On a Thursday evening in August, the busiest two acres in Verona aren't downtown on Main Street. They're a stretch of green space along West Verona Avenue in the Mill District, where a folk band is setting up on a bandshell, families are staking out spots on the lawn with camp chairs, and a line is forming for pizza by the slice next door. This is Century School Park, and if you've lived in Verona for a while, you've probably noticed it's started doing something unusual for a small-city park: it doesn't really go quiet.
Most neighborhood parks have an obvious season. They fill up in summer, empty out by October, and sit under snow until spring soccer starts again. Century School Park was built differently, and the businesses moving in around it were chosen with that difference in mind. That's the part worth understanding if you live nearby, because it changes what this corner of town is actually for.
The Park Came Before The Businesses
Century School Park, at 309 W. Verona Ave., wasn't an afterthought squeezed between existing buildings. The city approved its design in June 2022 as a companion piece to the Mill District apartment development going up around it, and construction was timed to run alongside the apartment buildouts so utilities and green space could go in together. The Common Council's own summary put the city's contribution at roughly $750,000, funded through tax increment financing, for a plan that included a plaza along Verona Avenue, a playground, a pollinator habitat, a great lawn, and a stage. The park held its ribbon cutting in July 2024, with live music and food trucks marking the opening.
That sequencing matters. In a lot of small towns, a park gets carved out of whatever space is left over once the storefronts and parking lots are settled. Here, the park came first, fully designed with both a bandshell for summer programming and infrastructure for a rink, and the commercial space that followed had to answer to it. That's a different kind of investment than a pocket park with a bench and a swing set.
The Corner That Wasn't Supposed To Sit Empty
Tabby & Jack's Pet Supplies moved into 301 W. Verona Ave. in June 2024, becoming the pet store's ninth Dane County location and the first tenant to open its doors onto the new park. For about two years, that was the extent of the block's activity outside of concert nights.
That changed this summer. Ian's Pizza opened its Verona location at 303 W. Verona Ave. with a grand-opening week running July 13 through 18, and it isn't a modest addition. At roughly 8,000 square feet, it's the largest Ian's Pizza location in Wisconsin, with indoor seating for about 150, a beer garden, patio seating, a private event room, and plans for a rooftop patio down the line. The restaurant has 23 owners, ten of them employees, under the same worker-ownership model Ian's has used at its other Wisconsin locations. It serves twelve rotating taps and a dozen flavors of Calliope ice cream made on site.
None of that explains why the company chose this specific corner over a spot along Main Street with more foot traffic from downtown shoppers. The company's own description of the Verona location gets closer:
"We back right up to Century School Park, so afternoons here stretch out."
The same page goes on to mention the concerts at the bandshell and the ice skating a few steps away as reasons the corner works. That's not a restaurant treating a nearby park as a bonus. That's a restaurant built to face the programming schedule of the park behind it. So for the first time since the park opened two summers ago, the block along West Verona Avenue has three anchors instead of one: a pet store, a bandshell, and now a flagship restaurant designed around whatever the park happens to be doing that week.
What's currently on the block:
- Century School Park (309 W. Verona Ave.) — playground, plaza, firepits, bandshell, great lawn
- Tabby & Jack's Pet Supplies (301 W. Verona Ave.) — open since June 2024
- Ian's Pizza (303 W. Verona Ave.) — opened July 2026, largest Ian's location in the state
The Day That Keeps Showing Up On The Calendar
Here's the detail that's easy to miss if you only think of Century School Park as a summer concert lawn. The 2026 Concerts in the Park series runs Thursdays from 6 to 8 p.m., June 18 through August 27, which leaves three more shows on the calendar this month: August 13, August 20, and August 27. That's the park's summer identity.
Its winter identity runs on the same day of the week. The park's chilled outdoor ice rink opened last season on November 28 and closed March 1, and according to design notes from the park's landscape architects, skating hours ran 4 to 8 p.m. on Thursdays and until 9 p.m. on Fridays. Concerts on Thursday nights in summer, extended skating hours on Thursday nights in winter. Whatever the season, Thursday is when this particular two acres of Verona is built to be busiest.
That consistency is worth noting because it isn't universal across the city's parks. Verona's other outdoor rink, at Harriet Park, is flooded over open ground rather than mechanically chilled, which means it needs a real cold snap to freeze properly before it can open. Century School Park's rink runs on a chiller, so it opens on a set date regardless of whether the ground has frozen yet. If you've ever shown up at a Verona rink expecting to skate and found the ice still soft, that's the difference. Century School Park was built not to depend on the weather cooperating.
What This Means If You're Already Here
If you live in Verona and haven't made it out to a Thursday concert yet this summer, there are three left. Grab a slice or a scoop from Ian's before the band starts, since the restaurant's patio and beer garden sit close enough to the bandshell that you don't have to choose between dinner and the show. Bring a lawn chair. Tabby & Jack's keeps evening hours most weeknights if your dog needs a walk-by on the way home.
And if you're the type who plans a few months ahead, the same block is worth remembering once the leaves turn. Based on last year's schedule, the rink typically returns around the same late-November window, and unlike the flooded rinks elsewhere in town, it doesn't wait on the weather to decide when the season starts.
What's actually changed this year isn't just that Verona got a new pizza place. It's that this stretch of the Mill District now has a built-in reason to be full most Thursdays of the year, and the newest, largest business on that block was designed with that reason specifically in mind. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's what happens when a park gets built as infrastructure first and a gathering spot follows.
Verona keeps adding these small, specific reasons to know a block better than a map ever could. If you're weighing whether this is the kind of neighborhood where you'd want to put down roots, or you're already here and thinking about what your own home might be worth in a market this active, the team at Husky Homes knows this corner of Dane County block by block. Request a Free Home Valuation and let's talk about what's next.
