The center of Yorktown Heights is a town highway garage. Not a plaza, not a market hall, not a row of awnings. A working municipal yard on the corner of Front Street and Underhill Avenue, a short walk from the old Putnam Line station house in Railroad Park. Anyone who has lived here more than a year stops noticing it.
That corner is the key to a change most residents are experiencing as a series of unrelated rumors: a brewery going into a former health club, a café showing up in a new Underhill Avenue building, something happening with the empty Sears at Jefferson Valley Mall. They are not unrelated. In the past thirteen months the Yorktown Town Board rewrote its zoning code twice, and those two votes, more than any developer announcement, determine where you will be spending Thursday evenings and rainy Saturdays for the next several years. Both changes landed on old infrastructure: a defunct rail right of way and a dead anchor store.
The brewery needed a word that wasn't in the code
Brett McCormack of Menagerie Beer Company went to the Town Board in June 2025 with a plan for 1735 Front Street, in a light industrial complex that already holds a catering hall, in a space a health club used to occupy. His partner in the venture, Tim Czarnetzki, co-founded Foreign Objects Beer Company in Monroe and Urban Family Brewing in Seattle. The plan was Thursday through Sunday, opening around 4 p.m. Asked what it would feel like for the neighbors, McCormack described the goal as "small, intimate. A community gathering space."
The problem was linguistic. Yorktown's code did not have provisions for a small brewery. At a special meeting on July 28, 2025, the board approved a zoning amendment adding them, and McCormack said afterward that the next phase was installing brewing equipment and a canning line and building the bar. A related site, Hudson Valley Craft, lists Yorktown Heights as coming soon for beer, cider, and soda alongside the Menagerie label. Build-outs of this kind run long and quietly, so treat it as under construction rather than pending an opening night, and follow the brewery directly rather than waiting for a sign to appear on Front Street.
What matters for the rest of us is the address. Front Street is one block off the North County Trailway. It is also the street the town has spent a decade trying to change.
The garage is supposed to move, and that is the whole story
The Yorktown Heights Downtown Revitalization Project proposes relocating the Highway Garage from the Front Street and Underhill corner out to town-owned land on Greenwood Street near Route 202/35, into a new building of roughly 40,000 square feet that would consolidate the department's fleet in one place. Parks and Recreation reshuffles in the same move, with most office staff relocating into the Downing Park buildings, operations and maintenance crews and their equipment heading to the new structure, and the temporary offices at Sparkle Lake no longer needed.
Then the interesting part. The vacated hamlet corner would be demolished and marketed to private developers, with the town's own concept showing a 24,000 to 27,000 square foot L-shaped commercial or mixed-use building arranged around outdoor space, deliberately positioned to tie Railroad Park and Patriot Park together. In other words, the plow yard in the middle of downtown is slated to become the connective tissue between the two parks residents already use.
Read that against the $1.7 million the town put into Downing Drive several years ago for sidewalks, curbs, and paving. Officials were explicit at the time that the point was pedestrian connection between the business corridor and the North County Trailway, on a street that leads to Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace and past long-vacant retail including the former Turco's. A brewery choosing Front Street in 2025 is not a coincidence. It is the first private bet on a public plan.
Meanwhile, Underhill Avenue picked up the daytime half. Craig and Glen Bernardi, the brothers behind Bobo's Cafe in Chappaqua, Somers, Baldwin Place, and Ridgefield, took a space at 1726 Underhill Avenue near Route 202 in a new development. Glen has said Yorktown "wasn't even on our radar" until their own regulars kept telling them the town would suit them. Ordering platforms now show a Yorktown Heights Bobo's with a full menu and a 7 a.m. open, which suggests that build-out has crossed the finish line or is about to.
