Ask anyone who spent August walking past the intersection of Main, Broad and South Streets in Manasquan, and they will tell you about the cones, the plywood walkways, and the detours that turned a five minute errand into fifteen. What they might not mention, because it happened quietly in the same stretch of blocks, is that a seafood restaurant opened its rooftop deck, a specialty market took over a storefront that had sat empty, and a Brick Township coffee shop signed a lease on Main Street. The construction and the openings happened at the same time, on the same street, and neither one canceled the other out.
That is the part of this year's Main Street story that tends to get lost. The road work made the news because it hurt sales during the town's busiest month. The business openings didn't make the same headlines, because a new restaurant opening is not usually treated as news. But put the two side by side and you get a more accurate picture of what actually happened on Main Street in 2026, and it is not a simple story about decline.
The Season Everyone Remembers for the Orange Cones
The utility work began on Monday, August 3, when the borough started replacing water, sewer and stormwater lines beneath Main, Broad and South Streets ahead of a Monmouth County project to rebuild the same intersection into a single-lane roundabout. The timing landed in the middle of the town's peak tourist season, and the businesses along that stretch felt it immediately.
Kathy Weston, owner of Weston Gallery, kept her shop open through the closures but told NBC New York that her late-summer sales were down about 30 percent, adding that the foot traffic of people who like to simply walk the street had disappeared. A few doors down, Main Street Gallery owner Jennifer Burger described a steeper hit at the borough's August 17 council meeting, where a packed room of merchants pressed officials on why the work started with only a few days' notice during what she called one of the year's two biggest sales months. John Newman, longtime owner of Bouquets to Remember and a former Chamber of Commerce president, put it plainly at that same meeting: people couldn't park, and they couldn't conveniently walk in.
The frustration was specific to timing, not to the town itself. Chamber president Pauline Evans noted that the mayor and council had briefed businesses back in May, though turnout at that meeting had been lighter than hoped. Daily construction updates went out through the borough's app and through squanprojects.com, and work reliably wrapped by 4 p.m. each day so evening business could continue. The Meet Me on Main Ladies Night Out shopping event went ahead as scheduled on August 13, cones and all.
The Businesses That Moved In Anyway
While all of this was unfolding, Main Street kept adding tenants rather than losing them.
- Coastal Canteen opened at 142 Main Street on May 20, months before the utility work started but well within the same construction-affected season. Chef Andre Barbero built a seafood and craft cocktail menu around what he calls the spirit of the Jersey Shore, with a rooftop deck that opened for the summer.
- Joe Leone's Centro Market took a storefront at 113 Main Street, its third location after Sea Girt and Point Pleasant, bringing a takeout counter of soups, pasta, seafood and prepared sides to a stretch of Main that had been missing a grab and go option of that scale.
- A Brick Township coffee shop moved into the former Papa Ganache space at 217 East Main Street, with a soft opening on July 31 and a grand opening on August 4, one day after the utility work began at the other end of Main.
None of these businesses waited for the construction to clear before signing a lease or scheduling an opening date. That is worth sitting with. A retailer or restaurant group deciding to commit to a storefront makes that call based on what they expect the street to look like in a year, not what it looks like during a six week utility project. The openings suggest the people closest to the commercial math on Main Street were not worried about a temporary disruption changing the fundamentals.
The Town's Response Was the Real Story
What actually shifted the trajectory of the season wasn't a business closing. It was the borough deciding to change its own plans.
The construction that started in August was only phase one. Monmouth County had been expected to follow it in November with a roundabout project at the Main, Broad and South intersection, an estimated $1.5 million reconstruction. After the August 17 meeting, where business owners voiced their frustration directly to Mayor Michael Mangan and the council, the borough went back to the county. On September 3, officials announced the roundabout would be postponed to spring, giving downtown a construction-free fall and holiday season.
Alison Manser Ertl, publisher of The Coast Star and a Chamber of Commerce vice president, had pushed for that outcome, telling the council that decisions affecting downtown businesses should not be made without downtown businesses at the table. Councilman Jay Bryant responded that the ideas discussed at that meeting, including a possible business improvement district and a Main Street trolley, were being forwarded through the borough's normal process rather than pushed through unilaterally. Whatever the internal back and forth, the outcome was concrete: the bigger, more disruptive project got pushed off the calendar specifically because merchants asked for it.
That is not a small thing for a town this size. It means the fall and holiday shopping season, the stretch that Weston Gallery and others depend on to make up for a rough August, will run without a second wave of road closures layered on top of the first.
Where Things Stand in Mid-September
The original water, sewer and stormwater project was expected to wrap by the end of September. As of the borough's most recent project update, posted the week of September 7, work is still active at the Main and South Street intersection, with variable closures still possible. Separately, a federally funded streetscape project along Main Street and Route 71 is scheduled to run from September through December, bringing new sidewalks, lighting and finishes to the business district on its own timeline, independent of the paused roundabout.
In other words, Main Street is not finished with construction this year. But the version of construction still ahead is smaller in scope, and it no longer carries the threat of a second major intersection rebuild landing on top of it before the holidays.
The Street Gets Its Fall Back
The clearest sign that Main Street is returning to its normal rhythm arrives on September 19, when Manasquan Bank hosts its 13th annual Community Day at Squan Plaza, with carnival games, arts and crafts, and the bank's own management team working the grills. It is the kind of event that only makes sense on a street people expect to keep walking down, not one they are bracing to avoid.
The businesses that opened their doors this year while the street around them was torn up made a similar bet, just a quieter one. Main Street is having the kind of year that does not fit neatly into a single headline: disrupted and expanding, inconvenienced and invested in, all at once. For anyone who has lived along that stretch through the cones and the ribbon cuttings both, that combination is probably the most accurate description of the place.
For questions about property along Main Street or elsewhere in Manasquan, Clayton & Clayton REALTORS® has spent nearly a century watching Jersey Shore towns work through exactly this kind of season. Schedule a confidential consultation whenever you are ready to talk specifics.
