Downtown Mauston New Businesses Bring Old Buildings to Life

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation's account quotes Mauston City Administrator Daron Haugh telling agency officials during a visit to downtown last year: "When stores plant roots in an area, they create a ripple effect." He wasn't talking about a new shopping center or a housing subdivision. He was standing in front of buildings that had already been standing for decades, describing what happens when someone finally decides to fix one up instead of walking past it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. If you've noticed more people parked along State Street lately, or wondered why a boat dealership showed up where the old K-Mart used to be, the answer isn't that Mauston built something new. It's that the town ran out of places to build and got serious about reusing what was already there.

The One Empty Lot Rule

Here's the detail that explains everything else: downtown Mauston has exactly one remaining infill spot available for new construction. Haugh laid this out plainly in an interview with Business View Magazine, describing a district where nearly every other lot is already occupied by a building dating back to the early 1900s. That's not a complaint. It's the whole strategy. With almost no room to build outward, the city's Tax Incremental District program has spent recent years pushing money and incentives toward the opposite move: facades, awnings, brickwork, interior rebuilds, anything that turns an empty building into an occupied one.

That's the frame worth holding onto as you walk past the three projects that actually define what "new" means downtown right now. None of them are new construction. All three are buildings or lots that sat unused, sometimes for years, until someone decided reuse was worth the investment.

The Opera House That Became a Brewery

Start at 134 E. State Street, where Gravity Box Brewing Company has been pouring beer since February 2021. The building itself goes back to 1875, when it housed Mauston's original Opera House. It was rebuilt in the late 1960s and sat as fairly ordinary retail space for decades after that, until owners Micah Playman and his wife April took it on, largely self-funded, and turned it into a taproom with sixteen rotating taps and a beer garden out back.

The brewery marked four years in business in February 2025. Along the way, it absorbed space that used to belong to an in-house coffee shop. That coffee counter operated out of the same building until 2024, when Gravity Box needed the entire footprint to keep up with growing business. In the summer of 2025, the brand expanded again, opening a second and smaller taproom in Wisconsin Dells, a sign that whatever's working in Mauston's version is working well enough to try exporting it.

Haugh has pointed to Gravity Box specifically as one of the projects creating that "ripple effect" he talks about. Not because it's the biggest building downtown, but because it turned a spot people used to drive past into a spot people plan a stop around.

The $3.15 Million Bet on the Old K-Mart

A few blocks over at 800 N. Union Street sits the other half of the story, and it's a much bigger building with a much bigger price tag. The former K-Mart had sat vacant since 2019, when the chain closed its retail stores nationwide. That's five years of a 68,000-square-foot building doing nothing in the middle of town.

In 2024, Jay Mittelstaedt, who already ran Jay's Power Center in Reedsburg, purchased that building along with two adjacent properties for $3.15 million. With help from a WEDC Idle Sites Grant, he renovated and expanded the space into Jay's of Mauston, a dealership that now houses three separate divisions: powersports, agriculture and turf equipment, and marine. It's the kind of purchase that only makes sense if you believe the town around it is worth betting on, and Haugh has credited it, alongside Gravity Box, as one of the two anchor projects doing the heaviest lifting for foot traffic downtown.

Here's how the three reuse projects stack up against each other:

The Lot Becoming a Living Room

The third project is smaller in dollars but arguably the most personal, because it's not a business at all. An unused downtown lot is being converted into what the city has called a "fully realized urban oasis," funded in part by a $28,255 Vibrant Spaces Grant from WEDC. Haugh described wanting to see people sitting at the picnic tables by the middle of July, and the plans on file include a handicap-accessible outdoor structure with shade, a water bubbler, outdoor WiFi, a bike rack with a repair station, and a dog waste station, all tucked into small sidewalks just off State Street.

Contractors on the project have all been local businesses, which fits the pattern. This isn't outside developers discovering Mauston. It's the same handful of local names, tradespeople, brewery owners, dealership owners, showing up in more than one part of the story.

Why This Chain Reaction Matters If You Live Here

Mayor Teske has talked about this in terms of who shows up for what. Someone on an ATV trail stops at Gravity Box for a beer. Someone who came for the brewery notices the powersports dealership down the street and realizes there's more to explore than they planned on. It works because Castle Rock Lake and the surrounding ATV trail network were already pulling people toward Mauston. What's changed is that there are now more reasons to actually stop once they're here.

For residents, the practical version of that is simple. If you've felt like downtown has more going on than it did five years ago, you're not imagining it, and it isn't because anything got built from scratch. A brewery filled an 1875 building. A dealership filled a five-year-vacant big-box store. A vacant lot is turning into somewhere to sit down. With only one infill spot left downtown, this reuse pattern isn't a phase. It's likely the only version of "new" the district has room for going forward, which means the next building to change hands is probably one you already walk past without noticing.

If you're the kind of person who likes tracking what's happening in your own neighborhood before it shows up anywhere else, that's worth keeping an eye on. And if you ever find yourself wondering what a building like that might be worth, or what's changing block by block near a property you own, Seth Tully has spent enough time in Juneau County to talk through it plainly, no pressure, just a local conversation about a place he knows well.