Ald. Brian Hopkins announced on September 1 that Whole Foods signed a lease for 1639 N. Wells Street, the building Treasure Island abandoned back in 2018. Eight years of empty storefront, and now there's a tenant. That's the headline every outlet in the city ran this week, and it's a real one.
It's also only half the story if you actually walk this stretch of Wells. Several blocks south, at 1233 N. Wells, there's another dead grocery storefront that nobody's writing headlines about right now, because its news cycle already happened, back in April 2024. Old Town isn't waiting on one grocery store. It's got two vacant grocery-format buildings sitting on the same commercial spine, in the same half-mile, and only one of them has a name attached to it.
Two Buildings, One Gets the Announcement
The confusion is understandable, since both spaces have cycled through the same category of tenant and both closures made news. But they're different addresses with different timelines, and conflating them is exactly how a resident ends up thinking the grocery problem is solved when it isn't, not yet, not with a construction schedule that hasn't even been drafted.
Fern Hill bought the Treasure Island building for $14.8 million back in 2019, a year after the store closed, with plans to bring in a new grocer as part of a larger overhaul of that block. It took until this month to land one. Whole Foods and the property owner are now moving into design, permitting, and construction planning, according to Hopkins' office, and there's still no opening date attached to any of it.
Meanwhile, 1233 N. Wells has its own history. Plum Market opened there in 2013 and ran for nine years before an unexpected lease termination pushed it out. Dom's Kitchen & Market moved in in 2022, then abruptly closed in April 2024 alongside its sister chain Foxtrot when parent company Outfox Hospitality collapsed. That space has now sat empty for close to two and a half years, with no lease announcement of any kind.
There's a boundary line running through the middle of this story that's easy to miss. North Avenue splits Old Town in two, and everything south of it falls in the Near North Side half of the neighborhood, while everything north of it is technically Lincoln Park. The 1233 building, along with most of the storefront turnover below, sits on the Near North Side side of that line. The Whole Foods building at 1639 N. Wells sits just across it, in the Lincoln Park half. Two buildings, one commercial strip, two different community areas.
| Address | Last tenant | Closed | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1639 N. Wells | Treasure Island | 2018 | Whole Foods lease signed, no opening date |
| 1233 N. Wells | Dom's Kitchen & Market / Foxtrot | April 2024 | Vacant, no lease reported |
Ray Clark, president of the Old Town Triangle Association, called the Whole Foods lease "welcome certainty" for the neighborhood. He's right that it's progress. It just isn't the whole picture, and residents scanning the same news alerts everyone else reads would have no way to know that a second, more recently closed grocery space sits a five-minute walk away with nothing yet lined up for it.
The Small Stuff Never Waited For The Big Stuff
What's striking is how differently the rest of Wells Street operates. While the anchor tenant clock ticks in years, the street-level clock ticks in months.
Winnie's opened in the former Broken English Taco Pub space at 1400 N. Wells sometime last fall, filling that storefront within a matter of weeks of the previous tenant's exit. FARE, the fast-casual bowls-and-coffee concept that got its start as a downtown food hall counter, signed for 868 N. Wells and was targeting a summer 2026 opening, tucked into the base of a new apartment building alongside neighbors like Layla & Ringo's Cafe, DJ's Great Room, and Petite Edith. Old Town Pour House, which had poured 90 craft beers on tap from its Wells Street location since March 2012, closed that spot roughly a year and a half before this past June and chose not to return to Wells at all. Instead it's rebuilding downtown, taking over the former City Social space at 120 N. LaSalle under owner Bottleneck Management, the same company behind South Branch Tavern & Grille and Sweetwater Tavern & Grille.
None of that turnover required a zoning hearing. A lease gets signed, a build-out happens over a few months, and the storefront changes hands. Compare that to the Whole Foods timeline, where the lease itself is the news, and actual groceries on shelves could still be a year or more away depending on how much reconstruction the building needs.
The Building Next To The Grocery Story
Part of why the Wells Street timeline moves so slowly traces back to what's happening just across that North Avenue line. Fern Hill's Old Town Canvas, a residential tower planned for the corner of North Avenue and LaSalle Drive, on the Lincoln Park side of the boundary, spent more than two years in community negotiation. The developer's original planned-development filing called for a tower as tall as 43 stories with up to 500 units, 100 of them affordable. What the Chicago City Council actually approved in April was smaller: 349 apartments, after the Old Town Merchants & Residents Association pushed for design changes and a wider setback along Wells Street to preserve sightlines for existing residents.
That compromise didn't end the friction. This spring, a Cook County judge denied a preliminary injunction sought by neighborhood condo owners trying to halt construction, allowing Fern Hill's pre-construction work to proceed even as the underlying lawsuit continues. The Whole Foods building sits inside this same multi-parcel redevelopment, done in partnership with Moody Church, which helps explain why "lease signed" and "store open" are still two very different milestones here. Anyone hoping the grocery news means shelves are stocked by winter is reading the announcement more optimistically than the construction calendar supports.
The One Thing On Wells Street That Runs On Schedule
Set against all of that, Old Town Oktoberfest is refreshingly predictable. It debuted on Wells Street in September 2025, the neighborhood's first swing at a festival built around its own German heritage, complete with bratwurst, pretzels, live bands, and a stein-holding contest that turned into an instant crowd favorite. It returns September 18 through 20 this year, per the Old Town Merchants & Residents Association, which also runs the long-running Wells Street Art Festival every June.
Two festivals a year, same weekends, same organizer. It's the one part of this stretch of the neighborhood that isn't waiting on a permit or a lawsuit. Everything else, the groceries, the tower, the FARE build-out, moves at whatever pace construction and litigation allow. Oktoberfest just shows up.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If you've been treating the Whole Foods announcement as the end of Old Town's grocery gap, it's worth adjusting that expectation. The lease covers one building. The other one, closer to the middle of the neighborhood and empty for a shorter but still substantial stretch of time, has no comparable news attached to it. Until both spaces have tenants moving product, the daily routine of getting groceries on this stretch of Wells Street looks the same as it has for the past two and a half years.
What has changed, and quickly, is everything smaller. New bars, a new fast-casual spot, a longtime tavern relocating rather than returning. That's the part of Old Town that actually moves at the pace residents experience day to day, even while the two big storefronts everyone's watching sit on their own much slower clock.
Millie Rosenbloom has spent decades watching how these two speeds play out across Chicago's North Side and Near North corridor, where a single block can carry a fast-moving restaurant scene and a years-long redevelopment story at the same time. If you're trying to understand what a specific stretch of Old Town, Lincoln Park, or the Near North Side actually looks like right now, not just what the last headline said, reach out to Millie Rosenbloom for a read on the neighborhood grounded in what's actually happening on the ground.
