"This site has a special history in our community," Willowbrook Mayor Frank Trilla said in April 2026, announcing that Trader Joe's would finally take over the old Willowbrook Bowl building on Plainfield Road. He's right about the history. Willowbrook Bowl ran from 1963 until 2016, more than five decades of Friday night leagues and birthday parties, and the building has sat empty ever since. Ten years is a long time for a landmark to sit dark.
But if you drive the half mile from that empty bowling alley over to Kingery Highway, you'll find a restaurant row that has been quietly reshuffling itself the entire time that building sat still. A chain diner closed its doors for two and a half months and reopened under the same name. A family-run Indian restaurant changed hands without ever changing its sign. None of it made the building look any different from the road. That's the part worth understanding if you live here: the storefront that never changes and the storefront that's already changed twice this year can look identical from the driver's seat.
The Building That Would Not Move
The Willowbrook Bowl site at 735 Plainfield Road, just east of Route 83, is the kind of property that's easy to drive past for years without thinking much about. It's also, it turns out, the kind of property that takes a village government to unstick. Willowbrook bought the site last year for $5.1 million, financed through a loan from Hinsdale Bank & Trust, specifically because a parcel that size sitting vacant for a decade generates nothing in local sales tax. The village's own press release frames the coming Trader Joe's as a chance to bring one of the community's most visible dead spots back to life.
What the announcement didn't include was a timeline. Neither the village nor Trader Joe's gave an opening date, and NBC Chicago's reporting on the project confirmed as much when the news broke in April. Months later, no public date has surfaced since. If you've been waiting to see something move on that corner, the honest answer right now is that construction and permitting timelines for a project this size don't move fast, and there's still no schedule to point to.
That's the pattern with landmark vacancies. They don't get filled by a single new tenant signing a lease. They get filled by a government stepping in, buying the land, and recruiting a specific brand to anchor it. It's a slow, deliberate process, which is exactly why it took ten years.
A Few Turns Down Kingery Highway, The Clock Runs Faster
Compare that to what's happened on Kingery Highway in just the last few months. The Denny's at 7737 S. Kingery Highway closed for repairs and stayed closed far longer than anyone expected. When the closure was first announced in May, the chain told local media the restaurant would reopen the following week. By mid-June, the timeline had slipped again, with the company citing plumbing and electrical work that took longer than planned. The doors finally reopened at 7 a.m. on July 21, 2026, after roughly ten weeks dark, a stretch confirmed by Patch's coverage of the reopening. Ten weeks. Not ten years. Same corridor, same kind of national chain, completely different clock.
A few doors away, Taste of India on Kingery Highway went through a quieter version of the same thing. The restaurant went under new management as of June 1, 2026, according to its own website, but the name on the sign never changed, the lunch buffet never stopped running, and most regulars probably never noticed a transition happened at all. That's turnover you can miss even if you eat there every week.
Neither of these is a story about decline. A diner reopening after repairs and a family restaurant changing management are both, in their own way, businesses staying in business. But they're proof that this stretch of Route 83 changes hands constantly in ways that don't leave a visible scar, while the bowling alley two blocks over sat frozen precisely because nobody with that kind of capital was willing to touch it for a decade.
The Two Places That Never Seem To Change At All
Then there's a third category, and it's the one that actually explains why the corridor works the way it does. Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket has been feeding people along this stretch of Historic Route 66 for generations, and it shows up in review after review from travelers making the same pilgrimage their grandparents made. Portillo's & Barnelli's, anchored inside Willowbrook Town Center at 7195 N. Kingery Highway, keeps hours that run past most of its own chain's national standard, open until 11:30 on weeknights and midnight on Friday and Saturday, a small signal that this particular location does enough business to justify staying open later than the company typically bothers to.
Places like these don't experience the same churn as everything around them because they aren't renting generic strip mall space that any tenant could occupy. They're built on position: a historic route that still draws travelers who plan their trip around it, and a town center location busy enough to earn extended hours most other locations don't get. That kind of standing doesn't turn over in a news cycle. It's also not something a new restaurant can simply buy into by signing a lease.
Here's roughly how the three speeds break down on this stretch of road right now:
| Property Type | Example | What Changed | Time Frame |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landmark vacancy | Willowbrook Bowl, 735 Plainfield Road | Village purchase, Trader Joe's redevelopment announced | 2016 vacancy to 2026 announcement, no opening date yet |
| Ordinary churn | Denny's, 7737 S. Kingery Hwy | Closed for plumbing and electrical repairs, reopened | About 10 weeks, May to July 2026 |
| Ordinary churn | Taste of India, Kingery Hwy | Same location, new ownership | Effective June 1, 2026 |
| Enduring anchor | Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket | Continuously operating Route 66 destination | Decades, no interruption |
| Enduring anchor | Portillo's & Barnelli's, Town Center | Extended hours beyond chain standard | Ongoing |
What This Means Next Time You're Driving Route 83
None of this changes what you'll actually find for dinner tonight. The strip still has its Chipotle, its Subway, its Seafood Village, and whatever's currently in the Somerset Plaza space that's listed for lease right now alongside longer-standing tenants like Tequila Azteca. What it changes is how you read the corridor. A building that looks unchanged from the road isn't necessarily stable. It might be two ownership changes deep and you'd never know from the parking lot. And a building that's sat empty for years isn't necessarily a sign that nobody wants to be there. Sometimes it just means the only entity with enough patience and capital to move on it is the village itself.
I keep a close eye on stretches like this one because it's the kind of detail that tells you more about a place than any single headline does. The buildings that hold steady and the ones that quietly turn over both say something about how a community actually functions day to day, and that's the kind of thing I try to notice before I ever talk to anyone about buying or selling a home here.
If you're curious what any of that means for your own property while all this plays out, I'd be glad to talk it through. You can also get a sense of where things stand with a Get Your Instant Home Valuation from The Casselyn Group, whenever you're ready to look into it.
