The Real Story Behind Downtown Keene's Busiest Fall in Years
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Drive through Central Square this week and you'll hit the same wall most Keene residents have gotten used to by now: cones funneling Court Street traffic onto School Street, a slip lane closed near Roxbury, parking gone from the east side of the square on weekdays until 5 p.m. It's been like this since mid-July, and it isn't ending soon. What doesn't quite add up is that this is also shaping up to be one of the fullest fall calendars downtown Keene has had in years, with a run of festivals, a marathon, an art tour, and a theater season stacked almost back to back through October. Those two facts aren't a coincidence sitting next to each other. They're connected, and once you see how, the orange cones read differently.
The work tearing up Central Square is the city's Downtown Infrastructure Project, a three-year, roughly $28 million undertaking to replace water mains that in places date to 1868, along with aging gas lines that predate most of the buildings around the square. Casella Construction, the Vermont firm the City Council hired in May, broke ground in mid-July. Fifteen trees came down in the first weeks, three others got tagged for transplanting instead of removal, and Liberty Utilities has been working its way around the square's perimeter tying new gas main into the existing network, moving from the west and south sides to the east side near Roxbury Street as August wore on.
Phase one is supposed to wrap up around Thanksgiving. Phase two, which shifts the work onto Main Street itself, is scheduled for next summer. If you need to know which block will be torn up on a given week, Public Works Director Don Lussier's office and downtown project ombudsman George Downing both field those calls directly, and the city keeps a running project page with detour updates and monthly Coffee and Hard Hats meetings at the Transportation Center on Gilbo Avenue, the next one set for September 9.
Here's the part that doesn't get mentioned on the detour signs. A Sentinel editorial on the project pointed out that streetscape construction of this kind has a documented history of driving away a meaningful share of the small businesses caught in its footprint, citing research from Main Street America. That's the actual risk downtown Keene is managing this year, not just slower commutes.
The Keene Downtown Group's answer has been to concentrate events in the construction zone rather than avoid it. Jamfest, the free music festival that's run for six years, moved into the downtown core for the first time this August, staged on a lot behind the Colonial Theatre with six bands and a "jam trail" steering festivalgoers toward participating shops and restaurants along Main Street. It was explicitly framed as part of a series of mini-festivals meant to keep foot traffic flowing through the construction. The Keene International Festival followed on September 26, and Keene Pride's own festival lands on Central Square September 20, both timed to keep bodies moving through blocks that might otherwise get walked around.
This is the piece worth understanding if you live here: the calendar isn't decoration layered on top of a construction year. It's the city's actual strategy for getting merchants through it.
The clearest evidence that the strategy is working is who's willing to open a business in the middle of an active dig site. Nicola's opened quietly in March at 11 Central Square, a stone's throw from where Casella crews are now working. It's a new venture from Cheryl and Nicola Bencivenga, who spent more than two decades running Nicola's Trattoria on Railroad Street before selling that restaurant in 2018, after which it was reimagined as Granita Enoteca. This isn't a revival of the old name. Cheryl described the new spot on Facebook as embracing what she called "the spirit of community and great food," with chefs Nicola, Joseph, and Kevin running the kitchen Wednesday through Saturday evenings.
A few blocks over, Black Cloud Brewing Co. held its grand opening on March 7, started by a group of former Modestman Brewing employees who decided to build their own place rather than leave the industry. Neither business waited for the construction to clear before committing to downtown. That's not a small signal in a year when the city's own paperwork acknowledges the risk of losing storefronts to a three-year dig.
If you're trying to plan around both the construction and the events rather than get surprised by either, here's what's left on the books between now and the first hard frost:
None of these were scheduled to compete with the construction. They were scheduled around it, which is the whole point.
By the time Casella's crews wrap phase one this Thanksgiving, downtown Keene will have gone through a full season of construction detours running in parallel with the busiest run of public events the Downtown Group has organized in years. That's not an accident of timing. It's a downtown business community and a city government that looked at the odds facing small storefronts during a multi-year dig and decided the counter to that risk was to give people more reasons to walk through the square, not fewer.
For anyone who lives here and has been annoyed by the detour on Court Street or the missing parking near Roxbury, it's worth knowing the disruption has an actual end date this year, and that the new restaurant you've been meaning to try or the festival you keep seeing flyers for is part of the same plan to get downtown through to the other side of it.
If you're weighing what a home near all of this is actually worth, or you're curious how a project like this tends to affect property values in the blocks closest to it, the team at North New England Real Estate Group knows the Monadnock region block by block. Contact us for a free local market consultation and home valuation.
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