Drive down Main Street tonight and you'll find a sign that wasn't there last week: no parking, Canal Street to Thompson Street, odd side, starting at 11 p.m. for sidewalk grading. The same notice closes Bridge Street to Bronson Street for demo work and empties the large municipal lot for bump-out prep. Earlier this month, other postings covered milling at the north end of Main Street and curb pours near Willard's Alley. None of these notices repeat. Each one covers a different stretch of the same street, and the Village of Catskill has been posting a new version every few days since late May.
That rolling pattern is the part easy to miss if you only notice the orange cones and not the calendar behind them. This isn't one long closure. It's a sequence of short, specific ones moving block by block up Main Street, and the Village has said publicly that the whole sequence needs to wrap by the end of October. That target lands after both of the corridor's marquee fall dates, not before them. The Catskill Food Festival fills Dutchman's Landing Park on October 3, and the Catskills Comedy Festival takes over Main Street venues for a three-day run from October 16 to 18. Both happen weeks before the Village's own finish line, which means the street's two biggest fall crowds arrive while the sidewalks are still being poured, not after.
What's Actually Happening Right Now
The construction on Main Street didn't start as a sidewalk project. It started in May 2025 with underground water and sewer work, the kind that doesn't show up in photos because it's happening below the pavement. Village Board Vice President Peter Grasse III has described decades of liability tied to the street's old infrastructure, telling a CBS6 reporter about the years of insurance claims and lawsuits from people tripping on the sidewalks that predated this project.
Work paused for the season in November 2025 and picked back up at the end of March 2026, continuing the underground phase from Church Street up to Summit Avenue. The visible part, the sidewalks and curbs and streetlights most residents associate with "the construction," only began in late May 2026. That's the phase still running through this September: about 85 percent of the sidewalks and curbing on Main Street are being torn out and replaced, along with 49 new trees and new parking meters that take both coins and cards.
Here's how the phases break down:
| Phase | Timing | What It Covered |
|---|---|---|
| Water and sewer replacement | May 2025 to March 2026 | Underground lines, lead service line removal, combined sewer overflow fixes |
| Streetscape construction | Late May 2026 to end of October (target) | Sidewalk and curb replacement, new trees, streetlights, parking meters |
The Village has put the Main Street portion of the total project at roughly $7.6 million, with $2.4 million for water, $2.9 million for sewer, and $2.3 million funded through the state's Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant specifically for the streetscape work. Village Board President Natasha Law has described the broader effort, water and sewer combined, as a $30 million clean water and downtown revitalization initiative that involved years of planning and public review dating back to 2022.
A Deadline That Isn't Arbitrary
The Village has already shown it can time construction milestones to specific events. Back in May, when asphalt work on Main Street had residents asking questions, Law told the Daily Gazette that the blacktopping underway wasn't cosmetic. It was timed so cars could arrive safely, without bottoming out, for that weekend's Catskill Car Show & Food Festival.
That same logic applies now, at a larger scale. Neither the Food Festival nor the Comedy Festival depends on the sidewalks being finished to happen at all. But both depend on Main Street being walkable, well lit, and free of active demolition for the corridor to function the way it's supposed to during a weekend built around foot traffic between venues.
As of this week, the work is still active on multiple fronts. The Village's most recent posting calls for sidewalk grading from Canal Street to Thompson Street and sidewalk demo from Bridge Street to Bronson Street, both starting tonight, with bump-out prep closing the large municipal lot. Concrete trucks are expected Tuesday and Wednesday to finish the remaining sidewalks near the light, per the Village's own update. That leaves a real question for the coming weekend: whether the stretch fronting Dutchman's Landing and the businesses that lead to it will be in its finished state, or still mid-grade, by the time the Food Festival crowd arrives on October 3.
What's Already Landed On Main Street
Businesses haven't waited for the sidewalks to decide whether to open. Phos, a Greek-American restaurant, now occupies the address at 353 Main Street that spent years as the Polish-inflected New York Restaurant. A few blocks up, Loomie's Luncheonette opened its doors to a breakfast-and-lunch crowd this year under owner Josie Grant, who previously ran Moxie Cupcake and Redstart Coffee before returning to Main Street with a spot combining coffee, soups, sandwiches, and baked goods.
Neither business waited for a finished streetscape. Frank Guido's Port of Call, with its long-standing view over Catskill Creek where Main Street meets the Hudson, has kept its regular hours through the same stretch of construction. The Avalon Lounge, a few blocks off Main on Church Street, has continued running its mix of Korean-kitchen dinners, bar service, and live music through the sidewalk work down the block. None of this reads as businesses waiting out a storm. It reads as a street that kept functioning commercially while its underground and above-ground infrastructure got rebuilt in stages around them.
Reading The Weekly Updates
If you live in the village, the most useful habit this fall isn't checking a single "when will construction end" answer. It's checking which block is affected this week, because the closures genuinely move. A parking ban posted for the west side of Main between Bridge and Bronson one week has nothing to do with whether the east side near Willard's Alley is clear the next. The Village posts these updates through its own website, its Facebook page, a dedicated construction Facebook page, the Catskill Police Facebook page, and a call-in hotline, and Trustee Mitchell has been delivering physical paper notices to affected addresses so business owners can plan deliveries around the work.
That granularity matters more in the next three weeks than it has all summer. If you're planning to walk from the Food Festival at Dutchman's Landing Park up to Main Street on October 3, or you're hosting an out-of-town guest for the Comedy Festival weekend, the safest plan is checking the Village's current update rather than assuming last week's map still applies. The project has moved in exactly this kind of short, rolling window since May, and there's no reason to expect the final stretch to behave differently.
The Village's latest update hopes to finish the remaining sidewalks up to the traffic light with Tuesday and Wednesday's concrete pours, which would put that stretch in place ahead of the October 3 Food Festival and the October 16 to 18 Comedy Festival.
If you're weighing what a changing Main Street means for property values or timing a move in Catskill, Melissa Dubin can walk you through what's actually happening on the ground, block by block.
