Walk into the Winnetka Metra lot on a Saturday morning this month and you will find the same thing you would have found any September in the market's eight-year history: tables of cut flowers, a line for coffee, somebody's dog getting more attention than the heirloom tomatoes. What has changed is what sits across Elm Street. For most of this market's run, the corner at Elm and Lincoln was either a row of empty storefronts or a fenced hole waiting on a developer who hadn't shown up yet. This fall, for the first time, something is actually being built there, on a schedule that has a real end date attached to it.
That contrast is the story of downtown Winnetka right now. The market's rhythm never wavered. The lot beside it took nearly two decades to stop failing.
Three Failed Plans, One Steady Saturday
The site at the southeast corner of Elm and Lincoln has a longer history of disappointment than almost anywhere else in the village. The first serious redevelopment attempt collapsed with the 2008 recession. A second version, initially pitched around 2012 as a seven-story building with 120 apartments, worked its way through years of revisions and won preliminary approval as condominiums in 2017, only for trustees to rescind that approval in August 2019. The developer at the time warned the site would likely sit vacant for another seven years. In 2020, a Wilmette-based developer announced plans to buy the property. That deal fell through too. By 2021 the village was settled in litigation over the site, which had gone into foreclosure.
Crain's Chicago Business, covering the eventual financing deal, noted that developers had been trying to revive the site for nearly two decades before anyone actually broke ground. When the current plan from Murphy Development Group finally cleared its last approval in early 2025, Village President Chris Rintz reportedly told the developer's team to simply go build something, a comment that reads less like enthusiasm and more like exhaustion after three failed attempts.
Meanwhile, forty yards away, the Winnetka Farmers' Market kept its Saturday schedule every summer through all of it. The market, run by the Winnetka-Northfield-Glencoe Chamber of Commerce, is now in its eighth year at the same Metra lot location, and in 2025 it drew more than 45,000 visitors across 141 vendors. It never needed a developer, a construction loan, or a village council vote. It just needed the parking lot to still be there on Saturday mornings, which it always was, even when the block across the street couldn't get out of its own way.
What's Finally Rising Behind the Fence
This time is different in a way you can measure. Site demolition finished in 2025, construction is underway, and the project is targeting completion in December 2026, with commercial tenants beginning to open in early 2027. It is a four-story, Tudor-style building with 59 residential units above roughly 20,955 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, and unlike the previous iterations of this project, it now has signed tenants instead of renderings.
Here is who has actually committed to the space, according to reporting from The Record North Shore:
| Tenant | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ballyhoo Hospitality (Mediterranean concept) | Restaurant, anchor tenant | About 6,700 square feet, seating for roughly 200 inside and 40 outside |
| Fare | Fast-casual, natural-food restaurant | Second dining concept on the block |
| Solidcore | Fitness studio | |
| Winnetka Aesthetic Studio | Medical aesthetics practice | Led by Dr. Paul Phelps |
| Duet Preservation Audiology | Audiology practice | |
| Charles Schwab | Financial services | Leased the project's second-largest footprint |
Ballyhoo is not a stranger to Winnetka. The same hospitality group already runs Pomeroy, the French bistro at 844 Spruce Street that opened in 2021, along with Sophia Steak in Wilmette and DeNucci's in Highland Park. Its new Mediterranean restaurant will be built around live-fire cooking, seafood, and shared plates, at nearly triple the square footage of a typical downtown storefront. That single restaurant, once it opens, will represent a meaningful jump in the neighborhood's seated dining capacity, arriving on a corner that spent the better part of fifteen years contributing nothing but vacant storefronts to the block.
Avli Already Showed You the Preview
If you want a sense of what a bigger Ballyhoo restaurant will feel like on the block, you do not have to wait until 2027. Avli, the Greek restaurant that has operated in Winnetka for more than sixteen years, already ran a smaller version of this play in March 2026. The restaurant expanded by 2,400 square feet into the adjacent Laundry building, adding a roughly 1,600-square-foot lounge along with more front-room dining, under new chef Jorge Angulo, a Culinary Institute of America graduate who has built his career overhauling restaurants around Chicago. The menu changed with the space. Avli leaned harder into mezedes, the shared small plates that anchor a Mediterranean table, while keeping most of its longtime dishes recognizable in some form.
Angulo has been candid that the transition was not painless for a restaurant with sixteen years of regulars used to one version of the place. That tension, between honoring who already shows up and building for who might show up next, is the same tension the whole block will face at a larger scale once Ballyhoo's new restaurant opens. Avli just got there first, opening its expanded lounge back in March, roughly a year ahead of when Ballyhoo's new restaurant is expected to serve its first meal.
The Calendar Before It Changes
None of this means downtown Winnetka is unrecognizable yet. It means this particular fall has a shelf life, and a few specific dates worth knowing if you want to catch the season before the corner changes for good.
- The Winnetka Farmers' Market runs its final Saturdays of the 2026 season through October 31, with hours of 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Metra lot on Elm Street. That gives you seven more Saturdays before the market's 22-week run wraps for the year.
- The Schmidt-Burnham Log House, the oldest log structure in Cook County, keeps its scheduled public afternoons open through November 20. It sits a short distance from downtown at 1140 Willow Road, and the Winnetka Historical Society keeps its hours modest on purpose, which is part of why longtime residents still haven't gotten around to seeing it.
- One Winnetka's building shell is expected to be substantially complete by December 2026, with the first tenants opening their doors in early 2027, meaning the fence at Elm and Lincoln should start coming down piece by piece over the winter rather than staying put through another spring.
None of these are dramatic deadlines. They are just the actual boundaries of the season, the kind you only track when you already live close enough to notice them passing.
The Last Ordinary Fall
Put those pieces together and the pattern is simple. The farmers market has run on the same schedule for eight years regardless of what happened across the street. The log house has kept the same quiet hours for longer than that. Avli just finished proving what a bigger, busier version of a familiar restaurant looks like once it actually gets built, instead of just proposed. And the lot that spent nearly two decades failing to become anything is now, for the first time, on a real December 2026 finish line with real signed tenants.
That makes this fall a hinge point rather than just another season. Next September, the Ballyhoo restaurant should be open, Solidcore should have a full class schedule, and the fence that has framed Saturday mornings at the market for over a year should be gone. This fall is the last one where the block still runs on its old rhythm. Worth noticing while it still does.
If you are watching what downtown Winnetka's changes might mean for your own property or your next move in this market, Larissa Brodsky can walk you through it with the same building-level detail she brings to Chicago's high-rise neighborhoods. Request your complimentary condo valuation to start that conversation.
