The Circle Is Finished. Logan Square Isn't Done Rebuilding Its Center.

For eighteen years, the Logan Square Farmers Market set up a few blocks from the Illinois Centennial Monument, not around it. The city's busiest new restaurants picked cheap storefronts wherever they landed. The traffic circle itself was something you drove through on the way to somewhere else. That arrangement ended this year, and not by accident. A $27 million infrastructure project spent over two years dismantling the six-lane circle that used to cut through the square, and what replaced it pulled the market, a wave of new restaurants, and the neighborhood's public life back into the same four blocks for the first time in nearly twenty years.

Here's the part that makes this more than a ribbon-cutting story. Five weeks after that ribbon was cut, the city started fencing off a second lot two blocks away for another plaza. Logan Square's center didn't finish getting rebuilt this summer. It just moved on to the next piece.

Two Decades of the Center Not Being the Center

The project that closed in June had been in planning since before most current residents moved in. Construction broke ground in May 2024 under then-Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, who has since become superintendent of the Chicago Park District, and it wrapped with a ribbon cutting on June 22, 2026, led by Mayor Brandon Johnson and current 35th Ward Alderman Anthony Quezada. The final cost grew past the original $27 million estimate, anchored by $21 million in federal transportation funding, according to reporting from Block Club Chicago.

What that money actually changed is more than cosmetic. Milwaukee Avenue no longer cuts straight through the circle. Traffic reroutes around it now, which freed close to an acre of former roadway for a new pedestrian plaza called La Placita and a Milwaukee Avenue promenade. The project also added 70 sidewalk extensions, new street trees, dashed bike lanes, raised crosswalks, and a walking path that rings the square. La Placita itself was shaped with input from Palenque, the Logan Square Neighborhood Association's community group, to reflect the neighborhood's Latin American heritage.

None of that would matter much if the plaza just sat there. It didn't sit there for long.

The Market Got Its Address, and a Smaller One

The Logan Square Farmers Market spent eighteen years operating on Logan Boulevard, then shifted to a temporary site on Kedzie Boulevard for two seasons while the surrounding streets were torn up. This year, its 19th outdoor season, the market moved into what organizers call its permanent home: the new plaza on Milwaukee Avenue and a stretch of Logan Boulevard between Kedzie and Milwaukee, running Sundays from May 10 through October 25, according to the market's own site.

Market producer Nilda Esparza, who runs the market for the Logan Square Chamber of Commerce, called it the market's "forever home" at a community meeting reported by Block Club Chicago. That's a real claim, not a marketing line. The old temporary site, cramped as it was, still pulled roughly 270,000 visitors across the 2025 season. On a good Sunday now, the market draws 12,000 to 15,000 people through the square, and the Chicago Reader has named it the city's best market seven years running.

Here's the detail most people miss. The new home is actually smaller. The market now runs 103 booths, including 44 weekly farmers and 14 vintage vendors stationed at La Placita in front of Reno, Same Day Cafe, and the other businesses along Kedzie. That's 24 fewer booths than in past years, because the new footprint, while more central, is tighter than the old boulevard stretch. A permanent home came with a smaller floor plan. Vendors accepted the tradeoff for a location that puts them inside the neighborhood's actual foot traffic instead of a few blocks removed from it.

The Restaurants Already Placed Their Bets

Restaurant operators don't usually wait for a ribbon cutting before deciding where to open. In Logan Square this year, several of them didn't. A cluster of new spots landed within a few blocks of the monument, on Milwaukee or California, well before or right around the project's completion.

The Radicle is worth a closer look because it says something about how these operators are thinking. Daisies owner and chef Joe Frillman had a proven, nationally recognized restaurant a block away when he decided to reopen his original storefront, vacant since 2023, as a second concept rather than expand somewhere with more foot traffic. Frillman put it plainly in a press release reported by Block Club Chicago:

"Since COVID, late night culture has really taken a hit in Logan Square."

That's a bet on the neighborhood staying out later, not just eating well. Christian Hunter, who left a Michelin-starred run at Atelier in Lincoln Square to open Hooligan on his own terms after a food hall deal fell through, told WTTW that Logan Square felt like the right neighborhood for the kind of food he wants to push. When chefs with other options keep choosing this same handful of blocks, that's a pattern, not a coincidence of cheap rent.

The Building Isn't Done, It's Just Building Something Else

If the ribbon cutting looked like an ending, the fencing that went up five weeks later told a different story. In late July 2026, crews broke ground on a second plaza at 2550 N. Milwaukee Ave., the former Megamall site near Andros Taverna and La Boulangerie. The plan calls for outdoor seating, new lighting and landscaping, a performance space, and a children's play area, according to Block Club Chicago's coverage. City officials say the work could wrap by early 2027, though no firm date has been set.

At the same time, Logan Square's Comfort Station, the century-old former trolley waiting room across from the monument that hosts up to 200 public art shows, concerts, and film screenings a year, closed for renovation this month. It's one of only two surviving buildings from a set of nine identical structures built along Chicago's boulevard system in 1926 and 1927, according to Hoodline's reporting. The building will be back. In the meantime, its usual calendar of exhibitions and shows is on pause.

Put together, the traffic circle project, the market's new home, and the Megamall plaza groundbreaking aren't three separate updates. They're one long project that keeps landing in the same handful of blocks around the monument, with each phase picking up where the last one left off.

What This Looks Like If You Already Live Here

A few things worth keeping straight for the rest of this fall and into next year.

• The farmers market runs through October 25, 2026, Sundays from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., at its new home in La Placita and along Logan Boulevard between Kedzie and Milwaukee.
• Comfort Station's public events are paused during its renovation. Check its calendar before planning around it.
• Hooligan has no confirmed opening date beyond "fall 2026." Worth watching rather than planning a specific night around.
• The Megamall plaza at 2550 N. Milwaukee Ave. is fenced off through at least early 2027, so expect that stretch to stay under construction a while longer.
• If your mental map of the square still routes around the old traffic circle, most of that geometry no longer exists.

Twenty years is a long time for a neighborhood's center to sit a few blocks off from where the name says it should be. Logan Square spent most of that time with its market, its late-night scene, and its public gathering space scattered in different directions. This year they landed in the same place, and the city didn't wait to see how that settled before starting the next plaza.

If you're watching how a neighborhood like this holds up over time, whether you already call it home or you're weighing what a stretch of Milwaukee Avenue like this might mean for your own next move, Nina Trivedi brings the same close, block-by-block attention to Chicago's neighborhoods that she brings to Naperville and the western suburbs. Start the Conversation whenever you're ready to talk through what any of this means for you.