The Andersonville Plaza Won't Open Until Spring. Half of Clark Street Didn't Wait.

If you went looking for the Andersonville Farmers Market on Catalpa Avenue this summer, you'd have found a fenced-off construction site instead. For the second year running, the market has set up on a stretch of Winona Street near Clark, using the AT&T parking lot as a stand-in for the block it's called home since 2009. Wednesdays, 3 to 7 p.m., through October 21.

The move isn't new. What's worth noticing is how long "temporary" has already lasted, and what's happened on Clark Street while everyone waited.

The plaza project that displaced the market, officially named Elise Malary Plaza, broke ground in June 2026. City officials said at the groundbreaking that it's slated for completion next spring. That means a project first announced in early 2020 will take roughly seven years to open. In that gap, six storefronts on Clark Street changed hands, and the operators moving in aren't hedging. They're expanding.

Roughly Seven Years From Announcement to Opening

The timeline is longer than most people realize. Plans for a car-free plaza on Catalpa between Clark and Ashland surfaced in early 2020. A community task force worked through four rounds of meetings before landing on a final design in August 2023. Construction was originally supposed to start in 2025, then got pushed to 2026 after design changes and to accommodate a new traffic signal at Ashland and Berwyn. The city eventually awarded a $2.7 million contract to Sumit Construction, and shovels went into the ground this past June.

The plaza will bring benches, overhead lighting, new landscaping, and a permanent home for the farmers market once it's finished. None of that helps the neighborhood right now. For two full growing seasons, the market has operated a half mile from where it started, in a parking lot instead of on the street it built its identity around.

What Actually Moved While the Plaza Waited

Here's what changed on Clark Street in the same window the plaza sat in limbo:

That's five addresses, five different owners, none of them chains testing the market with a pop-up. Add in Folk Coffee & Vintage, which built out a full cafe inside its existing vintage shop this spring, and you have six storefronts changing character on a corridor that runs maybe six blocks.

Bigger Bets, Not Smaller Ones

The pattern isn't just turnover. It's the direction of the bet.

De Colores Mexican Grill comes from Patricia Guerrero, who also owns Edgewater Tacos, a pickup-and-sidewalk-seating operation. Her new spot has a rear patio, real seating, and alcohol service, a deliberate step up from the counter-service model that built her name. Noble Thai is doing something similar in reverse geography: trading a single West Town storefront for a full bar, dining room, and the largest patio on the north end of Andersonville's commercial strip, the same building Parson's used to fill.

Paper & Pencil's move is the clearest number. The stationery shop's original Berwyn Avenue location is 400 square feet. Its new Clark Street space is four times that. The expansion tracks with real demand: the shop's owners reported sales up 150 percent year over year in summer 2025, and their social following grew past 98,000 followers, a jump of more than 22 percent since January alone. That's not a business hedging against uncertainty. That's a business that outgrew its building and needed somewhere bigger to go.

In a Block Club Chicago report, Karen Castillo Mavros, who opened Vintiques & Company at 5432 N. Clark this spring, described the reception from her new neighbors simply:

"Everyone's really friendly, really welcoming and supportive of other small businesses."

Fifteen vendors sell out of her storefront now, in a space that sat empty before she took it.

None of these operators waited for Elise Malary Plaza to open before committing to the block. If anything, the roughly seven-year gap between the plaza's announcement and its opening turned into the exact window when Clark Street rebuilt itself around it.

What This Means for Your Walk Down Clark Street This Fall

The construction fencing on Catalpa isn't going anywhere before winter. The farmers market will keep running on Winona through October 21, and there's no indication it moves back to Catalpa until the plaza itself is finished next spring. If you've been avoiding that block because it looks torn up, that's accurate. It will look torn up for a while longer.

What's changed is everything around it. Devil Dawgs has been open on the 5200 block for almost a year now. De Colores has a rear patio if you want a margarita outside. Noble Thai's buildout on the old Parson's site is set to bring a full bar and dining room to the north end of the corridor. Vintiques and the new Paper & Pencil location both give Clark Street more square footage of retail than it had a year ago, not less.

The city's plaza will eventually give the neighborhood back its gathering space. Clark Street, in the meantime, didn't pause to wait for it.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a home near Clark Street, whether you're watching the neighborhood as a longtime resident or thinking ahead to a move, the Geoff Brown Team tracks these shifts block by block across Chicago's North Side. Get a Free Home Valuation and we'll walk you through what corridor changes like this one tend to mean for a specific address.