Marty O'Connor and Mary Nedbalski walked up to their new pub on a Monday morning ready to work. Instead they found orange cones where the street used to be. The road in front of Gunny's Pub, the Midwestern bistro they had spent a year renovating out of the old Racine Plumbing Bar & Grill building on Lincoln Avenue, was gone. Not damaged. Gone, replaced by a construction zone that would push their September 16 opening right up against the wire.
If you live in Lincoln Park and have spent the last month rerouting around Lincoln Avenue, you have probably assumed this is all one mess. One closure, one set of cones, one long city project that will eventually clear. It is not. There are two separate disruptions running at the same time on the same stretch of street, caused by two different failures, and they are on two different timelines. Knowing which one you are actually driving around changes how you plan your week, and it says something worth noticing about how this corridor absorbs disruption without losing its pulse.
The Water Main Nobody Saw Coming
The bigger of the two closures runs between Wrightwood and Diversey. It started August 10, when the Chicago Department of Water Management began replacing close to 3,000 feet of water main and lead service lines along that stretch. The pipe being pulled out dates to 1889. City engineers had already flagged it as overdue. A typical water main lasts 80 to 100 years. This one had been in the ground for 137.
What makes this closure sting is how it landed on the businesses that line it. More than 30 storefronts learned about the shutdown the same way O'Connor and Nedbalski did, by showing up to find their block already fenced off. Among them: the breakfast spot Batter & Berries, Juno Sushi, Delilah's, and the thin-crust standout Pat's Pizza & Ristorante, alongside a 7-Eleven, Chicago Chiropractic & Sports Injury Centers, Innovative Primary Care, Jim Karas Intelligent Fitness & Wellness, Lincoln Dental Lounge, and Skinovatio Medical. One boutique owner who runs a cancer recovery practice on the block told reporters that when she raised concerns about patients needing accessible parking, the response was to point her toward surrounding side streets, a fix that does not work for someone recovering from chemotherapy.
The timing was not entirely the city's fault. Crews had actually finished earlier phases of the project ahead of schedule in July. The current closure exists because workers hit unexpected utility lines underground that forced a change to the water main's alignment. The detour routes northbound traffic via Wrightwood to Sheffield to Diversey, and southbound the reverse. The tentative completion date is October 6.
That date matters more than it looks. It means the Wrightwood-to-Diversey closure has an actual endpoint on the calendar, even if the businesses along it got no warning it was coming.
The Sewer Line That Wasn't Supposed to Take This Long
A few blocks away, a second and unrelated project has been grinding through its own delays. This one started at Racine Avenue and Diversey Parkway, where the city began replacing a sewer line along a three-block run of Lincoln Avenue. It was supposed to wrap in July. Then the Fourth of July weekend brought severe storms that opened a sinkhole and packed the pipes beneath Gunny's Pub with gravel and debris, resetting the clock.
This is the closure O'Connor and Nedbalski walked into. It is a different utility, a different starting point, and a different cause than the Wrightwood-Diversey water main job to the north, but the two projects sit close enough together that most residents experience them as one continuous headache. They are not. One is a planned capital project running slightly behind its original window because of an equipment surprise underground. The other is an emergency repair that got worse because of a summer storm, with a timeline that could stretch into October.
O'Connor's read on it stuck with me: "The road might be closed, but the neighborhood certainly isn't." Gunny's is opening anyway on September 16, built around a menu of upland game and Midwestern hunter-gatherer cooking, with chef Mike McKinnell running the kitchen and a name that honors O'Connor's late hunting dog. The bar's plan for a shared "third space" leans on its actual neighbors, Delilah's and Rose's Lounge, both of which are also sitting inside the construction zone and staying open through it.
What's Opening Anyway
Here is the part that should reframe how you think about all this cone-dodging. While two separate stretches of Lincoln Avenue have been torn up for weeks, new businesses have kept arriving on schedule, not after the dust settles.
Baggu opened its second Chicago store at 2118 N. Halsted on August 14, inside a 2,200-square-foot space that used to house It's A Secret Medspa. The location sits about two blocks from the Armitage Brown Line stop, in the same retail stretch as Buck Mason and Gorjana. It is Baggu's eighth store overall and its second in the city, following the Wicker Park location that opened in 2024 to a line that wrapped the block.
A few blocks over on Armitage, Geja's Cafe knocked down a wall to expand into the space next door, adding ten new tables. The fondue restaurant has been open 61 years, since it started as Chicago's first wine bar, and the candlelit, subterranean dining room that has drawn generations of couples through its Premier Dinner is now simply bigger. None of this waited for the water main or the sewer line to finish.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
The instinct when a neighborhood looks torn up is to assume something is wrong with it. Two infrastructure failures happening within blocks of each other, on the same street, in the same month, reads like bad luck stacking on bad luck. But the useful way to read this fall on Lincoln Avenue is by separating the disruption from the momentum.
The disruption has two clear origins and two rough endpoints. The Wrightwood-to-Diversey water main work is tracking toward an October 6 target. The Racine-to-Diversey sewer repair, delayed by storm damage, does not have as firm a public date, but Gunny's own decision to open into it on September 16 suggests the worst of that closure is considered manageable enough to build a business launch around.
The momentum is the part that matters more if you are trying to read this corridor honestly. A new bag shop, a fondue institution doubling its dining room, and a from-scratch pub all moved forward on their own timelines, independent of when the cones come down. That is not what a struggling commercial strip looks like. It is what a strip looks like when operators are confident enough in the neighborhood's pull that a temporary detour is a scheduling problem, not a reason to wait.
If you are walking or driving Lincoln Avenue this month, the practical version of all this is simple. Use Sheffield as your through street if you are heading north or south past Wrightwood. Expect the Racine-to-Diversey stretch to stay tight through most of October. And if you are looking for a reason to make the detour worth it, Batter & Berries, Juno Sushi, Delilah's, and Pat's Pizza are all still open behind the fencing, Baggu already has its doors open on Halsted, and Gunny's opens its doors on September 16 for one more reason to walk down there once the sidewalk clears.
Two closures. Two causes. One neighborhood that kept building through both of them.
If you are watching Lincoln Park from the outside and wondering whether a corridor mid-construction is a corridor worth betting on, that is exactly the kind of read that benefits from someone who tracks this market block by block. Chaz Walters has spent more than three decades watching Chicago neighborhoods through moments like this one. Let's Connect.
