If you've tried to drive through the Hemingway District this year, you already know the drill: orange barrels, a Renew the Avenue sign parked by the Green Line station, and a detour that sends you around instead of through. The easy read is that Oak Park Avenue is having a rough year and the businesses along it are just trying to survive until the barricades come down.
That read misses the more interesting story. While the street itself has been dug up in phases since February, the storefronts along it have kept opening, expanding, and picking up awards. Rustico moved into a larger space and spun off a sister restaurant down the block. A new falafel counter opened on Harlem. A building owner is fighting the village over century-old ironwork under the sidewalk. None of that reads like a district in retreat. It reads like one betting the disruption is temporary and the location still isn't.
What's Actually Closed Right Now
The full project runs the length of Oak Park Avenue between Ontario Street and Randolph Street, replacing water and sewer infrastructure that's more than a century old before rebuilding the street surface on top of it. Construction was originally penciled in for January 19, but a polar vortex pushed the actual groundbreaking to February 2. Crews worked underground first, with sewer and water main installation from Randolph to Pleasant and from Lake to Ontario on track to wrap by early May, ahead of the above-ground work.
As of this month, the live project tracker shows the currently closed stretch is Randolph to Lake, with no northbound or southbound vehicle traffic and no street parking through November. The rest of the corridor stays open to cross traffic. Here's what that actually means if you're trying to get to a favorite spot on the Avenue:
- Through traffic gets diverted at Chicago Avenue to the north and Madison Street to the south, so you're not driving the length of the district even where it's technically open.
- Trucks are routed around entirely, out to Harlem Avenue.
- Pace bus service is on a temporary detour for the duration.
- The Avenue Parking Garage at 720 North Boulevard stays accessible by road throughout construction, with free parking for the first 90 minutes.
- Pedestrian access to every business in the district is preserved at all times, even when the street in front of it isn't.
Brian Racine, the project's manager, has described the approach as a "layer cake," tackling the deep excavation first so the visible above-ground work like curb bump-outs and new lighting can move faster once it starts. The whole project is aimed at substantial completion by Thanksgiving, timed so the district isn't fighting construction and holiday foot traffic in the same month.
One workaround worth knowing about if you're headed out for dinner: Maya Del Sol has opened its valet service to customers of neighboring Hemingway District businesses, not just its own. The entrance is in the alley behind St. Edmund's Church, it runs $5 flat, and it's available Tuesday through Thursday from 4 to 9 p.m. and Friday and Saturday until 10.
The Preservation Fight Nobody Saw Coming
The traffic detours are the visible disruption. The more surprising conflict is happening underground, at the southeast corner of Oak Park Avenue and Lake Street, where the Scoville Building sits.
Scoville Building owner James Bushouse is pushing back on part of the project that has nothing to do with traffic and everything to do with what's under the sidewalk. Like several buildings of its era in the district, the Scoville Block has a vaulted sidewalk, a below-grade space historically used for coal deliveries or mechanical equipment, held up by cast iron columns Bushouse says were imported from France, facing a wall lined in Joliet limestone. The village's plan calls for filling that vaulted space with lightweight concrete as part of the new streetscape. Bushouse argues that erases a piece of the building's history that should be preserved, and he's asked state historic preservation officials for support.
The village has acknowledged there's no formal legal agreement in place for the roughly 200 feet of vaulted sidewalk outside Bushouse's building, though it says conversations are ongoing. It's not the first time this has come up. A similar vaulted sidewalk problem showed up during an earlier Downtown Oak Park streetscaping project near what was then the Marshall Field's building, and the village found a workaround there too. Whatever gets decided on Oak Park Avenue, it's a reminder that "streetscaping" here means threading a modern utility project through buildings that predate the infrastructure by a century, one negotiation at a time.
The Businesses Betting Against the Barricades
If construction were genuinely scaring off investment, you'd expect a quiet year for openings. Instead, the district has kept adding to itself.
| What's new | What it is | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Hoja Santa | Contemporary Mexican, sister restaurant to Rustico, which moved into a larger Oak Park space | 722 Lake St. |
| Habibi's Chicken and Falafel | Quick-service concept from Pita Pita Mediterranean Grill | 421 N. Harlem Ave. |
| EcoWilde | Floral, plant, and recandling services | Oak Park |
Three existing district restaurants, Publican Quality Breads, Rustico, and Sugar Beet Co-op, were recognized by the village's public health department for their inspection records this spring, while Happy Apple Pie Shop and Daly Bagel picked up Climate Ready Green Awards for sustainability practices. None of these are the kind of headline that makes it onto a national retail report, but taken together they describe a business community that's still investing in storefronts, still passing health inspections cleanly, and still winning awards in the same season the street in front of them is torn open. That's a different story than "construction fatigue."
Moses Valdez, who owns Style Society Club on Oak Park Avenue and leads the Hemingway Business District Association, put it plainly when the project was first delayed last year: the district would keep hosting its events and doing what it does regardless of the timeline. Six months into the actual digging, that's largely held up.
Your Saturday Still Starts at Pilgrim Church
If your weekend routine runs through the Oak Park Farmers' Market, none of this touches it. The market runs Saturdays from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., May 23 through November 14 this year, in the Pilgrim Church parking lot at 460 Lake Street, a block west of Ridgeland Avenue. It's not on Oak Park Avenue and it isn't part of the detour zone, which makes it one of the few fixed points in the district's routine that hasn't shifted at all this year while everything around it has.
That's worth noticing on its own. The market has run in some form for more than five decades, and this year it's doing exactly what it always does while the street a few blocks over gets rebuilt underneath itself. If you want a low-stakes way to see how the Hemingway District is actually handling construction, a Saturday morning at the market followed by a walk down to check on your favorite storefront tells you more than any press release from the village.
What This Means If You Live Here
The honest version of this story is that construction is real, the detours are genuinely inconvenient, and the vaulted sidewalk dispute could still drag on. But the businesses making long-term bets, expanding into bigger spaces, opening new concepts, investing in the kind of upkeep that wins inspection recognition, aren't the actions of people who think the disruption outlasts the neighborhood's value. They're the actions of people who've done this math already.
I watch this kind of thing closely because it tells me something about where buyer and seller confidence is headed in the surrounding blocks, long before it shows up in any sale price. The village has been trying to deliver this streetscape project since 2011, delayed by everything from pandemic recovery to a single over-budget bid. A district that keeps attracting new tenants during the first year the project has actually broken ground is a district that's still worth paying attention to.
If you're curious what any of this means for your own property here, whether it's how nearby investment tends to affect resale timing or just what your home is worth right now, I'd be glad to walk through it with you. You can start with a Get Your Instant Home Valuation from The Casselyn Group, and we'll go from there.
