Porches Inn at MASS MoCA. Ginko partnered with architects Karla Rothstein and Salvatore Perry of Latent Builds, the same pair behind Greylock WORKS, on a plan for the ground floor that included a restaurant, retail space, a park, and a rooftop bar. The building hosted a handful of pop-up eateries over the next few years while the rest of that plan waited.
What finally moved it was a conversation last September, when Wadsworth mentioned the space to Colleen Taylor. The menu that resulted is built around seasonal ingredients under executive chef Anna Smith, with sous chef Mason Field and front-of-house manager Amanda Cote both coming over from Trail House and Freight Yard Pub. Coffee starts at 7 a.m., lunch at 11, dinner runs through 9 p.m., and Taylor has said the goal for mornings is straightforward:
"We're hoping that it turns into a coffee place like Tunnel City in the morning."
The rooftop bar from the original plan is still coming. Construction on it is expected to start this winter.
A tavern that never really closed
Zio Roberto Ristorante e Taverna opened on Marshall Street on June 15, in the Mulcare Building that owner David Moresi already had. The space had most recently been Grazie, and next door sits the Mohawk, a bar that's been pouring drinks since 1933 and now operates as an aperitivo lounge attached to the restaurant. The pasta is made in house every day, tagliatelle, gnocchi, and ravioli, some rolled by hand and some run through an extruder, using flour imported from Italy. General manager Anh Phan came up through the Boston restaurant scene, including a stint at Polcari's, before relocating to the Berkshires to run the front of house here.
Moresi has been open about why he chose Marshall Street specifically, saying his goal is to "draw people out of Mass MoCA, get them onto Marshall Street" and, from there, onto Main Street to support the neighborhood's other restaurants and shops.
It's a bet on foot traffic that already exists, routed one block over rather than invented from nothing.
The pop-up that finally got walls
Door Prize, the European and Mediterranean comfort food spot now running out of Hotel Downstreet, is the template the other two are following. Jenny Klowden and Bryan Josephs spent years running it as a pop-up in the MASS MoCA courtyard before it had a permanent address, and their pierogis built a following at the North Adams Farmers Market long before there was a dining room to serve them in. By the time Door Prize got its full liquor license and a fixed location at Hotel Downstreet, the restaurant already had regulars. It just didn't have a street number yet.
Same names, different addresses
Line these three up and the pattern is hard to miss. None of this summer's downtown restaurant news involves a stranger betting on North Adams from the outside. It's Colleen and Sean Taylor, who've been feeding this city for decades, opening their sixth location in a building whose ownership history goes back through the same handful of local names, Wadsworth, Rothstein, Perry, who keep showing up together on other projects in town. It's David Moresi finishing a buildout inside a building he already owned, next to a bar that's been open since before most of Main Street's current buildings had their current tenants. It's Klowden and Josephs converting years of market-stall proof into a lease.
What that means for anyone tracking downtown is that this isn't speculative investment chasing a trend. It's existing capital and existing relationships finally getting matched to space that had been sitting vacant for reasons that had nothing to do with demand. The TD Bank building didn't sit empty for five years because nobody wanted it. It sat empty because the ownership, financing, and development pieces took that long to line up. Once they did, the operator who filled it was someone already three restaurants deep in the same zip code.
The week you're already living
None of this changes the rhythm most of downtown already runs on. The Farmers Market is still Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., on Main Street. Windsor Lake Concerts still happen Wednesdays at 6:30. MASS MoCA's Chalet is still open Thursdays from 6 to 10, and Party in the Park still fills Noel Field on Thursday evenings through August. Late July brought Bang On A Can's LOUD Weekend to the museum, and MASS MoCA's current exhibition, "Technologies of Relation," organized by curator Susan Cross, looks at artists working with artificial intelligence, worth a stop on a Chalet night if you haven't been over yet.
Main Street's retail side is filling in too. Patricia Welch, who has more than 60 years of hatmaking experience, recently opened Tip Top Hats at 16 Eagle Street, a small but specific addition to a stretch of downtown that's gaining tenants faster than it's losing them for the first time in a while.
Put it together and the honest version of the story isn't that North Adams got discovered this summer. It's that the people who never left finally got the buildings they'd been waiting on.
If you're weighing what a stretch of Main Street like this means for your own plans in North Adams, whether that's a first home, a move, or just curiosity about what a building like 90 Main is actually worth once it's full again, Diane Thorson knows this downtown block by block. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
