In January 2023, when Ticonderoga learned it had won the North Country's $10 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative award, one of the people who helped write the application described the moment simply.
"Was like ten Christmases put together."
That was Courtright, one of the people behind the PRIDE of Ticonderoga grant application, talking to North Country Public Radio about the award that was supposed to remake Montcalm Street. Three and a half years is a long time to wait on a Christmas morning that was announced but not yet unwrapped. If you live in Ticonderoga, you have probably heard "downtown revitalization" often enough that the phrase stopped meaning much. Grants get announced. Ribbons get promised. Then everyone goes back to driving past the same empty storefronts.
Here is what most people walking Montcalm Street this month have not pieced together: the money didn't land as one project. It split into two completely different tracks, moving at two completely different speeds, and that split is the reason some blocks look transformed while others still look exactly like they did in 2022. Once you see the two tracks, you can predict which building moves next just by knowing who owns it.
The One Building Everyone Points To
Ask anyone in town what the DRI money actually built, and they will mention 108 Montcalm Street, the old J.J. Newberry's building. It sat empty for fifteen years. In November 2024, the Ticonderoga Revitalization Alliance began Phase 1 of turning it into Newberry Commons, a mixed-use building with two commercial units on the ground floor and four workforce housing apartments above.
Phase 1 alone carries a project value of $1.265 million, and it is not glamorous work. It is asbestos and mold remediation, facade repair, electrical upgrades, and a full roof replacement, the unsexy infrastructure that has to happen before anyone can lease a storefront or move into an apartment. This is the anchor project, the single largest, most visible use of DRI dollars in downtown Ticonderoga, and it is the kind of investment that only happens once in a building this size. It is also the reason people assume the whole street is on the same timeline. It isn't.
The Money That Didn't Go to One Address
While Newberry Commons absorbs a seven-figure anchor investment, a second and much smaller pool of DRI money has been moving through a completely different mechanism: a Small Project Fund that individual building owners have to apply for, one storefront at a time.
The fund launched with $600,000 in March 2025. By June 2025, the state had announced more than $778,000 already awarded, meaning demand from local building owners had outpaced the original pool within three months. That gap between the launch number and the award number tells you something the anchor project can't: there are more owners on Montcalm Street ready to fix up a facade or reopen a vacant unit than the initial fund was built to cover.
Not every building has applied yet, and not every building is ready to. Ticonderoga Alliance had already flagged three properties for feasibility studies before the Small Project Fund even opened, sizing them up for reuse strategies:
| Address | Building | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|
| 108 Montcalm St | Former J.J. Newberry's | Under construction, Phase 1 began Nov. 2024, becoming Newberry Commons |
| 74 Montcalm St | Agway Building | Feasibility study completed, awaiting a redevelopment strategy |
| 85 Montcalm St | Sears Building | Feasibility study completed, awaiting a redevelopment strategy |
| 110 Montcalm St | Rathbun Building | Feasibility study completed, awaiting a redevelopment strategy |
That's why the block between the Agway and Rathbun buildings can look frozen in place while, a few doors down, Newberry Commons has scaffolding up. It isn't neglect. It's sequencing. A feasibility study is not a construction permit, and a building can sit in that gap for a long time waiting on a private owner to decide what to do with the report they were handed.
What's Already Open While the Big Projects Catch Up
Not everything on Montcalm Street is waiting on a grant cycle. Some of the street's newer life predates the DRI money entirely, and some of it never needed a state fund to begin with.
At 113 Montcalm, a single storefront now holds two businesses stacked front to back. The front unit is Champ Café, a coffee shop run by Katie Andersen with a Lake Champlain sea-monster theme, fresh pastries, and gluten-free and vegan options. The back unit is Ti Works, a 24-hour co-working space that started as a pilot project and now operates as its own locally owned business, connected to the café through an adjoining door. It's a small footprint doing double duty, which is a pretty good description of how a lot of Montcalm Street's smaller reopenings have worked.
That pattern isn't new. Back in 2023, before most of the DRI construction had started, Megan Scuderi opened Blee's Salon and Spa across from the Adirondack Trading Post after leaving a career in New York City real estate staging. Jamiee Kuhl, who grew up on Montcalm Street watching its storefronts close one by one, came back as an adult with a different read on the place.
"I like it. Now I want to raise my kids here."
That wave of small openings happened without waiting for a grant announcement. It's worth keeping in mind when the Newberry Commons scaffolding makes it feel like nothing moves on Montcalm Street without state money behind it. Some of it never did.
Proof People Are Actually Using the Street
Construction and grant math only tell you what's being built. The Ticonderoga Montcalm Street Partnership's calendar tells you whether anyone actually shows up once it's done. This past July, the street ran its Downtown Summer Nights series every Friday, with shops staying open until 8 p.m. and evening programming pulling people onto the sidewalk after dinner hours. On July 25, TMSP ran its 17th Annual StreetFest, a milestone that means the event predates the DRI grant by more than a decade and has simply kept running through every phase of the street's ups and downs.
TMSP has already published its full save-the-date calendar for the rest of 2026, with FallFest, HalloweenFest, and the Street Art Auction still ahead this year. None of that programming depends on whether Newberry Commons finishes on schedule or whether the next round of Small Project Fund money gets awarded. It's a separate, older layer of Montcalm Street's life, run by volunteers, that keeps the street occupied whether or not the construction crews are on site that week.
Reading the Street for Yourself
If you want to know what's actually changing on Montcalm Street rather than what's been announced, watch for the difference between scaffolding and paperwork. A building with visible construction, like 108 Montcalm, is on the anchor track and moving on its own multi-year timeline. A building that's had a feasibility study but no visible work, like the Agway, Sears, or Rathbun buildings, is waiting on its owner to decide what comes next, and that decision has nothing to do with the state's calendar. And a storefront that just quietly opened, the way Champ Café and Ti Works did, probably didn't wait on either track at all.
Ticonderoga is a town of fewer than five thousand year-round residents deciding, building by building, what its own Main Street becomes next. The $10 million didn't rebuild Montcalm Street. It funded one large anchor and seeded a pool of smaller decisions that individual owners are still making, at their own pace, for reasons that have as much to do with a single building's fifteen years of vacancy as with any master plan.
If you're watching this corner of the Adirondacks and wondering what a changing Main Street means for property values, timing, or what's actually for sale nearby, Melissa O'Reilly knows this stretch of Essex County block by block. Let's connect.
