Ask around Broadway on a Saturday night and someone will still tell you to grab a flight at Kelly Green before the show. They mean well. For seven years that was correct advice: Kelly Green Brewing put Pitman on the map as Gloucester County's first brewery when it opened in a converted storefront in May 2016, in a town that had been legally dry for most of its history. It closed at the end of March 2023.
Human Village Brewing, the second taproom that gave Broadway a two-brewery stretch for a few years, is gone too. Both businesses now carry the same flat label on their public listings: no longer in business. Neither storefront pours beer anymore. If you've read a "things to do in Pitman" roundup anytime in the last few years and it mentioned either brewery as a current stop, you were reading something stale.
That correction matters for anyone who actually lives here, because it changes what a Friday night in Uptown Pitman looks like now, and it changes what's worth putting on the calendar this fall.
What Actually Happened to the Beer
Kelly Green's closing wasn't a business failure story. Co-founder Justin Fleming, a Pitman native who grew up two blocks from the tap room he'd eventually open, explained the decision in terms that had nothing to do with foot traffic or rent. "As a husband and a father of three beautiful girls, my time now is going to my family," he wrote when he announced the closure. The brewery had spent its final weeks doing what small breweries do when they're closing well: discount merchandise, a full weekend of live music, one more pour before the taps went dry for good.
Human Village followed a similar arc into the same outcome. Both brands are still findable online, on Untappd, on old brewery-tour lists, on beer-review sites where the check-ins go back a decade. What's missing from most of those pages is the present tense. Current business listings for both addresses on Broadway show them closed, and neither has reopened under new ownership as a brewery.
For a town of just over two square miles that built part of its "comeback" reputation on being the first place in the county to legally sell a pint, that's a real shift. It's also one that hasn't dented the district's actual traffic, because the businesses that replaced the breweries were built around a different anchor entirely: the theater, not the tap.
What's Actually Pouring and Plating Now
Walk that same stretch of Broadway today and the full bars are still there, just under different names and different concepts. Merryman's Pub sits in a building that was once home to Pitman National Bank more than a century ago, now repurposed by co-owners Bill Merryman and Vito Mannino into a full-service pub in the heart of downtown. A block over, Martini's on Broadway opened right beside the historic theater, built out to feel like a 1940s supper club, seating up to 80 people between its dining room and bar and designed specifically to catch dinner-before-the-show traffic from the theater next door.
Vito Mannino's footprint in Pitman goes beyond the pub investment. He also owns Mannino's Cucina Italiana and Pizzeria Mannino's, the latter founded in 2015 and known locally for pizza cooked in a brick oven imported from Italy, with dough aged 72 hours before it ever sees the 800-degree deck.
So the honest version of Uptown Pitman's evolution looks less like decline and more like a lineup change:
- Then (2016 to roughly 2023): Kelly Green Brewing and Human Village Brewing anchored the drinking scene, both taprooms, both closed now
- Now (2026): Merryman's Pub, Martini's on Broadway, and the two Mannino restaurants anchor it instead, all full-service, all built to pair with a night at the theater rather than a standalone taproom visit
The businesses that lasted weren't the ones selling the novelty of a first brewery in a dry town. They were the ones that hitched themselves to the thing that actually brings people downtown on a recurring basis: a working theater that's been running shows since the 1920s.
The Fall Calendar Actually Worth Marking
That theater is doing more this September than most residents have on their radar. The Broadway Theatre of Pitman opens The Bodyguard as a full musical run from September 4 through September 27, with two standalone comedy nights slotted into the same stretch: "I Told Me So" with Andy Hendrickson on September 10, and "The Indiana Kid" with Tom Thakkar on September 17.
Ten days into that run, on Saturday, September 19, the Lori Poisker Memorial Pitman Craft Show takes over Uptown for its fall edition, a tradition that's run for more than 30 years and typically fills the district with more than 350 crafter spaces, food trucks, and community group tables. If you're driving in, guests park at 400 N. Woodbury Road, with a free shuttle running to First and East Avenue right outside the show, since Broadway itself closes to street parking for the day.
The last Friday of September lands on the 25th this year, which is also Fourth Friday, Uptown's recurring evening of free family activities, live music in Ballard Park, and extended hours at the shops and restaurants along Broadway. That date falls inside the final week of The Bodyguard's run, meaning the same evening that closes out the craft show season and kicks off Fourth Friday's fall lineup is also one of the last chances to catch the musical before it closes that Sunday. For anyone trying to fit a full night out into one trip downtown rather than three separate ones, that overlap is worth building a plan around.
None of this required a brewery. The craft show has run for three decades regardless of who was pouring beer down the block. Fourth Friday predates both breweries and outlasted them. The theater, which brings in well over 100,000 visitors a year on its own, never needed a taproom next door to fill seats. What changed is which businesses get to ride that traffic, and right now it's a pub in a converted bank, a supper club built to look like 1940s Hollywood, and a family running two Italian kitchens a few doors apart from each other.
Why This Is Worth Knowing If You Already Live Here
The version of Pitman that gets repeated online, the small dry town turned surprise brewery destination, was true for about seven years and hasn't been true since spring 2023. What replaced it isn't a downgrade. It's a district that figured out its real draw was never the novelty of the first tap in the county. It was a walkable half-mile of Broadway anchored by a hundred-year-old theater, and that part hasn't changed at all.
If you're planning a fall evening downtown, the reliable move now is dinner at Martini's or one of the Mannino spots before a show, or a stop at Merryman's if you're catching Fourth Friday instead. If someone still tells you to swing by Kelly Green first, you can tell them why that plan needs an update.
We spend a lot of time in Gloucester County towns like this one, watching which businesses last and which ones were a phase. If you're curious what else has shifted in Pitman or a neighboring town, or you're thinking ahead to a move within Gloucester County down the road, The Pat Settar Team is always happy to talk through what a town is actually like to live in day to day, not just what the old listings say.