| What | Where | What actually changed | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Menagerie Brewery and Tasting Room | 1735 Front St, former health club space | Town Board added small-brewery provisions to the zoning code, July 28, 2025 | Equipment installation and interior build-out |
| Bobo's Cafe | 1726 Underhill Ave, new development near Rt 202 | Fifth location for the Bernardi brothers | Menu and morning hours now listed |
| Highway Garage site | Front St at Underhill Ave | Proposed relocation to Greenwood St, site marketed for mixed use | Town concept plan, no developer named |
| Downing Drive corridor | Between the business district and the trailway | $1.7M in sidewalks, curbs, paving tied to trailway access | Funded in December 2022, work slated to start spring 2023 |
| Former Sears, Jefferson Valley Mall | Second floor and part of the first | Permitted uses expanded, July 14, 2026 | Leases reported as negotiated |
The mall vote solved a completely different problem
On July 14, 2026, after a public hearing at which no residents spoke, the Town Board voted unanimously to expand the permitted uses at Jefferson Valley Mall to include craft breweries, amusement centers, and indoor recreation facilities. Westfair Communications reported Planning Director Robyn Steinberg explaining that breweries were added at the supervisor's suggestion for a technical reason worth knowing: Yorktown classifies breweries as restaurants, other states do not, and the town wanted the welcome mat to be unambiguous. Deputy Supervisor Sergio Esposito described the goal as evolving with the changing mall scene.
The vote traces back to a May meeting where the board learned the owner of the former Sears site had already negotiated leases for part of the second floor. The floated tenants:
- Laser tag
- Virtual reality
- Ninja-style obstacle activities
- Golf simulators for remaining first-floor space
The obstacle was not neighborhood opposition. It was lease length. Those businesses needed long-term leases the code did not permit, while existing recreation tenants at the mall have operated on temporary ones. Town materials pointed to Cloudbound's family play facility in New Rochelle as evidence that demand for year-round indoor recreation in the Lower Hudson Valley is real.
So the two votes are aimed at two different hours of the week. Front Street is being set up for a Thursday evening and a Saturday afternoon on foot. The old Sears is being set up for a February Sunday when it is 38 degrees and raining and the kids have already been to the John C. Hart Memorial Library twice this month.
The next three weekends, concretely
The 102nd Yorktown Grange Fair runs Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 13 at the fairgrounds on Moseman Road, under the theme "Goats, Games & Good Times!" Details worth planning around:
- Hours are 4 to 11 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday.
- Saturday and Sunday from 10 to 11 a.m. are quiet hours, designed for guests who need lower stimulation. If that describes someone in your household, that hour is the fair.
- Admission is $15 per carload, with separate wristbands for unlimited rides.
- Music runs Mike Risko Band on Friday night, Whiskey's Edge with line dancing lessons Saturday afternoon, Jokerz Wild headlining Saturday night, and Annie and the Natural Wonder Band at 11 a.m. Sunday.
- New this year is a mechanical bull, alongside the mile-long tractor parade, horse show, livestock barns, and blue ribbon contests.
It remains the only agriculturally based country fair in Westchester, which is a strange and good thing for a town that also contains an enclosed mall.
On Thursday, September 17, the Hart Library hosts Kostya Kennedy on The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America. And the farm stand stretch is fully open: The Meadows Farm Market for produce picked on the Yorktown fields behind it, Wilkens Fruit & Fir Farm and Stuart's Fruit Farm as apples come in, Hilltop Hanover Farm & Environmental Center, Hemlock Hill Farm, Mohegan Lake Farm Market, and Muscoot just over the Somers line.
What a resident should take from all this
Yorktown's dining baseline has been stable for years. Peter Pratt's Inn in its restored 1700s farmhouse, Hudson Valley Steakhouse, Himalaya at Triangle Center, Oscar's on Saw Mill River Road, Our Place, Pappous Greek Kitchen, the Bagel Emporium on a Sunday morning. None of that is going anywhere, and none of it moved the town's center of gravity.
What is moving it is the pairing of a rail right of way and a vacated department store, both of them pieces of old infrastructure the town has decided to reuse rather than replace. The hamlet gets a walkable evening it has not had since the Put ran; the mall gets the indoor hours the hamlet cannot offer. If you want to watch this happen in real time, the two things to follow are whether the Highway Garage relocation actually funds and moves, and which of those Sears leases gets signed first. Everything else follows from those.
Neighborhood changes like these tend to show up in how people feel about their own street long before they show up anywhere else. If you are thinking through what a shifting downtown means for you, whether that is a first home near the trailway, a move within Yorktown, or a plan for a house you have owned for thirty years, Isabel R. Alves would be glad to talk it through with the same care she brings to every client conversation. Let's Connect.
