The Kazoo Parade is a month behind us. The Fall Festival is still ten weeks out. On paper, August in Nazareth reads like the flat middle of the calendar, the stretch after the July 4 Whitefield House crowds have gone home and before the borough tips into apple season.
That reading misses what has actually happened to Nazareth this summer. Two restaurants have opened three blocks apart on the borough's spine. A Saturday market that used to be a nice-to-have has quietly become the reason people plan their weekends around Center Square. And the shows programmed into the Center for the Arts have started to feel less like a side project and more like the reason to stay in town on a Saturday night. If you live here, late summer is the moment the pieces snap together.
The Circle On Saturday Morning
The borough runs its Farmer's Market in the Circle every Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. through summer and early fall, with entertainment and new vendors added to the roster this year, per the announcement from the borough office. That is a longer season and a bigger footprint than most residents realize, and it explains why Center Square has developed a rhythm on Saturdays that carries into the surrounding blocks.
The market is the first stop, not the whole trip. Once you have your produce, the rest of the morning belongs to whichever direction you walk from the Circle. That was true two years ago in theory. It is true now in practice, because the walk itself has more to reward it.
What Opened On Main And Broad This Summer
Two openings define the season. Both sit inside a three-block radius of the Circle.
- Cody's Eats & Sweets, 52 S. Main St. Cody Dally, a Nazareth grad who built a following at Lehigh Valley farmers markets, opened the brick-and-mortar on June 26. The menu leads with tomato pie by the slice, quarter, half, or full sheet, plus ribeye cheesesteaks and a rotating stuffed-cookie program that includes chocolate chip with Nutella and Oreo, banana cream with dulce de leche, and red velvet cheesecake stuffed with New York-style cheesecake. The larger oven at the Nazareth space lets him bake 16-by-24-inch whole tomato pies, which is not a size most kitchens in the borough can produce.
- New Vista Grill, 49 N. Broad St. The comfort-food eatery is holding its grand opening on Aug. 8, welcomed by Kate Hartney of the Nazareth Area Chamber as an expansion of the borough's dining options.
The Cody's storefront is worth a note on its own. The space at 52 S. Main previously housed Mersin on Main and Indigo 52, two operators who left the address quiet for stretches at a time. A tenant with a farmers-market following and a signature product is a different kind of anchor than a rotating cast of concepts, and it is the piece that pulls the Main Street side of the Circle into the same weekly gravity as the market itself.
Add the establishments that were already doing the work, and the picture fills in fast. Nazareth Brew on the coffee-and-morning side. Birthright Brewing and The GOAT Pub & Pie for later in the day. Beck's Land and Sea House, in the borough since 2002, for a sit-down dinner with a private room that seats up to 26. The Nazareth Diner on S. Broad, open 24 hours, with a brewery license and a full bar since its renovation. What used to feel like a scattered handful of options now reads as a corridor.
Aug. 15 At 30 E. Belvidere
The Nazareth Center for the Arts is a gallery, an open-mic host, and a small-room concert venue at 30 E. Belvidere St., managed by the Cultural and Arts Commission, LTD, and running since January 2010. The August anchor on their calendar is The Beautiful Distortion on Saturday, Aug. 15, doors at 7:00, show at 7:30, BYOB.
The band is worth naming for two reasons. First, they are a Lehigh Valley rock outfit with vocalists Dave Doll and sisters Karen Jones and Amy Jones fronting a five-piece, and their credits include opening for Disturbed in 2022 and playing Musikfest, ArtsQuest, Levitt Pavilion, and Martin Guitar's Martin on Main. Second, they are playing an intimate room a five-minute walk from the Circle instead of a Bethlehem festival stage. That is the trade Nazareth residents have on offer in August that visitors from Bethlehem do not.
Before Breakfast, Henry's Woods
The Circle handles Saturday mid-morning. Jacobsburg handles the hour before it.
Jacobsburg Environmental Education Center covers 1,168 acres at the foot of Blue Mountain, with the main parking lot at 400 Belfast Rd. and a trail network the Pennsylvania DCNR documents in detail on the state park hiking page. The Henry's Woods loop is 1.8 miles with 147 feet of gain, half an hour to an hour at a walking pace, and it runs through remnant old-growth forest where eastern hemlock and white oak stand above 130 feet along Bushkill Creek, per the Old-Growth Forest Network.
For late-summer residents, two details matter. The loop is short enough to be a before-coffee walk rather than a plan-the-day hike. And the connector network keeps growing. The Bushkill Township Trail from Belfast Road toward Wind Gap is part of the regional network called THE LINK, which is intended to reach the Appalachian Trail to the north and, via the Two Rivers Trail, Easton to the south. What Henry's Woods offers now is a quiet loop. What it will offer in a few years is a trailhead into something much longer.
A Resident's Late-August Saturday
The pieces line up cleanly if you want them to.
- 7:00 a.m. Park at 400 Belfast Rd. Walk the Henry's Woods loop counter-clockwise. You will be back at the car in under an hour.
- 8:30 a.m. Coffee and a pastry at Nazareth Brew.
- 9:15 a.m. Farmer's Market in the Circle. Produce, whatever entertainment the borough has booked for the week, the walk-around portion of the morning.
- 11:00 a.m. Cody's on S. Main for a slice of tomato pie and a stuffed cookie to take home. Whole-sheet orders if you are hosting later.
- 12:30 p.m. Lunch and errands along Main and Broad.
- 7:00 p.m. Doors at the Nazareth Center for the Arts for the Aug. 15 show, or a table at Beck's, or the patio at the Diner. Pick your temperature.
The point is not that any single stop is unusual. The point is that until this summer, the day was harder to string together without a car trip out to Route 33.
What Sits On The Horizon
If you want a horizon to plan toward, the borough has already set one. The 2026 Nazareth Fall Festival is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 17, starting at 2:00 p.m. at 100 S. Main St. The Farmer's Market runs into early fall, so there is a stretch of Saturdays where the two overlap. The Beautiful Distortion returns to the Center for the Arts stage for the annual holiday concert later in the year, which is the through-line on the venue's calendar and worth watching for.
None of this is a reason to move to Nazareth. It is a reason to notice that if you already live here, the borough you have on Aug. 15 is not the borough you had on Aug. 15 of last year. A new bakery-restaurant on Main. A new comfort-food spot on Broad. A Saturday market with a longer bench of vendors and enough gravity to hold a morning together. An old-growth trailhead ten minutes from your front door. A small-room concert calendar that keeps giving you a reason to skip the drive to Bethlehem.
If your late-summer walk through town has you thinking about the next chapter of your own move within the borough, or about whether the house down the block is worth a serious look, the Shabana Pathan Group team lives and works this market. Schedule a Confidential Consultation and we will bring the same neighborhood-level attention to your address that this borough has spent the summer earning.
