Drive south through Twelve Corners this August and three things will strike you as wrong. The farmers market that has anchored Sunday mornings at Brighton High School for close to two decades is gone from that lot entirely. The ramp onto 590 South is squeezed down to one lane behind a wall of orange barrels. And the building that spent 62 years as Grinnell's, the kind of place where you took your kids for their First Communion lunch, now has a different name over the door.
None of this reads as connected if you experience it one errand at a time. But look at the three disruptions together and a pattern shows up that explains something most residents haven't put together yet: Brighton isn't falling apart this year. It's spending on itself, on three fronts at once, and the spending points in one direction, toward a slower, denser Monroe Avenue rather than a faster one.
The market didn't move for parking. It moved for what was under the turf.
The Brighton Farmers' Market opened its 2026 summer season on April 26 at a location it has never used before: the parking lot of the Golisano Institute for Business and Entrepreneurship on Sawgrass Drive, a full mile from its usual home at Brighton High School. The move isn't cosmetic. Brighton schools began installing artificial turf on an athletic field earlier in the year, and the excavation turned up hazardous material left over from a historic brick-manufacturing site that once occupied the ground. The school district is now working with the state Department of Health and the DEC on a cleanup plan before the field can be finished, which is why the market is running its entire Sunday season through November 22 from a business-school parking lot instead of a gym parking lot.
It's a strange kind of local trivia: the reason your Sunday egg run now takes you past the Islamic Center on Westfall Road instead of down South Winton is that Brighton, like a lot of Rochester's older suburbs, was built in part on top of its own industrial past. The market's temporary address is a direct, physical consequence of that history surfacing, literally, under a football field.
Two separate state projects are squeezing the same half mile
The traffic backups near the 590 interchange aren't coming from the market move. They're coming from a $51.5 million New York State DOT project that began this spring to replace the highway bridge over Monroe Avenue and rehabilitate the neighboring spans over Allens Creek Road. Work of that scope doesn't wrap in a few weeks, so if the stretch near the Monroe Avenue ramps has felt worse than usual all summer, that's why. Sam Khalil, who owns Basha Mediterranean on Monroe, told 13WHAM he's bracing for the hit to his business but supports the work: the bridge, he said, has been in bad enough shape that driving under it was unsettling. Longtime Brighton resident Guy Barker, who has worked nearby for almost 23 years, put a number on how bad the corridor already was before the bridge project even started, describing daily 20 to 30 minute jams that began once Whole Foods opened nearby.
Here's where it gets more interesting than one more construction headache. Separately from the bridge, the state has drawn up design plans for the flat stretch of Monroe Avenue itself, the 1.75 miles between the city line and the 590 bridge, and those plans don't just resurface the pavement. They shrink it. Current plans call for taking Monroe from four travel lanes down to two, plus a center turn lane and new shoulders wide enough for cyclists, something the corridor doesn't have today.
That's a $13 million decision to make an already congested road physically narrower, in the same year a separate project is already squeezing the same traffic. It only makes sense if the town is optimizing for something other than how fast cars move through it. Brighton Supervisor Bill Moehle said as much directly:
"This is our main street. We want people to stop, we want them to shop, we want them to eat, and we want everybody to be able to do that safely."
That's not a planner's talking point. It's a stated tradeoff, reported by WXXI, and the town isn't guessing blind on the bet. Monroe County ran the same lane-reduction on Elmwood Avenue and Moehle pointed to that project as evidence the approach works. Reconnect Rochester, the transportation advocacy group backing the plan, cites research that road diets like this one reduce crashes by an average of 30 percent. So the frustration of sitting in a longer line of cars this year isn't an oversight. It's the visible cost of a bet that a narrower Monroe Avenue is a safer and, eventually, more walkable one.
Twelve Corners is still betting on itself too
The clearest sign that this is investment and not decline sits at 1690 Monroe Avenue, in the building that used to be Grinnell's. The restaurant had been family owned and operated in that spot for 62 years before it closed in July 2023. Chef Richard Reddington, a Pittsford native who spent 25 years in Napa Valley kitchens before returning home, gutted the space with business partner Marty O'Sullivan and reopened it as Redd Wood on March 12, 2025. O'Sullivan didn't come to the project as a stranger to the building or the neighborhood. He remembered celebrating his own First Communion at Grinnell's, and for more than a decade before that partnership, he'd run the food truck Marty's Meats, a regular at private events, area festivals, and, notably, the very Brighton Farmers' Market that just got displaced by the turf project down the road. The same name threads through both storylines: a food truck vendor who fed the market crowd for years is now the co-owner steering a full-service restaurant into a building the town spent six decades treating as a fixture.
A few blocks over, the same logic showed up in a straightforward real estate transaction. Brighton Commons, the 35,000-square-foot retail plaza at 1855 Monroe Avenue that has anchored the Twelve Corners area since it was built in 1940, sold this April for $2.8 million in a deal that wasn't even publicly marketed. It changed hands fully leased, to a buyer whose portfolio already includes another Monroe Avenue plaza and a property in Fairport. Private capital doesn't chase a corridor it expects to shrink in relevance. It chases one it expects to keep earning rent.
What the pieces add up to
None of these four threads was planned together. A school district's turf project, a state bridge replacement, a state resurfacing design, and a private restaurant reopening don't share a project manager. But they share a year, and they share a half mile of road, and the direction they all point is the same: Brighton is willing to absorb a season of detours, a squeezed commute, and a market operating out of a business school parking lot in exchange for a Monroe Avenue that functions less like a highway and more like the main street Moehle described.
If you live here, that reframes what you're driving through this year. The cones near the 590 ramp and the empty lot at the high school aren't signs that Brighton is neglecting its own infrastructure. They're the visible cost of Brighton spending on it, on three fronts, in the same twelve months, with a private restaurant and a fully leased plaza betting alongside the town that the corridor is worth the mess.
The market runs at its temporary Sawgrass Drive location every Sunday through November 22, and the bridge and corridor work will likely still be a fact of life on your commute into the fall. If you're the type who likes knowing why the drive changed and not just that it did, now you do.
If a season like this one has you thinking about what's next for your own address on this corridor or anywhere else in Greater Rochester, the Bonnie Pagano Team has spent years reading exactly this kind of local detail for what it means to buyers, sellers, and neighbors. Reach out when you're ready to talk it through.
