Ed Wojnicz has been mayor of Wisconsin Dells long enough to remember when Wo-Zha-Wa was a different kind of party. Before the tour buses and the six-figure crowds, he says, "you could grab a beer, walk down the street, do whatever." The parade back then ran forty or fifty units. It was, in his words, "pretty much a small, local event through 1980."
That history matters this weekend, because the festival that grew out of it, and the downtown it runs through, are having two different kinds of anniversary at once. Wo-Zha-Wa traces back to 1967, when local service clubs threw a carnival to mark the end of tourist season and raise money for scholarships and youth programs. Fifty-nine years later, the festival still opens Friday with sidewalk sales and closes Sunday with a parade down Broadway. What's changed is what's lining that route. A run of restaurants and bars that didn't exist a year ago is now open on the same blocks where the Kiwanis and Lions once set up beer tents, and unlike the festival, they're not built to disappear after the parade passes.
What's New Between the Carnival and the Coffee Shop
Start with the biggest change. Farmer in the Dells and its rooftop cocktail bar, The Silo Bar, opened earlier this year inside The Wisconsin Hotel on Gasser Road, a new property from the Waterman and Schmitz families, whose local roots go back six generations through projects like the original Great Wolf Lodge and Noah's Ark Waterpark. The restaurant leans into a farmhouse menu built around Klement's bratwurst and coffee from Bella Goose, the same river-front roastery locals have been going to for years. Above it, the Silo Bar spans multiple levels and is finishing construction on a 90-foot glass dome, a piece of downtown skyline that has nothing to do with waterslides.
A few minutes away, Outlets at The Dells spent the summer adding tenants that have nothing to do with retail therapy either. Draft City Taproom opened as a craft beer and pub food spot built, in the words of its own announcement, for "post-shopping drinks, weekend meetups, and summer nights." Lush Latte, a small locally owned café, opened alongside it in May. Neither one exists to catch a family on its way to Mount Olympus. Both exist because the outlet center's general manager said shoppers had been asking for somewhere to sit down.
Downtown itself picked up three more names this year: Dells Panaderia, a bakery and coffee shop built around traditional Mexican-style pastries, The Lucky Leprechaun, the area's first Irish pub, and Station 136 Kitchen & Cocktails, a smoked-meat spot with a Southern menu. None of these are festival pop-ups. They're storefronts with hours, staff, and menus that assume a Tuesday night in November matters as much as the third weekend of September.
The Old Guard Runs on a Different Clock
The contrast is easiest to see next to the businesses that have been here longer. Monk's Bar & Grill has been serving burgers since 1947 and is still described as a favorite among locals and visitors alike. Edge-O-Dells has built its name the same way, as what locals actually call a local favorite, not a marketing line. The Showboat Saloon has run karaoke and live music for more than two decades and still gets called both a locals' and a tourists' spot in the same breath.
But plenty of Dells institutions run on tourist-season time, not calendar time. Mr. Pancake, a breakfast tradition dating back generations, closes for the off-season entirely. That's normal here. A town built around waterparks has always had a business model where half the calendar goes quiet. What's notable about this year's crop of openings, the taproom, the bakery, the pub, the farmhouse restaurant with the dome bar, is that none of them are pitching themselves as seasonal. They're pitching themselves as places you go on a Wednesday.
The Weekend Itself
None of that changes what Wo-Zha-Wa weekend actually looks like on the ground. The festival still runs on its own three-day rhythm, and it's worth knowing before you're caught in the road closures.
| Day | What's happening | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, Sept. 18 | Sidewalk sales, antique market, arts and crafts fair and farmers market, carnival rides open in the evening | Downtown, Broadway corridor |
| Saturday, Sept. 19 | Wo-Zha-Wa 5K/10K run in the morning, sidewalk sales and arts and crafts fair continue all day, carnival rides run into the evening | Downtown, Bowman Park |
| Sunday, Sept. 20 | Antique market and arts and crafts fair through mid-afternoon, the 60-plus unit parade at 1:30 p.m., a post-parade performance by the South Shore Drill Team at Elm Street Plaza | Broadway, Elm Street Plaza |
The official festival schedule also lists a performance from a Southern and Ho-Chunk family drum group based in Wisconsin Dells, a nod to the fact that "Wo-Zha-Wa" itself is a Ho-Chunk word meaning fun time. If you're used to the regular Sunday market at Elm Street Plaza, note that it takes the week off this time around. The plaza's Sunday market runs every week through October 11, with one exception carved out specifically for September 20, because the parade needs the space more than the produce stands do.
A Charity Carnival That Never Stopped Being One
It's worth sitting with where this all started, because the DNA hasn't fully changed even as the crowd has. Wo-Zha-Wa began as a fundraiser for local scholarships and youth recreation, and the service clubs that ran the original beer tents in 1967 are still part of the festival's backbone. The scale is unrecognizable from those early years, when the parade drew a few thousand people rather than crowds that the mayor himself describes as capable of swelling into six figures. But the festival never fully handed itself over to tourism marketing. It's still the kind of weekend where a longtime resident gets asked to be grand marshal because he worked fire control for the DNR for four decades, not because a booking agency picked him.
That's the piece easy to miss if you only know Wo-Zha-Wa from the carnival rides and the parade photos. The event grew up alongside the town's tourism economy, but it was built by people who lived here, for reasons that had nothing to do with visitor spending. The new restaurants opening this year are following a similar logic in miniature. Farmer in the Dells put Bella Goose coffee on its breakfast menu instead of designing something purely for out-of-towners. Draft City Taproom got built because outlet shoppers, plenty of whom are locals doing a Saturday errand run, asked for a place to sit down afterward.
What This Means If You Live Here
None of this requires a decision from anyone. You don't have to evaluate Wisconsin Dells as a place to move to, you already live here. But if you've been meaning to walk downtown for the festival and haven't been past Gasser Road or the outlet mall lately, this is the year that stretch of town looks different than it did twelve months ago. The parade route hasn't moved. What's lining it has.
If Wo-Zha-Wa weekend has you thinking further ahead, whether that's about your own address in the Dells or a move within south-central Wisconsin, Flat Fee Pros handles flat-fee MLS listings across this part of the state. Reach out any time for a free consultation about what a listing here actually costs.
