Westerville Spent Decades Fighting Alcohol. This Fall, Uptown Built A Season Around It.

For decades, Westerville's biggest export wasn't a product. It was a position. The city was home to the national headquarters of the Anti-Saloon League, the organization that helped push Prohibition through Congress and printed anti-alcohol literature out of buildings a few blocks from where State Street sits today. That history is not a footnote anyone in Uptown has forgotten. It's printed into the marketing copy for the neighborhood's own beer festival.

Uptown Untapped, the summer food and beverage event that closed down East Main Street on August 8 this year, describes itself as taking place on "historic streets once home to the Anti-Saloon League." The organizers aren't hiding from the irony. They're building the whole event around it. This year's edition moved past the traditional beer-festival format entirely, adding bourbon, vodka, gin and margarita cocktails alongside ten breweries, according to the event's own program notes. A neighborhood that once tried to end drinking in America now uses its dry reputation as a punchline for the thing it does best on a Saturday night.

That contradiction is worth sitting with, because it explains something about what's actually happening in Uptown Westerville right now. The neighborhood isn't just adding restaurants. It's building its entire fall calendar and a good chunk of its new business roster around gathering, drinking and eating in public, on the same streets that used to print pamphlets against exactly that.

The Calendar Keeps Running Through October

Uptown Untapped already wrapped for the year, but it wasn't the only reason to be on State Street this season. Uptown Westerville Inc., the nonprofit that has run the historic district since 1989, hosts Fourth Friday street festivals that close State Street to traffic and turn the block into an open-air market. The remaining 2026 dates are:

• Friday, August 28
• Friday, September 25
• Friday, October 23

Each one runs under Uptown's Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area permit, which means you can buy a drink from one business and carry it down the sidewalk into another. It's a small regulatory detail, but it's the mechanism that makes Fourth Fridays feel less like a festival and more like the whole district turning into one continuous room for a few hours. Local musicians play multiple stages, shops stay open late, and the same DORA framework that powers Uptown Untapped keeps the sidewalks legally walkable with a drink in hand every fourth Friday from spring through fall.

If you want a very different kind of history lesson, the Ohio Cup Vintage Base Ball Festival lands in Westerville on September 5 and 6. Vintage base ball, played under mid-1800s rules with underhand pitching and no gloves, is a niche but growing reenactment sport with clubs across the Midwest. It has nothing to do with drinking or dining, which makes it an odd, useful contrast to everything else on the calendar. Westerville's history shows up twice this fall. Once as an ironic hook for a cocktail festival. Once played completely straight, on a diamond, by people who take the 1860s seriously enough to skip the mitts.

What's Actually New on State Street

The restaurant and retail turnover in Uptown this year has been fast enough that it's worth naming names, because the pattern only shows up when you look at what these businesses actually are.

Ampersand Asian Supper Club opened as the sister concept to Asterisk Supper Club, bringing ramen, rice bowls and Asian-inspired cocktails to a spot alongside its sibling restaurant. The Giving Room, a multipurpose event space built out by Westerville Florist, opened recently to host floral workshops, small parties and corporate gatherings. Begin, a cozy cafe on East Main Street, is serving specialty coffee and pastries. And Fox in the Snow Bakery, the Central Ohio chain with existing locations in Dublin, German Village, Italian Village and New Albany, is moving into the old FUSIAN space at 79 S. State St. with a late-summer or early-fall opening tentatively on the books.

Co-founder Culley, quoted on the city's economic development site, framed the move the way you'd expect from a bakery joining a district that already has a reputation to live up to, saying the goal was the same one it had been from day one: to create a space where people can gather and get "the most delicious food, from scratch and baked fresh every day." As Culley put it, "We hope to simply add to what is already making Westerville great."

Every one of those five businesses is small-format. A supper club, a florist's event room, a cafe, a bakery. They fit into existing storefronts along a walkable street that's been the same historic footprint for over a century. That's the Uptown growth story, and it's a real one. But it's not where the biggest single investment in Westerville actually landed this year.

The Biggest New Building in Westerville Isn't in Uptown at All

Smash Park opened this year in Westar Place, a commercial district removed from the historic State Street core. At 50,000 square feet, it's an indoor-outdoor complex built around pickleball, axe throwing, dodgeball and trivia nights, marketed as an "eatertainment destination." Measured in square footage, it's larger than the storefronts hosting Ampersand, Begin, The Giving Room and the incoming Fox in the Snow combined, several times over.

That split matters if you live here and have been reading the local coverage as one continuous growth story. It isn't. Uptown's expansion is happening in existing buildings, one storefront at a time, anchored by walkability and a permit system that lets you carry a drink between businesses. Westar Place's expansion is happening in new construction, built around square footage and destination amenities that have nothing to do with a historic streetscape. Both are genuine investment in Westerville. Neither one is a preview of the other.

For a neighborhood whose national identity used to be built on refusing to let people drink in public, that's a strange but coherent place to land. The historic core turned its dry reputation into an annual joke and a permit structure that makes the joke work. The newer commercial district a few blocks over skipped the irony entirely and built something 50,000 square feet in size that has nothing to do with State Street's history one way or the other.

If you're heading Uptown before the year turns over, the practical list is short: catch the Fourth Fridays on August 28, September 25 or October 23, look for Fox in the Snow to open its doors sometime in the coming weeks, and if 1860s baseball with no gloves sounds like your kind of Saturday, Westerville hosts its own vintage game the weekend of September 5 and 6. None of it requires you to buy or sell a thing. It just requires knowing which block you're standing on, and what that block used to stand for.

If you ever do find yourself thinking about what a move within Westerville, or into it, might actually look like, Home Connections Group knows this neighborhood block by block, including the parts that used to print pamphlets against everything Uptown Untapped now celebrates. Let's Get You Home.