Walk the promenade along Milwaukee Avenue on a Sunday morning this time last year and you were dodging a bus turnaround. Walk it now and you're standing on pavement that used to carry six lanes of moving traffic, next to a plaza with a name, watching a farmers market spread across ground that was still an active roadway when this project broke ground just over two years ago. Two blocks north, there's a chain-link fence around a lot that used to be the Megamall. That fence went up in June. The ribbon got cut the same month, a few hundred feet away.
Both of those things are true at once, and that's the part worth sitting with if you live here. The redesign didn't finish in June. It moved into its next phase, and the next phase looks like construction, not celebration.
What the Ribbon Cutting Actually Changed
The Milwaukee Avenue Streetscape and Logan Square Redesign project wrapped with a ribbon cutting on June 22, 2026, led by Mayor Brandon Johnson alongside 35th Ward Alderman Anthony Quezada. The city's own announcement describes a roughly $27 million project anchored by $21 million in federal transportation funding, and the headline change is structural: Milwaukee Avenue no longer cuts straight through the traffic circle. Cars now route around the Illinois Centennial Monument instead of through it, which freed close to an acre of former roadway for new public space, including a plaza called La Placita next to the Logan Square Blue Line station. The project also restored eight historic globe light fixtures around the monument to architect Henry Bacon's original 1918 design, a detail Logan Square Preservation had pushed for since the Harold Washington era.
If your mental map still routes you around the circle out of habit, that habit is doing more work than the street layout requires now.
A Market That Got Smaller to Get Central
The Logan Square Farmers Market spent 18 years operating a few blocks away on Logan Boulevard, then shifted to a temporary spot on Kedzie for two seasons while the surrounding streets were torn up. This year, its 19th, it moved into what organizers are calling its forever home: the new plaza on Milwaukee Avenue and a stretch of Logan Boulevard between Kedzie and Milwaukee, running Sundays from May 10 through October 25.
Here's the part that doesn't show up in the announcement copy. The market now runs 103 booths, including 44 weekly farmers and 14 vintage vendors stationed at La Placita. That's actually 24 booths lighter than in past years, because the new footprint, while dead center in the neighborhood for the first time in two decades, is tighter than the old boulevard stretch ever was. The market's own site confirms the 2026 outdoor season is already at full vendor capacity, meaning the smaller footprint isn't a temporary constraint while things settle. It's the shape of the market going forward. You're getting proximity to the monument in exchange for fewer stalls to wander past, and the crowds haven't thinned to match. The market still pulls an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people through the square on a good Sunday, now standing in the monument's shadow instead of a few blocks removed from it.
The Restaurants Betting on Foot Traffic
New restaurant openings tend to cluster where rent is cheap. This year's cluster around the monument reads differently, because the addresses aren't cheap by neighborhood standards. They're the ones closest to where the market and the plaza now put people on a Sunday, and the operators moving in aren't first-timers testing an idea. A short list of what's landed within a few blocks of the monument in 2026:
- Rasa Indian Cuisine and Bar, 2763 N. Milwaukee Ave., serving North and South Indian curries and biryani, opened this spring from an owner who left a South Side liquor store business to run a restaurant tied to his own culture.
- Osaka, 2456 N. California Ave., a sushi and omakase concept from chef Patrick Bouaphanh, who built the same name inside CH Distillery in the West Loop before giving it a Logan Square address of its own.
- Culebra, 2101 N. California Ave., a cocktail bar tucked beneath Lonesome Rose with a deliberately hidden entrance, already drawing a following since opening.
- Mansun Pocha, 2535 N. Milwaukee Ave., a Korean street food concept from the owners of New Village Gastro Pub, targeting a 2026 opening in the former Roadhouse space.
Every one of those addresses sits on Milwaukee or California, within easy walking distance of the plaza and the market. That's operators reading the same foot traffic shift residents are living through, and putting money behind the bet that it holds.
The Part That Isn't Finished
Less than five weeks after the June ribbon cutting, crews broke ground on a second plaza, this one at 2550 N. Milwaukee Ave., the former Megamall site near Andros Taverna and La Boulangerie. The city fenced the lot in June to start utility work, and construction proper began in late July. The plan calls for outdoor seating, new lighting, fresh plantings, a performance space, and a children's play area. La Boulangerie's patio, which had sat on city land next to the site, came down to make room for the build. City officials have said the project could wrap by early 2027, though the Chicago Department of Transportation has been clear that timelines will get updated as work progresses, which is a polite way of saying don't circle a date on your calendar yet.
Two plazas built or under construction within a few blocks of each other, both anchored to the same traffic circle, in a single calendar year, isn't something most Chicago neighborhoods see happen at once. It also means the fencing you're walking past this fall isn't a leftover from the project that just finished. It's the start of the next one.
The Bike Route Nobody's Fixed Yet
Not every change has landed cleanly. Streetsblog Chicago's reporting on the redesign flagged a specific routing problem for anyone riding a bike from northbound Kedzie to eastbound Logan Boulevard. The intended path now sends cyclists around the monument on an off-street route that requires four separate street crossings, where the old layout only required crossing Milwaukee once. The idea was a calmer route for riders of all ages. In practice, plenty of people on bikes and scooters are skipping it and using Logan's narrower travel lanes or the sidewalk instead, which isn't safer for anyone involved. If you bike through that intersection regularly, you've probably already found your own workaround. If you haven't hit it yet, budget an extra minute the first time.
What's Left on the Calendar
The farmers market runs through October 25, so there's still two months of Sunday mornings on the new plaza before the outdoor season closes. Past that, the Bloomingdale Trail Run returns Saturday, September 26, with a timed 5K plus quarter-mile and half-mile dashes for younger runners, organized by Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail alongside the McCormick YMCA and the Chicago Park District. It starts and finishes at the trail's west end near the YMCA on North Lawndale Avenue, and recent editions have drawn around 750 participants. Registration pricing stepped up after August 30, so if it's on your radar, the earlier rate has already closed.
None of this adds up to a finished project. It adds up to a neighborhood that swapped one kind of construction disruption for another, with a market that's more central and less spacious, a restaurant scene betting on a foot traffic pattern that's maybe six weeks old, and a fence line two blocks from the ribbon that just got cut. If you live near the monument, that's the version of Logan Square you're actually walking through this fall, not the one from the press release.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a property near the monument, whether or not a move is anywhere close to the table, that's the kind of read a longtime Chicago broker can give you straight. Millie Rosenbloom has tracked this stretch of the North Side long enough to know which changes move value and which just move foot traffic. Reach out anytime you want that read.
