Walk the 1500 block of Catalpa this month and you will find gravel where the farmers market used to set up, a chain-link perimeter around what was once a parking lot, and a small excavator parked where the tomato stand always went. It has looked like this since early summer, and it will look like this for months more. If you are used to crossing Catalpa on your way to the Jewel or cutting through on a Wednesday evening for produce, you already know the block is gone. What you may not know is how long it took to get here, or how little the rest of the neighborhood waited around for it.
Six blocks north on Clark, a storefront that has swapped tenants four times since 2015 just got a fifth. A taco shop from Edgewater opened a full sit-down restaurant a few doors south. A martini bar that closed came back under new owners at a different address. None of that paused for construction. If anything, it kept moving at its usual pace, which is fast, while the block itself moved at the pace it has always moved at, which is slow. That gap between the two speeds is the actual story of Andersonville this year.
Seven Years to Close One Block to Cars
The project on Catalpa is called Elise Malary Plaza, and the timeline behind it explains a lot about how public space actually gets built in a neighborhood like this. The idea was first floated in early 2020. The final design went through four task force meetings and multiple public surveys, with the last task force session held in August 2023. In March 2024, the community renamed that stretch of Catalpa "Elise Malary Way" in honor of the late trans activist and Chicago Therapy Collective co-founder the plaza is named for. Construction was supposed to start in 2025, then slipped to a May 2026 start after the city awarded a $2.7 million contract to Sumit Construction. The city broke ground on June 18, 2026, and current projections put completion next spring.
That is roughly seven years from first proposal to a finished sidewalk. Ald. Andre Vasquez, whose ward includes the block, put the goal plainly at the groundbreaking: the plaza is meant to "bridge so many of our independent businesses to our community." Once it opens, Catalpa between Clark and Ashland becomes Andersonville's first permanent car-free plaza, with benches, string lighting, bike parking, and room for the farmers market to return to the spot it held for more than a decade before construction staging pushed it out.
That displacement is worth sitting with for a second, because it is the part of this story most residents already feel but may not have put a number to. The Andersonville Farmers Market is in its 17th season this year, and last year, its 16th season, was the first time in its history it had to relocate. It moved to the 1500 block of West Winona, between Clark and the adjacent AT&T lot, where it has stayed for both its 16th and 17th seasons. It will not return to its original home until the plaza reopens next spring, which means an event that ran on the same patch of pavement for well over a decade will have spent two full seasons somewhere else before it gets that spot back.
Even in exile, the market didn't sit still. This season it added a rotating Community Booth, giving local nonprofits, block clubs, and artisans from Andersonville, Edgewater, and Uptown a dedicated spot each week, something the market never needed while it still had its original block. The market is still running Wednesdays from 3 to 7 p.m. through October 21 at Winona, in case you have been avoiding the area entirely and wondering where everyone went.
The Storefront at 5721 Didn't Wait for Anyone
While the city was running its multi-year process on Catalpa, the commercial buildings a few blocks away kept doing what they always do, which is change hands. The clearest example sits at 5721 N. Clark St., a corner spot with a bar, dining room, and a patio big enough to matter in the summer. In roughly a decade it has been:
- Pork Shoppe, which ran for about two and a half years before closing in February 2018
- Stone Fox, which opened and abruptly closed within the same year, 2019
- Parson's Chicken & Fish, which opened in 2021 and closed in October 2025
- Noble Thai, a West Town restaurant expanding north, which announced plans to move in this year
Four concepts, one address, none of them waiting on a public meeting to make the call. That is the tempo Clark Street actually runs on, and it kept running through the entire Catalpa closure.
A few doors south at 5403 N. Clark, Cescas Margarita Bar & Grill closed late last year after a full decade in business. Patricia Guerrero, who already runs Edgewater Tacos and comes from a family that has been serving Mexican food on the North Side since her father opened Durango Mexican Restaurant in the 1980s, is filling that space with De Colores Mexican Grill. It is a bigger bet than her original spot: full seating, a rear patio, and a liquor license, where Edgewater Tacos has always been a pickup counter. She was aiming for a Cinco de Mayo opening this spring.
North of both of those, Devil Dawgs opened last fall in half of the space long occupied by Reza's, a longstanding Persian restaurant that had anchored that stretch of Clark for years. And Marty's Martini Bar, which closed its original Balmoral Avenue location in 2024, came back last November under new ownership at 1477 W. Winnemac Ave. The buyer was 2Bears Tavern Group, which already runs a handful of LGBTQ+-friendly bars on the North Side, including 2Bears Tavern in Uptown and SoFo Tap.
None of this required a task force. None of it took seven years. That is not a criticism of the plaza process, which involves public money, traffic studies, and permanent infrastructure that has to work for the next several decades. It is just a reminder that the two systems running through this neighborhood, the civic one and the commercial one, move at completely different speeds, and 2026 happens to be the year you can watch both of them at once.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If your daily routine runs through this stretch, here is the practical version. The farmers market is at Winona through October 21, not Catalpa, and will stay there through next spring at the earliest. Taste of Andersonville, the Chamber's annual sampling event along the Clark Street corridor, went ahead as scheduled on August 12 with more than twenty stops, including Big Jones, Replay, and Devil Dawgs, proof that the neighborhood's restaurant district didn't treat the torn-up block down the street as a reason to slow down. The next Vintage Market lands September 13, with another on the 27th, Arts Weekend takes over the neighborhood September 25 through 27, and the Fall Wine Walk follows that same weekend. None of that depends on Catalpa being finished.
What does depend on it is the eventual return of a car-free block with benches, lighting, and a permanent home for the market that built this neighborhood's reputation as what the Chamber calls the "Shop Local Capital of Chicago." When that block reopens next spring, it will be joining a stretch of Clark Street that spent the intervening year quietly restocking itself with new tenants, new ownership groups, and at least one homegrown restaurant family expanding into a bigger space. The plaza will have taken seven years. The storefronts around it, as usual, will not have waited for it.
If you already live here, none of this changes your Wednesday plans so much as it explains them. The market is at Winona, the plaza comes back next spring, and Clark Street will keep doing what Clark Street does regardless of which block is under construction. DeMarcus Hunter tracks these kinds of shifts across Chicago's North Side neighborhoods as part of ongoing local market coverage, and is always glad to talk through what a specific block's momentum means, whether that is curiosity about a neighbor's sale price or a bigger question about buying, selling, or investing nearby. Book a consultation anytime the conversation turns from sidewalk gossip to something more concrete.
