New Businesses on South Street in Glens Falls: What's Open

As the Glens Falls Business Journal reported, Judd Gershen has been watching his future bar fill in around him for months. His tavern sits at 54 South Street, tucked between a wine bar that opened in July and a salon that moved in this spring, in a building that spent most of the last two decades boarded up. Everyone else on this stretch has already cut the ribbon. Gershen is still waiting on paperwork.

That wait is worth paying attention to, because it marks the moment this particular block of Glens Falls stopped being a construction site and started being a place people actually walk to. If you live here, you've probably driven past 46-56 South Street a hundred times without really looking. This September, for the first time in years, there's a reason to look.

A Building That Sat Empty for Twenty Years

South Street earned a nickname long before any of this started. City officials used to call it "the Street of Dreams," a nickname associated with long-running discussion about fixing up the street.

Visible progress on those efforts began in 2016, when Glens Falls landed $10 million in state Downtown Revitalization Initiative funding, the kind of grant money that takes years to turn into anything visible. It took most of a decade. The turning point for this particular building came when developer Chris Patten, who grew up in South Glens Falls and has been a landlord in the city since he was 21, bought the long-vacant structure at the corner of South and Elm from Chad Nims for $800,000 and put roughly $1 to $1.5 million into gutting it. The building had sat in rough shape long enough that Patten said he didn't want to risk another winter of snow load on the roof before getting inside.

What came out the other side is a three-story, navy-blue-and-white building with multicolored lighting along the roofline at night and twenty apartments upstairs, sixteen one-bedrooms facing South Street and four larger two-bedrooms facing Elm. The ground floor is where the real change shows up.

Four Doors Opened Before His

By the time Judd's Tavern is ready to open, four other businesses in the same building will already have a season of foot traffic behind them.

• Katy's Wine and Whiskey Bar, 46 South Street. Opened July 11. Co-owners Katy Foster and Bill Dingman brought in executive chef Colin Miner, and Dingman is no stranger to the neighborhood's dining history. He got his start in the industry at 14 at the Lake George Pancake House and later ran Bistro Tallulah, which he credits as one of the businesses that kicked off the broader revival of Glens Falls dining. The space itself dates to the 1890s and was a dry cleaner for most of its life. Foster kept an old black-and-white photo of the building from that era and hopes to hang it somewhere inside.
• Hometown Shop, 48 South Street. Opened April 18. Owners Kara Magoolaghan and Matt Rafferty sell paint, wallpaper, home goods, and gifts out of a space directly across from the new farmers market building. Magoolaghan has described the idea as something that came together after she noticed the space available and decided the neighborhood's new apartments needed somewhere nearby to buy things that make a place feel like home.
• Tease Salon and Beauty Bar, 50 South Street. Relocated here after eight years in South Glens Falls. Owner MeLinda Stanley runs six stylists out of the new location and says the move to a more visible spot brought a 20 percent increase in business, even while holding onto her existing clients. She also worked with the mayor's office to get street parking near the salon extended to three hours, which matters more than it sounds like for anyone booking a color appointment.
• Floro's Mercantile, 52 South Street. Opened in May. Owner Ali Gazetos Mineo is the great-granddaughter of Floro, the founder of the old New Way Lunch, one of South Street's longest-running institutions. Her shop is a vintage-inspired general store that also hosts private shopping events.

Four businesses, four different owners, four different reasons for choosing this exact block within a few months of each other. The renovated building now brings them together.

The Apartments Upstairs Are the Reason This Time Is Different

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only think of South Street as a place to grab dinner. Storefronts alone don't sustain activity on a block after 5 p.m. What's different this time is what's stacked on top of and around the retail.

The twenty apartments above Katy's, Hometown Shop, Tease Salon, and Floro's Mercantile mean there are people living directly over these businesses every night, not just visiting during business hours. A block over, a much larger project is doing the same thing at a bigger scale: the South Street Apartments, a $27 million, five-story building from Bonacio Construction, backed by New York's Office of Homes and Community Renewal, will add 70 residential units when it's finished, including 11 units of supportive housing. SUNY Adirondack has also signed on to lease space in the building for a health care workforce development program. Across the street, the city's own $5 million events and market center, known as The Ed, opened in 2025 and now houses the Glens Falls Farmers Market full time.

Add those pieces together and you get something South Street hasn't had in a long time: retail, housing, and a public market all overlapping on the same three blocks. In a Glens Falls Business Journal report, Patten explained why he pushed to bring in bars and restaurants specifically: "To do that we need to generate foot traffic with bars and restaurants." Foot traffic that doesn't disappear when the workday ends is exactly what makes a downtown block self-sustaining instead of dependent on drive-by visits.

What's Left to Finish

As of mid-August, Gershen was still finishing kitchen equipment installation and dining room trim work at Judd's Tavern, waiting on final permits, with an opening targeted for September. He's run a bar before, at a different address in Lake George, and says he's looking forward to being part of what's already happening on this block rather than trying to build momentum from scratch. Katy's Wine and Whiskey Bar was designed to draw an earlier, more relaxed crowd; Judd's Tavern is set up with televisions and a later-night feel, aimed at a different part of the evening.

The South Street Apartments are the other piece still coming together, with completion expected around winter 2026-27. Once those units fill, the block will have its full stack in place: shops during the day, a market on weekends, apartments overhead year-round, and finally, for the first time in a long time, somewhere to go after dinner without driving to another part of town.

None of this required a single dramatic reopening. It happened in five small steps over about five months, on one renovated corner after the building sat empty for twenty years. This fall is worth a walk down South Street to see what changed.

If you're weighing a move in the Glens Falls area and want a read on how a neighborhood like this one is actually trending, not just what the listings say, Dina Coluccio knows this stretch of the Capital Region well enough to talk it through honestly. Let's talk.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.