Bristol Borough won a national contest to revitalize Mill Street. Eight years later, business is booming.

Talking about the fresh energy flowing through the commercial heart of his formerly faded hometown, Bill Pezza prefers to use the word renaissance — because revival “makes it sound like we were on life support.”

Even if not near death, downtown Bristol Borough in Lower Bucks County certainly was bottoming out in 2000.

“We had over 50% [storefront] vacancies on Mill Street,” borough council president Ralph DiGuiseppe said.

“It was a dead main street that might as well have had tumbleweeds on it,” said Pezza’s son Greg.

Greg and his wife, Dana, own the ITRI Wood Fired restaurant and bar as well as The Forager, a specialty cheese shop downtown. These days, business is so good that she’ll be moving the cheese shop across Mill into a recently vacated space — one of three downtown.

The place now known as Bristol Borough was established as a Delaware River port on what had been Lenape land in 1681. The borough became a thriving center of shipbuilding and manufacturing but began to wither as suburbs bloomed after World War II.

Population peaked at just over 12,000 in 1950 and is now just under 10,000. Major industries like the Grundy Mill, which produced fine woolen and worsted fabrics, have long since closed or moved away.

“There was such a slow and gradual decline that it got away from everybody,” DiGuiseppe said. “But we started cracking down on absentee landlords to fix up their properties. We built new municipal facilities, renovated others, built roads, and upgraded parks.”

After a 16-year-effort, a pair of 250-foot docks opened on the Delaware at the foot of Mill Street in 2017. The $3 million project was built with a combination of federal, state, and county money, along with a contribution from the Grundy Foundation, which provides capital and operating grants to nonprofits in Bucks County.

“We were getting our mojo going again,” said Bill Pezza, who’s the president of a nonprofit, Raising the Bar, which promotes events and raises money for improvements downtown.

In 2016, Pezza and others in Bristol spotted a Facebook post advertising a national Small Business Revolution contest.

“They wanted to give $500,000 ‘to one small town in America,’” he said.

» READ MORE: Small town, big prize: Bristol wins $500K for downtown makeover

Sponsored by the Deluxe Corp., a Minnesota-based business services company whose founder invented the checkbook, the nationwide Small Business Revolution contest ran from 2016 to 2022 and judged competitors in part by the depth and breadth of local support.

“The town was mobilized, organized, and motivated,” Pezza said. “We had a campaign called ‘Pick Us,’ We had a pep rally.”

After Bristol won the contest, Deluxe dispatched a team of marketing and other experts to assist six small businesses in the borough.

The company also provided $500,000 to install a waterfront sound system for events, two information kiosks for the center of town, and poles and other infrastructure for display banners across Mill Street.

Miguel Velez said the expertise and other assistance provided by the Deluxe team enabled him to move his Market Street shop to larger quarters — and grow his clientele.

“Deluxe gave the town and me a spotlight that drew attention,” said Velez, 44, a lifelong borough resident who started cutting hair in 1999.

“When I opened my first shop 13 years ago, there wasn’t much going on downtown. It was pretty much the King George II Inn, a couple of pizza shops, and the jewelry store,” he said. “Now we’ve got restaurants and breweries and boutiques.”

The sisters Rosemarie Mignoni-Szczucki and Carol Ferguson grew up in and continue to operate the jewelry store their father founded in 1947. Mignoni Jewelry is an anchor in Bristol’s downtown.

They remember the center of the borough on Friday evenings, when mill workers went to the banks to cash paychecks and then shop, eat, or see a movie. The Grand Theater closed in 1960 and is now the Discover, Learn and Grow childcare and education service — which wasone of the businesses selected for technical and other assistance from the Deluxe team.

Ferguson said the first major change for the better downtown came about in the 1980s, when what had been a conventional movie house at the top of Radcliffe Street finally closed after nearly 20 years of showing X-rated films. It was replaced by the Bristol Riverside Theatre, now in its 37th season of presenting live entertainment.

“The Bristol Riverside brings thousands of people downtown,” she said.

Pezza, who’s 71 and moved to Bristol Borough from New York City at age 5, said small, locally owned, family-run businesses like Mignoni’s continue to be the backbone of downtown’s economy.

Unlike many older communities that plunged into ambitious “urban renewal” programs when customers and residents started to head for the suburban frontier, Bristol Borough still has most of its pre-war commercial streetscapes. Downtown is intact, compact, and walkable, encompassing about 11 blocks, eight of them on Mill and Market Streets, and offering views of a scenic stretch of the river.

The borough is served by SEPTA Regional Rail and the nearby Burlington-Bristol Bridge, which opened in 1931 and connects Bristol (township and borough) to Burlington City, N.J.

And while vacancies are few, relatively small storefronts can be affordable for start-up businesses.

Sisters Jordan and Andie DeChirico, who are 25, opened Terra Cotta Green Market Co. and began serving vegan and vegetarian fare on the 200 block of Mill Street five months ago.

“We looked at Yardley and Newtown and Washington Crossing, but none of them were as friendly and welcoming as Bristol,” Andie DeChirico said. “We had heard about all the great events Bristol has, and that also drew us in.”

With a distillery, brewery, wine-tasting room, and new dining options — and a waterfront — Bristol is becoming something of a bar scene.

Promotions such as “five bars within 700 steps” help set the tone, as do places such as Hops & Hardware Distillery.

“We’re one of the oldest towns in Bucks County, and now we’re the coolest,” said Denise Mitchell, who along with business partner, Charles Costello, owns the two-year-old establishment.

Karla Sloan, who owns the Bristol Antiques Market and is the chair of Raising the Bar, welcomes the new food-and-drink businesses, as well as stores such as Bristol Books & Bindery.

“I would like to see more retail,” she said. “Especially clothing.”

Meanwhile, according to Pezza, the transformation of a former bank building on the 200 block of Radcliffe into an eight-room boutique hotel is underway.

“Soon, when tourists come here looking for a place to stay, we won’t have to send them out of town,” he said.

And Greg and Dana Pezza said their speakeasy-style cocktail lounge Daddy Tom’s (named for his grandfather, a beloved Bristol physician) is adding an urban vibe to the blue-collar downtown.

“But we don’t want to lose the identity that is Bristol,” he said. “There’s always going to be a bit of grit to Bristol.”

As was true of the Bristol Stomp, a 1960s dance that once made the old river town famous.

There are a number of origin stories about the dance, which involved kids at local record hops floor-stomping en masse to certain beats of certain songs. The local craze inspired a national hit tune by the Philadelphia doo-wop group the Dovells.

“We have the documentation,” Bill Pezza said. “It didn’t start in Bristol, Tenn., or Bristol, Conn.

“It started in Bristol.”