Walk Main Street in the Georgetown section of Redding on any Wednesday evening this fall and you'll pass three businesses that didn't exist a year and a half ago, half-priced wine by the bottle at one of them, and a coffee roaster working behind a market counter that used to sell nothing but produce. None of this happened because a committee approved a master plan. It happened because a handful of neighbors opened doors, one storefront at a time, on the same half-mile stretch that town officials have spent two decades trying to redesign from scratch a few hundred yards away.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live in Redding: the walkable village center everyone assumed would eventually rise from the old Gilbert & Bennett Wire Mill site has, in practical terms, already started forming on Main Street instead. It just didn't ask anyone's permission first.
What's Actually Open on Main Street Right Now
The anchor of the current stretch is the Georgetown Owl Market & Saloon at 19 Main Street, which opened in March 2025 in a space that had previously housed the Olive Market and, before that, Washington Prime. Co-owners Gerry Valenti and Kate Perry, both longtime Redding-area residents, split the building into two operations under one roof. The market side runs breakfast and lunch from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily, with sandwiches, a coffee bar, and a shelf of specialty goods that includes goat milk soap, small-batch jams, and meats from local farms. The saloon side takes over from 4 p.m. through close Tuesday through Saturday, staying open until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, with a menu that runs from a wild boar sloppy joe to duck poutine and lamb chop lollipops. Valenti is also a founding partner of Taconic Distillery in Stanfordville, New York, which shows up in the cocktail list. Quartertone Coffee Roasters shares the market space and roasts its beans on site, so the espresso you order at the counter was likely roasted twenty feet away that same week.
A block down, Milestone has quietly become the kind of place regulars book without checking the menu first, holding a 4.6-star rating on OpenTable across more than 200 reviews and pulling multiple reservations a day for a room that describes itself as a neighborhood "joint" built around scratch-made comfort food and live music. Across the street, Uncorked Georgetown opened at 7 Main Street with a rotating menu of shareable plates and a 4 to 6 p.m. happy hour, open Wednesday through Sunday. And a mile north on Route 53, The Redding Roadhouse keeps doing what it's done for more than thirty years: three indoor fireplaces, ten rotating draft lines built around Connecticut craft beer, and a menu that hasn't needed reinventing to stay busy.
If you're mapping out where to actually go this month, the short version looks like this:
- Georgetown Owl Market & Cafe — 19 Main St, daily 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., breakfast and lunch sandwiches plus coffee roasted in-house
- Georgetown Owl Saloon & Restaurant — same address, Tuesday through Saturday from 4 p.m., Sunday brunch 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., half-priced bottles of wine on Wednesdays
- Milestone — 2 Main St, casual American with live music, reservations recommended on weekends
- Uncorked Georgetown — 7 Main St, Wednesday through Sunday, shareable plates and a daily happy hour
- The Redding Roadhouse — Route 53 near the Saugatuck Reservoir, the long-running pub anchor for the north end of town
None of these businesses opened as part of a coordinated village revitalization. They opened because individual owners saw an opening on a street that already had foot traffic, parking, and a building available.
The Downtown That Was Supposed to Come From the Mill
The reason that matters is sitting less than a mile away, behind a chain-link fence.
The Gilbert & Bennett Wire Mill opened in 1848 and ran for more than 140 years before the company went bankrupt and shut the plant down in 1989. What followed was one of the longer running redevelopment sagas in Fairfield County. A developer bought the tax liens in 2002, the town approved a mixed-use master plan in 2005, and a fight over unpaid taxes eventually landed in front of the Connecticut Supreme Court. The town won and formally took ownership of the 44-acre site in 2021, more than three decades after the mill went dark.
Since then, progress has moved at the pace public remediation projects tend to move. In 2024, Redding secured a $200,000 Brownfield Area Wide planning grant from the state and a $1,999,999 EPA Brownfield Cleanup Grant, both aimed at assessing and eventually cleaning up contamination left behind by more than a century of industrial use. A public meeting was scheduled for January 2026 to walk through draft cleanup alternatives for the Weaving Building, one of five parcels that make up the site. A Gilbert & Bennett Wire Mill Advisory Committee still meets monthly to steward the process.
Amy Atamian, who chairs that committee, has been direct about the goal, describing the ambition as building "a real little downtown Main Street because there is no downtown in Redding." It's a fair description of what the wire mill site was always meant to become: a walkable center with shops, restaurants, and housing options the town largely lacks. It's also, at this point, an accurate description of something that already exists a few hundred yards up the road, minus the brownfield cleanup.
Here's how the two timelines actually compare, side by side:
| Year | Wire Mill Site | Main Street, Georgetown |
|---|---|---|
| 1989 | Mill closes after 141 years of operation | — |
| 2005 | Town approves mixed-use master plan | — |
| 2021 | Town takes formal ownership after Supreme Court ruling | — |
| 2024 | Town awarded roughly $2.2 million combined in state and EPA cleanup grants | — |
| March 2025 | Advisory committee continues monthly planning meetings | Georgetown Owl Market & Saloon opens at 19 Main St |
| 2025-2026 | Draft cleanup alternatives scheduled for public review (January 2026) | Milestone and Uncorked Georgetown both operating on the same block |
Redding's First Selectwoman Julia Pemberton has described the wire mill property itself as "a hulking mass of old factory buildings sitting largely abandoned" at the gateway to town, which is still an accurate description in 2026. The mill's future as a village center remains genuinely possible. The state and federal grant money is real, the remediation work is underway, and a transit-oriented development anchored by a Metro-North stop on the Danbury Line has been part of the vision since the original 2005 plan. None of that is close to finished.
Why the Order Got Reversed
What's interesting isn't that the mill is slow. Brownfield cleanup on a former industrial site is supposed to be slow, and doing it carefully is the right call given the contamination history. What's interesting is that Georgetown got its restaurant row anyway, without waiting for the plan that was supposed to produce it.
If you live in Redding, that's the useful takeaway: you don't need to track wire mill committee meetings to know whether Georgetown is worth a Tuesday night drive. It already is. The Owl's Wednesday wine deal, Milestone's weekend music, and Uncorked's happy hour aren't waiting on a brownfield cleanup timeline. They're already running, on a stretch of Main Street that quietly became the closest thing Redding has to a downtown while everyone was watching the fenced-off site next door.
The mill redevelopment is worth continuing to follow, especially if the eventual plan includes new housing types or a train stop that could change how the whole village functions. But for anyone deciding where to grab dinner this weekend, the answer isn't years away. It's three doors down on Main Street.
If you're curious how Georgetown's slow-building momentum is shaping property values and interest in the surrounding streets, the team at RE/MAX Heritage tracks these shifts closely across Redding and the rest of Fairfield County, and we're always glad to talk through what it might mean for your own plans.
