Main Street closes to cars this weekend. That sentence hasn't been true in Brockport since the summer of 2022. For three years running, what organizers call "one of western Monroe County's signature summer traditions" had to find somewhere else to happen, because the street it belongs on was torn apart by a bridge that wouldn't finish being fixed.
This weekend, the Brockport Arts Festival marks its 30th year back where it started: Main Street and Erie Street, tents running block to block, a Duck Derby on the canal, three stages of music, and a poster designed this year by Courtney Lee of Courtney Lee Designs to mark the anniversary. It's a homecoming. It's also worth asking what, exactly, Main Street had to survive to make it possible.
Two and a Half Years, Ten Businesses
The Main Street lift bridge carries Route 19 over the Erie Canal and has done so since 1915. In May 2023, the state closed it for what officials estimated would be an 18-month rehabilitation. It didn't reopen until Monday, November 10, 2025, after repeated delays tied to mechanical issues the New York State Department of Transportation discovered during equipment testing. The project, part of a $29.1 million effort to modernize canal structures that also touched a lift bridge in Albion and followed similar work in Fairport and Spencerport, replaced more than 80 percent of the bridge's truss steel and rebuilt its lifting mechanism from the ground up, work the DOT says will extend the bridge's service life by at least 30 years.
Two and a half years is a long time for a one-block downtown to function with its main crossing gone. Sarah Bonczyk, owner of the Lift Bridge Book Shop, said at least ten businesses closed on Main Street during the closure. Her own store survived because the community raised money to keep it open through the delay, not because foot traffic held steady on its own.
Across the street, Erica Burns of Smartypants Fashion Exchange said she learned the bridge was finally reopening the same way most of Main Street did: secondhand, by text. Village officials hadn't given advance notice, and Mayor Ben Reed later admitted he'd found out at the last minute himself. Whatever the communication gaps, Reed's message to residents on reopening day was direct: "We can't stress enough: shop local, come to Brockport and do business with us."
What Surviving Actually Looked Like
Not every business felt the closure the same way, and the difference says something about what actually anchors a canal-town Main Street.
Custom House Bar & Grille sits right at the bridge's entrance and has since 1867. Its whole draw, as much as its menu, is watching boats pass on the canal from a seat with a view. A bartender there, Ariel Auble, put it plainly during construction: with the bridge down, there was "much less foot traffic from people walking across," and the business itself became harder to spot for anyone just passing through.
Frankie Fresh Burritos & Bowls took a different path. Originally on the north side of the canal, the restaurant moved to the south side in June 2024, into a larger space with more seating. An employee there, Cole Burbano, said the move wasn't a direct reaction to the bridge work, but it landed at a moment when relocating and growing turned out to be the right call, even as it became less convenient for regulars coming from Hamlin and Clarkson.
Line those three up and a pattern shows up that a generic "Main Street is back" post would miss entirely. The businesses tied to the bridge itself, geographically or in identity, took the hit hardest. The ones able to move did. And at least one survived only because its neighbors decided, in cash, that it should. That's not a story about resilience in the abstract. It's a story about which kind of business a two-and-a-half-year infrastructure delay actually tests.
This Weekend on Main Street
| What | When | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Brockport Arts Festival | Sat Aug 8, Sun Aug 9, 10am–5pm | Main Street & Erie Street |
| Spurr Car Show | Saturday, Aug 8 | Erie Street |
| Shake on the Lake: The Comedy of Errors | Saturday, Aug 8, 6:30pm | Alumni House lawn, SUNY Brockport (end of College Street) |
| Wine Garden | Festival weekend | Lawn of the Morgan-Manning House |
| Duck Derby | Festival weekend | Erie Canal |
This year's festival, run by BISCO, added a few fixes worth knowing about if you've been before. Vendor parking has always been a headache, according to festival director Kathy Kristansen, so BISCO set up a dedicated vendor lot at SUNY Brockport this year with volunteer shuttles running load-in and load-out. The Saturday-evening slot also has something new: Shake on the Lake, a Shakespeare troupe based in Perry, New York and known across the Finger Lakes and Western New York, is performing The Comedy of Errors free on the Alumni House lawn, bring your own chair. BISCO President Randy Dumas framed the anniversary simply: the festival has always been "about more than a weekend event, it is a celebration of creativity, community, and service," with proceeds continuing to fund programs for children and families across western Monroe County.
The Music Didn't Wait for the Bridge
The festival is the loudest proof that Brockport's downtown is functioning normally again, but it isn't the only one. The village's free Summer Serenades concert series has been running Thursday evenings at the Welcome Center on the canal, 11 Water Street, all season, and its opening night this year was bigger than the series has seen in a while.
On July 7, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra performed indoors at SUNY Brockport's SERC building for a program tied to the Erie Canal's bicentennial and the nation's 250th anniversary, funded in part by grants from the NYS Canal Corporation and the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, with in-kind support from the university. Roughly 550 people showed up, a turnout organizers hope can justify bringing the RPO back next season. The same night, the Welcome Center unveiled a new adaptive kayak dock, part of a broader push by the Canal Corporation to make the waterway easier to access for boaters of all abilities.
The rest of the Thursday lineup has kept the canal path busy: Big Mike and the Motivators on July 16, and on July 23 a newer name with old local roots, the Joey Stempien Big Band. Stempien came up through Brockport High School before becoming a Rochester-based jazz pianist and bandleader with a growing regional reputation. FEEDBACK closed out July on the 30th. The series runs Thursdays through August at 6:30pm, no tickets required, with St. Luke's Episcopal Church on Main and State streets standing by as the rain location.
None of this required the bridge. Serenades kept its schedule through every summer of the closure. What the bridge's return actually changed is simpler: for the first time since 2022, a resident can walk out of a Thursday concert at the Welcome Center, cross Main Street on foot instead of detouring around it, and end up at Custom House, Frankie Fresh, or Grinds Cafe and Sweet Shoppe on West Avenue, where pastry chef Cindy Repp has been turning out commemorative cutout cookies for the country's semiquincentennial. That short walk was the thing missing for two and a half years, more than any single business or event.
The Arts Festival's 30th year on Main Street is the ceremony. The quieter fact underneath it is that Brockport's downtown spent three years figuring out, block by block, which parts of itself could bend and which couldn't, and this weekend is the first time in a long while that the whole street gets to show up at once.
If you're curious what else defines day-to-day life along Brockport's stretch of the Erie Canal, our Brockport neighborhood guide has more on the village's Victorian Main Street and canalfront setting. And if you're ever ready to talk about what it's actually like to live here, High Falls Sotheby's International Realty knows this stretch of Monroe County block by block.
