Walk the 2000 and 2400 blocks of Atwood Avenue this fall and the signage looks different almost everywhere you look. New paint on the Ohio Tavern. A restored tin ceiling glowing through the front window of The Victory. A pastry case where a furniture store used to sit. If you only glanced at the storefronts, you'd assume the neighborhood had turned over.
Look at who signed the leases and a different story shows up. The people opening these doors aren't strangers to the block. They're bartenders who worked the old room, chefs who cooked two doors down, families who've been serving the same recipes since before the current owners were born. Atwood Avenue's busiest stretch of openings in years is, almost entirely, a string of people coming home.
A Bar That's Been Open Since 1933 Just Changed Hands Again
The Ohio Tavern at 224 Ohio Ave. has been some version of a neighborhood bar since 1933. This spring it changed hands again, reopening March 31 under four new owners: three local bar veterans and a friend with a finance background. The group put Stuart Pataska, a longtime bartender at Comedy on State, behind the bar to run daily operations.
What's notable is what they kept. The street tacos stayed. The nachos stayed. Karaoke nights stayed. What they added was more tequila, more draft cocktails, and a rotation of locally made beverages. That's not a rebrand so much as a maintenance job with better inventory, done by people who'd been drinking there long before they owned it.
The Coffee Shop Waited Ten Months to Get Its Ceiling Back
A few blocks up, The Victory spent ten months closed after a serious electrical fire. When it reopened, the goal wasn't a redesign. The floors got refinished and a new tin ceiling went up overhead, but the cozy feel of the original room stayed largely intact. For a business that could have used the fire as an excuse to reinvent itself into something trendier, the choice to rebuild the same room says something about what the owners thought the neighborhood actually wanted back.
The Newest Tavern on the Block Sits Inside a Decade-Long Development
Union Corners, the mixed-use development that fills the long-vacant 13-acre parcel near Schenk's Corners, took ten years and roughly $85 million to complete, with the last phase of apartments opening in 2022. The commercial space that came with it has been filling in slowly since, and one of its most recent tenants isn't a newcomer to Madison dining at all.
Union Corners Tavern opened in the development from Mike Kull, the owner of the downtown steakhouse Rare. Chef Jake Lawler, a recent finalist on Martha Stewart and José Andrés' "Yes, Chef," runs the kitchen. The room is decorated with model airplanes, boats hung from the rafters, and rowing photos that nod to the lake culture right down the street. There's a Skee-Ball setup with a league planned. As the Goodman Community Center reported, Kull wanted the menu to be reasonably priced, but not "your typical out of the fryer pub food."
It's a fine dining owner's idea of a corner bar, built inside a development whose planning involved debate over parking and clinic placement. The tavern didn't create the foot traffic on that block. It showed up once the traffic was already there.
Even the Genuinely New Spots Are Working With Old Bones
Not everything on Atwood is a returning name. Baked Lab, pastry chef Shawn Bolduc's first brick-and-mortar location, opened February 21 at 2044 Atwood Ave., serving snacks and Nordskov Coffee during the day and plated desserts with beer and wine at night. Taco Madre, a Baja California-style taco spot, is now open at 2827 Atwood.
But look at where Baked Lab landed. The building at 2044 Atwood was originally constructed in 1926 as a furniture store, and it's been home to restaurants and food production in the decades since the furniture left. Bolduc didn't pick a blank lot. He picked a building that's been feeding this block, in one form or another, for close to a century.
The pattern holds a few blocks away on Williamson Street, where a new restaurant called Ba Lao recently opened in the space that used to house Lao Laan Xang before that restaurant relocated to Atwood Avenue. The owner is part of the same family, serving the same commitment to Laotian comfort food, from familiar dishes like pho to plates that will be new to most Madison diners. It's a different address, but the same near-east-side habit of businesses staying in the family rather than closing for good.
What This Says About the Corridor Itself
None of this happened by accident. The Schenk-Atwood-Starkweather-Yahara neighborhood, known locally as SASY, runs its own neighborhood association, and that association produces AtwoodFest alongside the Barrymore Theatre every July. This year's festival ran July 25 and 26 across three stages named for Clyde Stubblefield, Luther Allison, and the Sugar Maple, and the proceeds go back into grants for community projects on the same blocks where the festival happens.
That's the loop worth noticing. The people who own these bars and restaurants sponsor the festival that funds the neighborhood association that helps keep the corridor's identity intact, which in turn makes it a place where a bartender wants to buy the tavern he already works at instead of starting from scratch somewhere else. Atwood Avenue isn't resisting change. It's just running that change through people who already have a stake in the block.
If you've lived near Schenk's Corners for a while, none of these names will feel foreign, even the ones on the new signs. That continuity is worth something, and it's part of what makes this stretch of the near east side function the way it does.
If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth, or thinking about what comes next for a property on these blocks, I'd be glad to talk it through. Reach out to Josh Brost any time.
