Walk east on Elm toward Lincoln on a Saturday morning and you hit the fence before you hit the coffee shop you're looking for. The corner that held six shuttered storefronts for the better part of a decade is now an active job site, and it has been for over a year. If you've started routing around it, quietly assuming downtown's fall season is on pause until that building opens, you're not wrong to notice the construction. You're wrong about what it means.
The season didn't stop. It moved two blocks north to Green Bay Road, and it's running on a shorter clock than usual this year. Six Saturdays remain before the biggest anchor of Winnetka's outdoor calendar closes for the winter, and three other closing dates land inside that same window. If you've been waiting for the fence to come down before you re-engage with downtown, you're going to miss most of what's actually happening.
Six Saturdays Left on the Clock
The Winnetka-Northfield-Glencoe Chamber's Farmers' Market has run every Saturday since June 6 in the Metra lot at 754 Elm Street, and this is its final stretch. The market closes for the season on October 31, which leaves six Saturday mornings on the books from today forward.
That market isn't the only thing on a countdown. Three other pieces of the fall calendar close out in the same six-week window, and they don't get the same attention because none of them repeat weekly.
| What's ending | Last date in 2026 |
|---|---|
| Farmers' Market at 754 Elm St | Saturdays through October 31 |
| First Friday series | Wraps the season with an Art Walk, October 2 |
| Hubbard Woods Park pumpkin patch | October 23 |
| Schmidt-Burnham Log House | Open through November 20 |
The Log House deserves a second look if you've lived here for years and never been inside. At 1140 Willow Road, it's the oldest log structure in Cook County, and the Winnetka Historical Society keeps it open on a handful of scheduled afternoons that run out on November 20. A short stop before or after a farmers' market Saturday is roughly the right amount of time.
None of these dates are secret. What's easy to miss is that they're all landing in the same narrow window this year, at the same time the village's biggest downtown project is still behind a fence. That timing is not a coincidence you need to solve. It's just the shape of the season, and it's worth knowing before the weather turns.
Where the Foot Traffic Actually Went
Here's the part that doesn't show up on any calendar: the corner of Elm and Lincoln has been closed to foot traffic for over a year, and Winnetka's dining life didn't shrink to fill the gap. It shifted north and west.
Hubbard Woods, on the Green Bay Road end of the village, has become the strongest concentration for a sit-down meal. Tocco, at 985 Green Bay, is Bruno Abate's Italian dining room, and it's a short walk from Grateful Bites Pizza Shoppe at 899 Green Bay, the brick-and-mortar spinoff of Grateful Bites Catering doing wood-fired pizza. Towne & Oak, also in Hubbard Woods, has become the neighborhood's go-to for breakfast, lunch, and coffee, and its catering side quietly handles a good share of the private events happening around the village this fall.
A few blocks the other direction, in Indian Hill, Aboyer has become the district's signature room. It's chef Michael Lachowicz's French-American restaurant on Green Bay Road, and Chicago's North Shore Convention & Visitors Bureau names it as the reason people specifically seek out that end of the village.
None of this is a consolation prize for the construction on Elm. It's a real shift in where the village eats, and it happened gradually enough that if you haven't been paying attention, you might still be thinking about downtown the way it looked three years ago.
Avli Didn't Wait for the Corner to Reopen
The clearest sign that Winnetka's dining scene is still investing in itself, fence or no fence, is what Avli did to its own building this spring. More than 16 years after first opening in Winnetka, the Greek restaurant, which has since expanded to three Chicago locations and one in Milwaukee, took over half of the village's Laundry building and added 2,400 square feet to its footprint. About 1,600 square feet of that became a new lounge with a redesigned bar. The rest went to additional front-room dining.
New chef Jorge Angulo, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, rebuilt the menu around mezedes, the small shared plates that anchor Greek dining, while working to keep roughly 60 to 80 percent of the dishes recognizable to longtime regulars. It's the kind of renovation that tells you something about confidence in a location. Avli didn't wait to see what happens at Elm and Lincoln before betting on its own block.
What's Actually Rising Behind the Fence
The project behind that fence is called One Winnetka, and it has a name, a size, and a completion date now, after nearly two decades of stalled attempts on the same corner. The site assembly finished when the property's foreclosure lender paid $1.25 million for the final piece: Conny's Pharmacy, which had operated there for 85 years before closing. That completed a 1.21-acre parcel that Murphy Development Group and Harrison Street's Christopher Merrill then purchased for $14 million to build One Winnetka.
The building going up is a four-story, Tudor-style structure with 59 residential units and roughly 20,955 square feet of first-floor commercial space. Construction is financed by a $66 million loan from Acres Capital against an $89 million total project cost, and the developer is targeting a December 2026 finish, with commercial tenants beginning to open in early 2027. That means the fence you're walking around today is likely to stay up through the rest of this year.
Six businesses have signed leases for that ground-floor space:
- A Mediterranean-inspired restaurant from Ballyhoo Hospitality, the group behind Winnetka's own Pomeroy, built around live-fire cooking and seafood
- Fare, a fast-casual natural-food concept
- Solidcore, a fitness studio
- Winnetka Aesthetic Studio
- Duet Preservation Audiology
- Charles Schwab
That list became a point of friction at Village Hall earlier this year. When trustees reviewed Solidcore's special-use request in February, several pointed out that if all six tenants move forward as planned, the building will open without a single traditional retail shop, despite retail being part of the original pitch for the project. The developer told the council it had approached apparel and home-goods companies and couldn't find a workable match given the corporate-guarantee requirements on its leases. It's a small disagreement in the scope of a project this size, but it's the kind of detail that tells you the corner's second life is still being negotiated in real time, not just built.
The Six Weeks That Matter
None of this changes what's fenced off today. It changes what you do about it. The village's fall season isn't waiting for that corner to open, and neither should you. The market at 754 Elm still runs six more Saturdays. The Log House stays open through November 20. Hubbard Woods and Indian Hill have absorbed the dining energy that used to concentrate closer to Lincoln Avenue, and Avli's expansion is proof the investment in downtown didn't pause just because one corner is under a crane.
By next fall, the fence should be gone and a new stretch of Elm Street will be doing its own thing. This is the last full season of the version of downtown you already know, and it's worth spending the next six weeks in it.
If you're a longtime Winnetka homeowner curious how a season like this one, with a major corner under construction and dining life shifting between districts, tends to show up in how buyers read the village, Sondra Douglass is always happy to talk through what she's seeing on the ground. Request a home valuation whenever you're ready for that conversation.
