Greenwood's New Outdoor Refreshment Zone Isn't Really About the Drinks
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
Three members of the Greenwood City Council voted against letting people carry a drink down Madison Avenue. Their objection had nothing to do with alcohol itself. It was about the clock.
When the council approved the city's first Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area in a 5-3 vote in November 2025, council president Mike Campbell and council member Steve Moan argued the proposed hours, noon to midnight, every day of the week, were too generous. They pointed to Carmel and Evansville, where similar districts run on tighter schedules, and asked why Greenwood needed to go further. The council passed it anyway, on the wider hours, and that detail says more about what this district is actually meant to do than the drinking rule does.
Old Town Greenwood has a parking problem that anyone who's tried to hit two places on Madison Avenue in one evening already knows. The businesses cluster along a walkable stretch, but they don't share lots, and until now, finishing a glass of wine at one address before walking to another meant either drinking fast or leaving it behind. The DORA doesn't fix parking. It makes the walk between businesses legal to do with a drink in hand, which is a smaller fix than it sounds and a bigger one than council members debating "excessive" hours were arguing about. The real question wasn't whether Greenwood wanted people drinking outside. It was whether Old Town should function as a single district you park in once, or a strip of separate stops you drive between.
Under Indiana Code 7.1-3-31, which the state legislature authorized in 2023, a city can designate an area where adults 21 and older can carry alcohol purchased from an approved business and walk it outdoors within marked boundaries. Greenwood's version, once fully operational, works like this. Participating businesses pour drinks into a cup stamped with a DORA sticker and a QR code. From there, a person can carry up to two drinks at a time, capped at 16 ounces for beer or malt beverages, 12 ounces for wine or hard seltzer, and 10 ounces for a mixed drink that contains no more than 2 ounces of liquor. Public intoxication remains a crime inside the boundary the same as anywhere else in the city. City Controller Greg Wright put it plainly when he introduced the ordinance: even with the drink allowance, being visibly intoxicated in public still gets you arrested.
The boundary itself runs along Madison Avenue from Fry Road south to Smith Valley Road, widening near Main Street to take in Market Plaza, and extending east to Washington Street. Old City Park and Craig Park both fall inside the line. Businesses that don't want alcohol on their premises can request a red sticker to opt out, so a shop that doesn't want DORA cups inside isn't forced to allow them.
Ten Old Town businesses had submitted completed applications to the city as of the ordinance's introduction:
Each of those still needs sign-off from the city's Board of Public Works and Safety and final approval from the Indiana Alcohol and Tobacco Commission before it can actually pour into a DORA cup, so the signage on the ground may lag the vote for a while. If you're walking Madison Avenue and don't see a sticker at a place you expected to, that's likely why. Temporary vendors get their own path into the district too, with permitted sites along Euclid and Madison avenues, inside Old City Park, in a Craig Park lot, and around the Greenwood Amphitheater, which means events like Freedom Fest, Final Fridays, WAMM Fest, and Our Lady of the Greenwood's parish fair can bring in one-day DORA vendors without each one applying for a permanent permit.
A DORA that only runs Friday and Saturday evenings is a nightlife amenity. One that runs noon to midnight, seven days a week, is something closer to a standing feature of how the district operates. That's the gap between what Campbell and Moan wanted and what passed. Wright's response was to lean on enforcement rather than shorter hours, telling the council the city would add police patrols specifically to catch problems early rather than restrict when people could carry a drink at all.
Greenwood is the second Johnson County city to adopt a DORA, after Bargersville did it the year before. Neither city invented the model. What made Greenwood's version notable inside its own council chamber wasn't the concept, it was the scope, and that scope is what turns a discrete list of ten addresses into something closer to a district you can spend an entire day moving through.
Picture the walk once the stickers are up and the businesses are live. Start with a glass at Vino Villa, wander south past La Trattoria, cut over toward Sip or Revery on Main Street without finishing your drink first, and end at Craig Park or Old City Park, both inside the boundary, without ever having needed to move your car. That loop existed physically before the ordinance. It didn't exist legally. The DORA is the difference between a cluster of businesses you visit one at a time and a district you actually stroll.
That matters more in Old Town Greenwood than it would somewhere with ample shared parking, because the corridor serves as the closest thing to a downtown for a population well beyond the city limits proper. The unincorporated pockets of Johnson County that carry Greenwood mailing addresses add tens of thousands of people to the roughly 64,000 who live inside city lines, and most of that combined population doesn't have another walkable Main Street to use. Madison Avenue is it.
The city also added art wraps to nine electric utility boxes throughout Old Town this past summer, using designs artists submitted over the winter. It's a small project on its own, the kind of civic beautification line item that rarely makes news. Paired with a district-wide drinking allowance that just widened the hours businesses can count on foot traffic, it reads less like a coincidence and more like the same bet made twice: that people will walk Old Town if the walk itself is worth taking.
None of this requires you to drink to notice the change. A parent pushing a stroller past Fresh Pots on a Tuesday afternoon, or a group grabbing coffee before a farmers market run, is walking the same boundary. What the DORA actually buys the neighborhood is permission for the district to function as one continuous stretch instead of nine separate destinations that happen to share a street name.
Enforcement will be the thing to watch over the next several months. Wright told the council that studying how other Indiana communities ran their own DORAs surfaced a handful of concerns, which is part of why the city leaned on added police patrols rather than trimming the hours. If the wider schedule holds up without becoming a problem, expect the debate that split the council 5-3 to quietly settle itself.
If you're weighing whether Old Town Greenwood is the kind of place where you'd want to live, walk, and spend a Saturday, we'd rather show you the district in person than describe it from a spreadsheet. Shelly Walters Realty Group knows this stretch of Madison Avenue the way you'd expect from a team that works Johnson County alongside the rest of the northern Indianapolis suburbs. Let our family help your family. Contact us today.
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