"To tear it down and build something new, it's hard when you have something like this," Kelsie Lally, lead designer on the Oshkosh Northwestern building project, said back in June 2025. She was talking about a stone-columned building at 224 State Street that the newspaper put up in 1930 and that sat under Michigan ownership before Oshkosh native T.J. Rodgers bought it in 2021. His team, now rebranded as aRc, has spent the years since turning it into what people keep calling downtown's comeback story: a restaurant, a hotel, a whole retail block, all under one restored roof.
Here's what that comeback story actually looks like right now, five years after the purchase and thirteen months after the first tenant moved in. One door is open. Truffle Pig, the Italian restaurant helmed by Chef Cristiano Bassani, has been serving handmade pasta and tableside parmesan wheels since August 2025. Everything else the project promised, a coffee shop, a candy store, a tailor, a hair salon and barbershop, an Italian market, a high-end women's boutique, and the 31-room hotel with a public lobby bar connected to Truffle Pig itself, is still under construction. The Oshkosh Chamber's most recent economic development update puts full completion at Spring 2027, though the lobby bar could open sooner than that.
That's a meaningful walk-back from the timeline reported in mid-2025, when developers were hoping to have the hotel ready for EAA AirVenture 2026. AirVenture came and went this summer. The hotel didn't open with it.
None of that means the project stalled or that downtown's momentum is fake. It means the single building everyone points to when they talk about downtown Oshkosh changing is not, on its own, a good measure of whether downtown feels different this fall. If you're waiting on a ribbon cutting at 224 State Street to decide whether the neighborhood is worth paying attention to, you're going to be waiting past next year. If you want to see what's actually running right now, look at what doesn't depend on that building finishing at all.
The Market Doesn't Care About the Construction Schedule
The Downtown Farmers Market has run every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on the 400 and 500 blocks of North Main Street since May 30, and it keeps going through October 31, skipping only the Fourth of July weekend for the parade. That's five full months of Saturdays that never once depended on a hotel opening down the block. Somewhere between 120 and 150 vendors show up on a typical week, and September is when the produce tables shift from summer's peak toward something more specific to the season: apples, pears, plums, and peaches.
Two orchards run stalls at the market by name. Redmond's Apple Basket sets up on the 400 block, and Apple-licious Orchard works the 500 block, and between them they cover a range of varieties that starts showing up as soon as the calendar turns to September. If you've walked the market in July for the sweet corn and skipped it since, this is the stretch where it's worth going back. The rhythm of the market doesn't wait on any single storefront downtown to finish. It just runs, the same way it has for years, whether or not the newspaper building across town has its coffee shop open yet.
What Else Is Actually on the Calendar This Month
The building isn't the only thing people assume is the story when it's really a slower-moving subplot. The real September calendar in Oshkosh has very little to do with it. A short list of what's already scheduled:
| Date | Event | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Sept. 5 | Hmong National Labor Day | Winnebago County Community Park |
| Sept. 12 | Walk for the Animals: Get Colorful for the Cause | Oshkosh Area Humane Society |
| Sept. 12 | Snooze at the Zoo | Menominee Park Zoo, 520 Pratt Trail |
| Sept. 19 | EAA Roads and Runways | 3000 Poberezny Rd. |
The Humane Society's walk includes a T-shirt tie-dye station, a dog kissing booth, and a DJ, and it's the kind of event that fills a Saturday morning regardless of what's happening downtown. EAA Roads and Runways, later in the month, draws the aviation and car crowd back to Poberezny Road outside of the summer AirVenture rush, a reminder that Oshkosh's identity as an aviation town runs on more than one week a year.
None of these events are waiting on a hotel lobby bar to open. They're already on the books, already have locations attached, and they'll happen whether the retail block at 224 State Street opens next spring or slips again.
Why the Slow Building Isn't the Bad Sign It Looks Like
It's worth putting the newspaper building's pace next to something else that happened nearby. The new ThedaCare Medical Center at 250 W. 6th Avenue broke ground in March 2024 and opened January 19, 2026, a 114,000-square-foot health campus complete with 24/7 emergency care and outpatient surgery, built and opened in under two years. Mill on Main, the 114-unit luxury apartment project along the Fox River, hit its Phase 1 leasing milestone with a ribbon cutting on April 23, 2026. Both of those projects moved from ground to open doors faster than the newspaper building has moved from purchase to fully tenanted.
That comparison isn't a knock on the historic building's team. A modern medical campus and a large-scale renovation of a preservation-minded 1930 structure are different kinds of projects with different kinds of constraints. Lally's own comment about not being able to replicate a building like this if you tried gets at why the pace is what it is. But the comparison does say something about how to read the project if you live nearby: it is not the fastest-moving sign of change downtown, and it was never going to be. The medical center and the apartment building did their work quietly and finished fast. The newspaper building is doing its work publicly and finishing slow, one storefront at a time.
How to Actually Watch This Space
If you want to track the building's progress instead of assuming it, the signal to watch for is the lobby bar. The Chamber's update specifically flagged that the bar attached to Truffle Pig could open ahead of the hotel's full completion, which would be the first real indicator that the rest of the block is close behind. Until then, the six additional storefronts, the market, the salon and barbershop, the tailor, the candy store, the coffee shop, the women's boutique, remain planned rather than open.
Meanwhile, the parts of downtown that don't depend on any of that keep running on their own schedule. The market runs every Saturday through the end of October. The apple stalls are already up. The Humane Society walk, the zoo sleepover, and the Roads and Runways gathering are all dated and locked in for September. None of it needed a ribbon cutting to happen, and none of it will pause if the hotel's timeline slips again.
That's the actual state of downtown Oshkosh this fall. One high-profile building is moving slower than anyone hoped in 2025, and the rest of the neighborhood never stopped moving at its own pace in the meantime.
If you're watching Oshkosh change and wondering what it means for the neighborhoods around it, C21 Ace has been tracking the Fox Cities market since 1997 and is always glad to talk through what's actually happening on the ground, no matter what stage you're at.
