Walk from the Metra platform to the Sloan Triangle this week and you'll pass two kinds of unfinished business. One is a storefront that got done. The other is a subsidy that keeps growing while the space behind it stays dark.
That's the real story of downtown Clarendon Hills this fall, and it's not the one the village's public meetings would have you believe. The loudest fight of the past year, over six feet of curb at Prospect and Park, produced a compromise nobody's built yet. Meanwhile, a boutique that spent more of its own money than the village gave it finished months ago and nobody argued about it at all.
A $9,378 Nudge Did More Than $622,000 Hasn't
In April, Clarendon Hills Village President Eric Tech stood up at a board meeting to praise a business for fixing what he called a dead corner. That business was Jacaranda Boutique & Interiors, which took over the old Coldwell Banker real estate office at 5 South Prospect Avenue. Owners Josue and Mariana Cuevas applied for a $9,378 subsidy from the village's downtown tax increment financing district and put more than $20,000 of their own money into the exterior and interior. The village's community development director, Ed Cage, told the board the transformation was real.
"This applicant has done a really nice job taking what was a dead corner that didn't have a lot of character and made some significant improvements to the exterior and interior."
That's roughly two private dollars for every one public dollar, and the corner is done. Compare that to Sparrow Coffee, the specialty roaster combining three storefronts into one at 100 Park Avenue. The village committed $622,000 in TIF subsidy back in October 2024. As of this writing, the space still isn't open.
| Project | Address | Public Subsidy | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jacaranda Boutique & Interiors | 5 S. Prospect Ave | $9,378 | Open, renovation complete |
| Prospect Tavern | 27-29 S. Prospect Ave | $265,000 (proposed) | Unresolved, no permits pulled |
| Sparrow Coffee | 100 Park Ave | $622,000 | Not open, third deadline set |
The pattern isn't subtle. The smallest ask finished first. The two largest are the two still stuck.
Three Deadlines and Counting
Sparrow's original agreement called for the coffee shop to open by Halloween 2025. That date passed with the building still torn apart, so the village granted a six-month extension to April 30, 2026. That date passed too, not helped by a stop-work order the village issued in March after staff flagged safety and maintenance issues at the site. Owner Chris Chacko got those corrected within days, but the clock had already cost him more than a stop-work order alone would suggest.
By April, with no permits pulled and no construction documents submitted, village staff considered the project in default. Trustees didn't terminate the agreement. Instead they granted a second six-month extension, this one running to Halloween 2026. In the village's July-August newsletter, President Tech described the project as making "excellent progress" and expected to open in the coming months. By early August, with school starting back up, it still hadn't. Chacko has been candid about what the delays feel like from his side.
"We feel almost like we're letting down the community, saying we're going to open at a certain time and we don't," he told village officials in April. "This is a fluid construction project."
Two extensions in, a third deadline on the calendar, and a coffee shop that's been renovating since late 2023. If you've walked past those papered windows and wondered what's taking so long, now you know the timeline, not just the rumor.
The Restaurant That Might Not Happen
The building at 27 and 29 South Prospect has sat mostly vacant since Sue's Cakery closed in 2019, cycling through short-lived tenants like La Pearl and I Want Candy. In 2025, Hinsdale-based operator Chase Lofti proposed combining the units into an American-style restaurant called Prospect Tavern, seeking $265,000 from the downtown TIF toward a project expected to cost nearly $600,000.
The Village Board rejected the subsidy in a split vote in September 2025. Lofti told Patch at the time he'd walk away, and that Clarendon Hills residents would keep driving to Hinsdale or Westmont for his style of restaurant. The board reconsidered in December 2025, approved a revised agreement, and Lofti signed it in January 2026. By April, staff said he'd missed every subsequent milestone, no permits, no construction documents, and recommended pulling the subsidy again. Trustees held off on that vote too, choosing instead to try to resolve things with Lofti, who told the board he remained "100 percent committed."
That's the last public update on file. No opening date, no construction activity reported since. If you've been waiting for that corner to fill, the honest answer is nobody official can tell you when, or if.
The Fight That Produced No Concrete
While all that played out storefront by storefront, the loudest civic argument in Clarendon Hills all year was over something that hasn't been built at all.
In August 2025, the village floated replacing the J. Kenneth Sloan Memorial Triangle at Prospect and Park with a plaza for public events. Resident Angela Sartori launched a Change.org petition opposing it that pulled in more than a thousand signatures, arguing the removal would back up traffic near the railroad tracks, especially with a train stopped at the crossing. The village brought in planning firm Houseal Lavigne, ran a resident survey, and hosted a Downtown Visioning Open House in February. By March, trustees backed off the full plaza concept.
What they landed on instead was smaller: retractable bollards and paver upgrades that would let the village close the lane for events without permanently removing the triangle. In April, village officials estimated that work at $1.2 million. By July, the estimate had grown to $3.2 million, with staff recommending a no-bid contract to Rosemont-based Christopher Burke Engineering and no stated reason in the memo for the increase.
As of this writing, none of it is built. The village's own materials note the earliest realistic construction window was always fall 2026, so if you've been wondering whether this is the season the triangle finally changes shape, the honest answer is maybe, and at more than double what it was supposed to cost.
What Else Changed This Fall
Not everything downtown is stuck in extension purgatory. A few things worth knowing if you live here:
- The Clarendon Hills Farmers Market at Village Hall runs Thursdays from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. through October 15, which leaves seven more market mornings before the season ends.
- Lions Park Pool reopened for the 2026 season after the renovation voters approved in a March 2024 referendum, when 70 percent backed an $8 million upgrade tied to a $200 annual tax increase on a $500,000 home over 15 years.
- Construction on Prospect Park's Field #2 began in August, part of the park district's ongoing athletic field improvements.
- A developer called MC Development has proposed a four-story building with six condos and ground-floor retail at 136 Burlington Avenue, replacing the current site shared by Collins Sarsfield Construction and Builders Heating and Cooling. The plan asks for a height exception, 50 feet against the village's 40-foot limit, and the Plan Commission is set to review it this week.
The Pattern Worth Watching
None of this needed a master plan to happen. It needed a boutique owner willing to spend more than the village gave her, and it's still waiting on two much larger checks to turn into open doors. The corner that got fixed didn't require a single public meeting. The triangle that dominated a year of them still doesn't have bollards in the ground.
If you live here, the thing to watch this fall isn't the plaza debate. It's whether a roastery with three missed deadlines finally pours a cup before Halloween, and whether the tavern space on Prospect stays empty another year, extending a vacancy that traces back to 2019. Small money finished first in Clarendon Hills this year. Whether the big money catches up is the only real open question left on the block.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home near downtown Clarendon Hills, whether that's how a stalled restaurant space affects a nearby listing or what a finished four-story building might do to a block you're watching, Timothy Soltys can walk you through it with a straight answer, not a guess.
