Walk past 100 Park Avenue this month and you'll still see paper on some of the windows. That's the old Starbucks building, the one Sparrow Coffee has been renovating since late 2023. Nearly three years later, it's still not open. Meanwhile, a few doors down and around the corner, an entire block of downtown has quietly turned over while everyone was busy fighting about a piece of pavement.
That's the part worth knowing if you live here: the loud fight over the Sloan Memorial Triangle consumed a year of public meetings and a thousand-signature petition, and it ended in a compromise nobody's fully implemented yet. The real transformation of downtown Clarendon Hills happened somewhere else, corner by corner, subsidy by subsidy, on a timeline set by small business owners instead of village trustees.
A year spent arguing about a triangle
Last August, the Village Board floated a plan to replace the Sloan Memorial Triangle at Prospect and Park with a plaza designed for public events. The triangle includes a turn lane connecting Prospect to Park, and removing it meant reworking how traffic actually moves through downtown. Residents pushed back hard. Clarendon Hills resident Angela Sartori launched a Change.org petition that pulled in more than a thousand signatures, and she posted video of a downtown traffic jam during a winter storm to make her point.
our Village endures all 4 seasons, and three of them are too cold for useless plazas
The village brought in a planning firm, Houseal Lavigne, to run a survey and host a "Downtown Visioning Open House" in February. By April, trustees had backed off the full plaza idea. What they landed on instead was smaller: retractable bollards and hardscape improvements like pavers, enough to let downtown host events without permanently erasing the triangle. It's a compromise, not a resolution, and as of this spring it still hadn't been built.
If you've been waiting for downtown Clarendon Hills to feel different because of that fight, you've been waiting on the wrong thing.
The corner that moved first
While the triangle debate ran its course, a genuinely dead corner got un-dead. Jacaranda Boutique & Interiors took over the old Coldwell Banker real estate office at 5 South Prospect Avenue, and the transformation was fast enough that the village's community development director, Ed Cage, told the board it took a corner with no character and made real improvements to both the exterior and interior. Village President Eric Tech praised the buildout at the same meeting. The village kicked in a $9,378 subsidy. Owners Josue and Mariana Cuevas put more than $20,000 of their own money into the exterior and interior, more than double what the village contributed. That ratio matters if you're trying to understand how downtown actually gets rebuilt here: the public money is a nudge, not the engine.
Jacaranda wasn't alone. Here's what else changed hands or is mid-transformation on the same few blocks:
| Address | What's there now | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 5 S. Prospect Ave | Jacaranda Boutique & Interiors | Former real estate office, revived with village TIF subsidy plus $20K+ in owner investment |
| 200 Park Ave | Just Lift Fitness (under construction) | Former Fifth Third Bank branch, drive-through pad becoming an outdoor group workout space |
| 1 Walker Ave | Thassos Greek Restaurant | New downtown dining addition in recent years |
| 95 Park Ave | Little Creperie | Relocated here to make room for Sparrow's expansion next door |
| 100 Park Ave | Sparrow Coffee (not yet open) | Three former units, including the old Starbucks space, being combined into one |
Notice what's happening at the bottom two rows. Little Creperie didn't close, it moved, because the coffee shop next door needed its space to grow. That's the kind of chain reaction a master plan doesn't produce. A tenant expanding into a neighbor's footprint does.
The subsidy that's still waiting on a return
Sparrow Coffee is the one to watch, and not just because the windows are still papered over. The village granted the company a $622,000 subsidy from its downtown tax increment financing district back in October 2024, with a one-year deadline to finish combining three units, formerly a State Farm office, the old Starbucks, and Little Creperie's original space, into a single café and roastery outpost at 100 Park Avenue.
That original deadline, roughly October 2025, came and went. That fall, the owner sought a six-month extension, pushing the target to April 30, 2026. That date came and went too. The village had already ordered construction halted that spring after staff flagged safety and maintenance issues at the site, which owner Chris Chacko's team corrected within days, and when the April 30 deadline arrived without an opening, the Village Board granted a second six-month extension, moving the goalposts to Halloween 2026. Chacko has been candid about the toll of the delays: he's said the project has felt like letting the community down every time a new opening date doesn't hold.
As of the village's most recent newsletter this summer, Village President Eric Tech described the project as making "excellent progress" with an opening expected in the "coming months," a phrase familiar enough to Sparrow-watchers that some residents have suggested the village hold off on any further downtown improvements until they can see how the café actually performs once it's open. That's a TIF district working as designed, in theory: growth in property tax revenue inside the district gets reinvested to attract businesses like Sparrow. Whether the theory holds depends entirely on a coffee shop that, as of this writing, still hasn't poured its first cup, with two six-month extensions already spent and a third deadline now on the calendar.
What this actually means if you live here
If you've felt like downtown Clarendon Hills has been in a holding pattern, you're only half right. The public fight, the one with the petition and the open house and the bollards nobody's installed yet, has occupied most of the attention and produced the least visible change. The private turnover, four storefronts deep and still counting, has done more to reshape what a walk down Park Avenue actually feels like.
A few things worth watching over the next few months. First, whether Sparrow actually opens before the weather turns, since "coming months" from a village newsletter in late summer could mean September or it could mean another winter of papered windows. Second, whether the bollard-and-paver compromise at the Sloan Triangle gets built this construction season, since trustees approved the concept in April but approval and installation are two different things in a town that just spent a year debating six feet of curb. Third, keep an eye on the Just Lift Fitness build-out at 200 Park, since turning a bank drive-through into an outdoor workout space is the kind of adaptive reuse that tells you more about where downtown's headed than any consultant's rendering.
None of this required a master plan to happen. It required a boutique owner willing to spend $20,000 on top of a village subsidy, a fitness studio willing to gut a bank branch, and a creperie willing to pack up and move next door so a coffee roaster could finally, eventually, open its doors. The plan is still catching up to what the businesses already did. You can read the village's own downtown master plan documentation directly on the Village of Clarendon Hills site if you want to track how the official version compares to what's actually happening on the ground, and Patch's ongoing coverage of the Sparrow project is worth a bookmark if you want to know the exact week the papers finally come off those windows.
Downtown's changing here whether the triangle ever gets its plaza or not. If you're watching this corner of DuPage County because you're thinking about your own next move, not just what's opening next door, our team knows the Clarendon Hills market as well as we know the neighborhood itself. When you're ready to talk about it, Matt Laricy and the LARICY Team are here. List with Laricy. Sell faster, reach more buyers.
