The Old Greenwich Farmers Market Didn't Get Pushed Out. It Got Squeezed Out.

For sixteen seasons, Wednesday afternoon in Old Greenwich meant the same thing: fold-up wagons rattling down West End Avenue, kids cutting through the church playground toward the produce tables, reusable bags filling up with shishito peppers and homegrown tomatoes. The market ran at Living Hope Community Church from 2:30 to 6 p.m., a fixture close enough to walk to that it barely counted as an errand.

This year it moved. Not down the block, not to another OG lot, but over the town line to St. Catherine's Church at 11 Riverside Avenue, with new hours, a new traffic plan, and a hired retired officer waving cars into place. A petition to keep it in the village gathered more than 600 signatures. The story that circulated was the familiar one: a church got tired of its neighbors, a market lost its home, and the people who fought hardest to save it lost.

That story isn't quite right. Read the actual filings and the market's own founder, and the real explanation is less about neighbors turning cold and more about a parking lot that was never big enough for what the market had become.

The Petition Assumed the Wrong Problem

The petition, started by resident Colleen M. Proppé, argued that losing the West End Avenue location would hurt families who relied on a market they could reach on foot or by bike, and who used the adjacent playground while they shopped. It's a fair case for why the village mattered. What it didn't grapple with is why the church stopped hosting in the first place.

According to the Greenwich Sentinel, Living Hope Community Church simply did not renew the market's use of its lot this year. The petition quotes the pastor telling Proppé by phone that neighbors had complained about noise and parking. But the underlying cause predates that phone call. Greenwich Free Press reported that the church's own application to add housing and expand parking went before the Planning & Zoning Commission last fall, and once that project entered the pipeline, the market's future on that lot was already in question. The market wasn't evicted for being disruptive. It was displaced by construction math on a site that was already tight.

The Numbers Nobody Put on a Petition Sign

Here's the detail that changes the shape of the story: the new St. Catherine's site doesn't just replace the lost parking, it roughly doubles it. Patch reported that the new location uses 29 spots for vendor tents, leaving 70 additional spaces open on the east side of Riverside Avenue for shoppers, which the reporting describes as double what Living Hope Community Church could offer. Add the 18 spots allocated to St. Catherine's itself and another 12 marked for visitors, and the Wednesday parking crunch that has quietly shaped this market for years mostly disappears.

That crunch was real. A market pulling 200 to 400 attendees over a four-hour window, a number confirmed in the P&Z filing, was always going to strain a single church lot on West End Avenue. Old Greenwich residents who drove over on a Wednesday and circled the block looking for a spot were not imagining a problem. They were living inside a market that had outgrown its footprint years before the eviction notice arrived.

What Actually Changed on Riverside Avenue

The hour shift is a direct consequence of sharing a lot with an active parish. St. Catherine's holds funerals that can begin at 11 a.m., so the market's 1 to 5 p.m. window, confirmed in Patch's reporting on the petition, gives the church a buffer before vendors start setting up tents. It's a smaller adjustment than the address change, but if you've built a school pickup or a dinner plan around the old 2:30 start, it's the one that will actually trip you up first.

The Planning & Zoning approval also came with a condition on amplified music, a direct response to the Greenwich Japanese School operating next door. As one commissioner put it during the vote, the concern wasn't banning sound entirely but respecting that people go to church "to pray, have a quiet time." The market can still run a speaker system. It just can't run one that carries.

The Founder's Own Verdict

The most telling read on whether this move helped or hurt the market doesn't come from the petition or the public comment period. It comes from Dana Lee, one of the market's original founders and the applicant on the new permit. She told the P&Z commission she would have preferred the Eastern Greenwich Civic Center, but Parks and Recreation confirmed that site was already booked with summer camps and couldn't accommodate a weekly market. St. Catherine's became the practical answer, in her words, "because they have that giant parking lot and will not be doing their carnival this year."

Her assessment of the outcome, though, cuts against the loss narrative:

"I would have preferred it at the Civic Center, personally, but the vendors have been pleased because we have new shoppers and people can find the market better than they could down in Old Greenwich."

That's a founder saying the new site is working better than the old one on the metric that actually determines whether a farmers market survives: whether shoppers can find it and get to it. Longtime OG residents lost a walk-to-market habit. The market itself, by its own founder's account, may have gained a more sustainable location.

How to Actually Plan Your Wednesday Now

None of this means the change is painless, especially if you built a summer around biking over with kids. A few practical adjustments make the transition easier:

• Arrive by 1 p.m. if you want first pick of produce. The market now opens an hour and a half earlier than the old 2:30 start and wraps at 5 instead of 6.
• Park on the east side of Riverside Avenue rather than circling St. Catherine's own lot, since that's where most of the open shopper spaces sit.
• Expect the same vendor lineup you're used to. The roster of 12 to 15 vendors, built around Connecticut farms with food businesses like Sono Baking and Carrot Top Kitchen applying to join, carried over to the new site rather than resetting.
• Note the season end date. This year runs through November 11, though the application indicates future seasons will trim back to the end of October.

The market's 16th season is still, fundamentally, the same market. The tomatoes come from the same farms. The vendors under the tents are largely the ones you already know. What moved was the geography, and the reason it moved had less to do with anyone wanting the market gone and more to do with a lot on West End Avenue that had been running past capacity for longer than anyone had reason to notice.

That's the kind of granular, block-by-block shift that never shows up in a listing description but shapes what daily life actually feels like in a neighborhood. It's also the kind of detail Lisa Migliardi tracks as a matter of course, whether you're settled in Old Greenwich already or weighing whether Riverside's version of that same Wednesday routine might suit you better. If a move is anywhere on your horizon, Request a Complimentary Home Valuation and start the conversation with someone who already knows which parking lot you'll actually be using.