Two weeks before opening night, a staff member at Gunny's Pub was still perfecting a goat cheese foam recipe for a signature cocktail. Outside, the street the bar sits on had been reduced to gravel and construction cones. Lincoln Avenue between Diversey Parkway and Wrightwood Avenue was closed to through traffic, torn open for a water main replacement that was supposed to have wrapped up two months earlier. Gunny's opened its doors on September 16 anyway, serving smashburgers and duck confit poutine to a neighborhood that could no longer drive past the front door.
That timing is not a footnote. It is the whole story of what Lincoln Park's commercial corridors are actually built on this fall, and it says something the average new-restaurant roundup misses entirely.
Two Months, Then a Sinkhole
The Chicago Department of Water Management began replacing the water main along a three-block stretch of Lincoln Avenue starting at Racine Avenue and Diversey Parkway roughly two months before Gunny's opened. Business owners along the corridor were told the work would be done by July. Then the Fourth of July weekend brought severe storms, and a sinkhole opened up along the route, filling the pipes underneath Gunny's with gravel and debris.
By late August, the city's revised target had shifted to early October, a timeline the department itself described as subject to change. That slippage matters if you live, walk, or eat anywhere near this stretch of Lincoln Avenue right now. The original estimate was already wrong once. The replacement estimate carries its own asterisk. Anyone planning around a firm reopening date should treat early October as a target, not a promise, until the department says otherwise.
The Bar That Opened Anyway
Gunny's occupies a 145-year-old building at 2642 N. Lincoln Ave., the former home of Racine Plumbing Bar & Grill, sitting on the west side of Lincoln next to Juno Sushi. Owners Mary Nedbalski and Marty O'Connor spent more than a year restoring it, and what sold them on the space was a massive skylight in the back room, the one O'Connor felt "yearned" for real dinner service. They brought in chef Mike McKinnell initially as a consultant and ended up offering him the head chef job outright.
The name comes from O'Connor's late dog, a pheasant and duck hunting companion, and it shaped the menu's Midwest hunter-gatherer lean: bavette steak with salsa verde and wedge-cut fries, an Italian beef built on house-made giardiniera, a smashburger finished with bacon mayonnaise sauce, poutine folded with duck confit, and a pull-apart stuffed cheese bread packed with Hook's yellow and Laubscher white cheddar plus chicharrón-style duck cracklings. The front room runs as a classic neighborhood tavern. The back room, under that 20-by-20-foot skylight, shifts into something calmer and more composed.
None of it waited for the street to reopen. As Nedbalski put it to WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, "The road might be closed, but the neighborhood certainly isn't."
What a Closed Street Doesn't Close
That line is the actual thesis of the season, not just a good quote. A car cannot currently drive down Lincoln Avenue between Diversey and Wrightwood. That has nothing to do with whether a person can walk to Gunny's, to Juno Sushi next door, to Rose's Lounge or Pour Decisions Chicago down the block, or to Delilah's a few storefronts over. Every one of those businesses depends on foot traffic from people who already live within a few blocks, not on drive-by visibility from Lincoln Avenue commuters passing through.
A retailer built around highway frontage or drive-up parking would take a real hit from a months-long street closure. A tavern built into a 145-year-old building on a residential stretch of Lincoln Avenue, surrounded by other walkable businesses, mostly does not notice, because the customers were never in cars to begin with. The disruption that shows up in a city press release as a construction delay is close to invisible to the people actually filling the sidewalk tables at six o'clock on a Wednesday.
Two Other Corridors Are Mid-Churn at the Same Time
Lincoln Avenue is not the only stretch of Lincoln Park turning over storefronts this season, and none of the others have a water main problem to blame or credit.
At Clark and Fullerton, Piccadilly Market opened its 5,200-square-foot flagship this month at 444 W. Fullerton Pkwy, the longtime home of Emilio's Tapas, according to Block Club Chicago. The original Piccadilly Market in Lincoln Square had 20 seats. The new location has an 80-person outdoor courtyard called Piccadilly Square, a full bar and lounge, and a food program led by chef Mark Mendez, formerly of the West Loop's Vera. The location itself is not a bet on foot traffic wandering over from the zoo. The building sits at the base of Park West Tower, a 20-story condo building constructed in 1972 with 200 residential units directly overhead. The flagship is built on top of its own customer base.
On Halsted, Baggu opened its second Chicago store on August 14 at 2118 N. Halsted St., a space that used to be It's a Secret Medspa, according to the Sun-Times. It is the brand's eighth location overall. When Baggu opened its first Midwest store in Wicker Park in 2024, hundreds lined up on day one, and the company called Chicago its third-largest market at the time. The Lincoln Park store sits about two blocks from the Armitage Brown Line stop, in the same stretch as Buck Mason and Gorjana.
A few blocks over on Armitage itself, Tie Bar announced plans earlier this year to relocate a few blocks down the street, from 918 W. Armitage Ave. to 1007 W. Armitage, near Sheffield, next to a Starbucks and across from Armitage Alehouse and The Budlong Southern Kitchen. And over on North Avenue, a 26,000-square-foot T.J. Maxx is set to open at 939 W. North Ave. as part of a larger redevelopment, in the same third-quarter window, according to Fox 32 Chicago.
Three separate corridors, three separate sets of openings, all landing in roughly the same six-week stretch of a single fall. Lincoln Avenue's version happens to come with orange cones and a slipped municipal deadline attached. The other two do not, and they are moving at the same pace regardless.
The Cones Are Still Out Front
The Department of Water Management's early October target has not been confirmed as met, and the department itself flagged it as subject to change back in late August. Whatever the next revision turns out to be, the businesses along this stretch of Lincoln Avenue already answered the only question that mattered to them this season: whether people would still show up with the street torn open in front of them. Gunny's is already serving its second cocktail menu revision. Juno Sushi, Rose's Lounge, Pour Decisions, and Delilah's are all still open next door. The street is still gravel. The neighborhood, as advertised, is not.
If you have been watching your own block turn over storefronts the way Lincoln Avenue has this fall and you are curious what that kind of foot-traffic churn actually does to what your home is worth, Vesta Preferred Realty can run the numbers with you. Get a Home Valuation and find out where your Lincoln Park property stands right now, cones or no cones.
