Rhinelander's North End Is Turning Into a Second Main Street

"We want to be the place that they stop and use their money." That's how Tony Pharo, Executive Director of the Oneida County Economic Development Corporation, described the goal for the stretch of Highway 17 running into Rhinelander from Eagle River. He wasn't talking about downtown, the courthouse lawn, or the strip along Brown Street that most people picture when they think of the city's commercial core. He was talking about a patch of Navajo Street that, a year ago, had a Holiday Inn and not much else.

That patch now has two new restaurants and a specialty medical clinic, with the county's own economic development office on record framing it as a deliberate answer to the money Rhinelander residents have historically spent in Minocqua and Three Lakes instead of at home.

What Actually Opened This Year

Erbert & Gerbert's opened at 1973 Navajo Street this past April, and the backstory is more local than the name suggests. The owner, Joe Flanders, grew up in Rhinelander and first ate at the sandwich chain while attending UW-Eau Claire. Bringing the concept home took about eighteen months of planning before the doors opened, according to WJFW's coverage of the launch, with a steady line of customers on opening morning, including one longtime local who told the station he appreciated having "something new and different and something fast."

A few doors down, at 1977 Navajo, Rosati's Pizza filled in the same short stretch of new construction. Both restaurants sit inside the strip development the county has been actively courting businesses toward, and both are now confirmed open and taking orders, not just announced.

The same building also includes an ENT clinic offering audiology, allergy, and ear, nose, and throat services. Pharo connected that addition directly to who lives in Oneida County now, not just who visits. "We do have an older population," he told WJFW, "so we need service industries and we need specialty clinics and restaurants."

That is a different kind of new business than a seasonal gift shop or another supper club. It is infrastructure for people who already live here and plan to keep living here, arriving in the same construction phase as the restaurants rather than years apart.

The Bet Behind the Building

Most of the Navajo Street construction has been privately funded, with only a small portion running through tax increment financing, according to the same reporting. That distinction matters if you're trying to gauge how confident the businesses involved actually are. Private capital moving into a corridor before the public money does is a different signal than a development that exists mainly because a TIF district subsidized it.

Pharo was direct about the ambition behind it:

"Rhinelander and Oneida County in my opinion is positioned perfectly to be the hub of the north."

The competitive framing isn't subtle. He named Minocqua and Three Lakes specifically as the places currently capturing dollars that Pharo would rather see spent in Rhinelander. Highway 17's north entrance, in that framing, isn't just a place to grab a sandwich. It's the opening argument in a longer case for keeping local spending local.

There's a piece of this still unconfirmed. The original county announcement also floated a housing complex near Menards, described at the time as something that could go up within the year. As of now, nothing on the ground confirms that it happened. It's worth watching rather than assuming it's already part of the corridor.

What's already true, without qualification, is that two restaurants and a clinic went from announcement to open storefront in the same twelve months the county spent talking about the corridor as a strategic priority. That's a faster turn than most municipal economic development plans manage, and it happened on a stretch of road most residents mainly associate with getting to and from Eagle River.

One Thing Worth Knowing Before You Drive Up There This Fall

Separate from anything happening on Navajo Street, this has been a construction-heavy year for anyone entering Rhinelander from the west side of town. A US Highway 8 project reconstructing two intersections as roundabouts, at WIS 17 South/WD Boyce Drive and at County G, closed the highway fully from west of Germond Road to west of the WD Boyce intersection starting April 27, with the city's own release describing a closure expected to run through the summer and traffic detoured along WIS 17 North, Lincoln Street, South Courtney Street, Pelham Street, Arbutus Street, and Kemp Street. Anyone who drove that route this spring and summer already knows it added time to trips that used to be routine.

The city's construction update page also flags a shorter, more immediate closure for this fall. US Highway 8 is set to shut down completely between Airport Road and Red Arrow/Lake Shore Lane for a railroad crossing replacement, running from 6:30 a.m. on October 16 to 6:30 a.m. on October 18. Out-of-town traffic during that window gets rerouted via Highway 17 South and Highway 51 North to Merrill. It's a two-day window, but it's the kind of detail that matters if you have somewhere to be that weekend and haven't checked the city's calendar recently.

None of this is connected to the Navajo Street development in any causal sense. They're two separate stories that happen to be unfolding in the same town in the same year: one is the county actively building toward a described commercial future, the other is the Wisconsin DOT rebuilding intersections that had nothing to do with anyone's business plan. Read together, they say something about how much is physically changing around the edges of a town that, from Main Street, might look like it's having an ordinary year.

What This Adds Up To

A resident who hasn't been out toward the Holiday Inn lately might still think of that stretch of Highway 17 as the road you take to get somewhere else. The county's own economic development leadership is on record treating it as the destination itself, and two operating restaurants plus a functioning clinic are the first hard evidence that the framing isn't just talk. Whether the housing piece follows is still an open question. The lunch options and the ENT appointments are not.

If you're trying to figure out what growth on a corridor like this means for property values a few blocks over, or whether the momentum on the north end reaches out toward the lake roads you've been watching, Matt Schultz has spent two decades reading exactly these kinds of shifts across Oneida County. Schedule a consultation before you assume next year's map looks like this year's.