Winooski's Real Superpower Is Reinvention, and This Fall You Can Watch It Happen

Walk past the rotary this month and you'll notice the last empty lot in downtown Winooski finally isn't empty anymore. For years it sat there as a parking lot and a construction fence, the one piece of the city's downtown puzzle that hadn't clicked into place. Now there's a hotel on it. And if you squint, the hotel is doing the same thing Winooski has been doing to its buildings for over a century: taking something worn down or unused and turning it into the next thing.

That habit isn't new. Winooski's whole downtown runs on it. The city's most photographed restaurant used to be a food truck. Its most photogenic dining room used to be a wool mill. Even its farmers market spends one Sunday a year putting spinning wheels and dye vats back into a building that once ran actual looms. This fall, the pattern completes another lap, and it's worth knowing the specifics if you live here, because a few of them changed the way you'll spend a Sunday.

The Last Empty Lot Just Became a Net-Zero Hotel

The Sugar House Hotel opened its doors this August at the corner of Winooski Falls Way and Abenaki Way, and it closes out a downtown master plan that Winooski has been chasing since the late 1990s. The 115-room property joins Marriott's Tribute Portfolio, and it's the first all-electric, net-zero, LEED Platinum hotel in Marriott's global portfolio, meaning no fossil fuels run through the building at all. Heating and cooling come from geothermal wells. Power comes from rooftop solar. Developer Doug Nedde told Vermont Business Magazine that hitting those standards alone added roughly three million dollars to the project.

The scale is easy to miss if you only think of Winooski as small, which, to be fair, it is. The whole city covers about 1.5 square miles. Onto a lot smaller than an acre, Nedde Real Estate and its partners packed a 115-room hotel, an 83-unit workforce housing building, and a 276-space public parking garage, a combined project the City of Winooski pegs at more than $74 million. That's not a hotel dropped into a neighborhood. That's a neighborhood's missing piece, finally installed.

The detail locals will actually use: every room is named after a Vermont sugarhouse, and the hotel's rooftop bar is currently the only rooftop restaurant and bar in the Burlington area, with sightlines toward the Green Mountains on one side and the Adirondacks on the other. As of this spring, roughly 40 sugarhouses across the state had signed on to have a room named for them, with developers still recruiting more to fill out all 115. If your family runs one, or you know someone who does, it's apparently not too late to ask.

The Rotary's Best-Known Restaurant Isn't Really a Restaurant Anymore

If your mental map of Winooski still has Misery Loves Co. filed under "dinner reservation," it's time to update it. The chef-owners, Nathaniel Wade and Aaron Josinsky, started the operation as a food truck before landing a brick-and-mortar spot at 46 Main Street in 2012. From there it became one of the state's most talked-about kitchens, earning two James Beard Award nominations for best chef in the Northeast, the kind of recognition Seven Days covered in detail when the squid-ink farfalle and foraged mushroom dishes were still on a nightly chalkboard menu.

That nightly menu isn't the current model. Misery now runs as a market and deli on the rotary, the kind of spot where you grab take-home meals, natural wine, and pantry staples rather than book a table for eight. It's still the same address, still the same reputation for thinking hard about food, just repackaged for how people actually eat on a Tuesday. If you've been avoiding a trip because you assumed you needed a reservation, you don't.

Waterworks Food + Drink, a few blocks away in the historic Champlain Mill, tells a version of the same story in the other direction. The mill was built in 1912 to produce woolen fabric using water power straight from the Winooski River. Today the same building holds a restaurant, a bar, and an events space, with river views from nearly every seat. The looms are long gone, but the mill never stopped working. It just switched product.

That thread actually got literal at the end of August, when the Winooski Farmers Market's Fiber Fair brought textile artists, natural dye demonstrations, and a community mandala weaving project into a partnership with the Heritage Winooski Mill Museum, the organization that keeps the mill era's actual history on record. For one Sunday, spinning and weaving came back to a city built on it, just a few blocks from a former mill now serving brunch.

Two Special Sundays Left at the Market

Fiber Fair has already come and gone this year, but the Winooski Farmers Market has two special Sundays left before it closes out the season:

• September 27, Youth Vendor Day — makers age 17 and under run their own tables, with family activities and games layered in.
• October 25, Halloween at WFM — the market's final Sunday of the year, with costumes encouraged and a lineup of themed vendors and games.

Both happen at the market's usual spot on Winooski Falls Way, right in front of the Champlain Mill.

New on Main Street

The rotary and Main Street corridor keep adding to an already dense food scene. Tiny Thai Restaurant relocated to 293 Main Street, open Tuesday through Saturday from 4 to 8:30 p.m. Donwoori, a family-owned modern Korean spot, is now settled in at 22 Main Street with dine-in and delivery. Neither replaces what's already there. They just add another reason a single block downtown can cover Thai, Korean, Nepalese, and New American in a five-minute walk.

Get Outside While the Leaves Turn

Winooski's outdoor options split into two speeds. The Riverwalk, a concrete path that opened in 2006 as part of the city's downtown revitalization, runs along the Champlain Mill and the old Woolen Mill for a family-friendly half-mile with river and falls views the whole way. If you want more distance, the Onion City Loop covers about two miles on dirt trail, following the Winooski River on a route that's rougher underfoot but rewards the extra effort with a quieter stretch of the water. Fall is arguably the best window for either one, before the mud season starts and before the light gets too short to enjoy after work.

Same City, Same Habit

None of this is really about a hotel or a farmers market or a restaurant that changed its hours. It's about a city that keeps looking at what it already has, a mill, a food truck, a vacant lot, and asking what else it could be. The Sugar House Hotel is the newest and biggest example, but it's using the same logic Misery Loves Co. used a decade ago and the same logic Waterworks used before that. Watching Winooski means watching that pattern repeat, usually a few blocks from wherever you're already standing.

If you're a longtime Winooski resident who's been thinking about what your own next move looks like, whether that's more space, less space, or just curiosity about what your corner of the Onion City is worth these days, idENTITY real estate group knows this city block by block. Get in touch when you're ready to talk it through.