Logan Square's Construction Didn't End in June. It Moved Two Blocks South.

If you live near the square, you probably caught the ribbon cutting in your feed sometime around June 22. Mayor Brandon Johnson stood near the Illinois Centennial Monument with Alderman Anthony Quezada and declared the $27 million Logan Square Redesign and Milwaukee Avenue Streetscape Project finished after more than a decade of planning and two years of actual construction. Cattail streetlights restored. A new plaza called La Placita installed next to the Blue Line station. The traffic circle rerouted around the monument instead of through it.

For a neighborhood that spent two summers detouring around orange barrels, this read like the end of the story.

It isn't. Five weeks later, on July 27, bulldozers showed up two blocks south at 2550 N. Milwaukee Avenue, the old Megamall lot, to start building a second plaza. That project won't wrap until early 2027 at the soonest. So the honest version of the story is not "construction is over." It's "construction moved," and the corridor most residents actually walk every day, the stretch past Andros Taverna and La Boulangerie, is going to look unfinished for at least one more winter.

What's actually worth paying attention to isn't the ribbon cutting or the new fence. It's what filled in along Milwaukee Avenue while everyone's attention was on the cones. Four restaurants opened on roughly the same three blocks during the construction window, turning what used to be a fragmented strip into something closer to an actual dining row. That's the change that will outlast the plaza debate, and it's the one most write-ups about the "finished" project are going to skip.

What Actually Got Finished in June

The completed half of the project is real and it did change the daily geometry of the neighborhood. Milwaukee Avenue between Belmont and the square got a full reconstruction: raised crosswalks, curb extensions, protected off-street bike paths circling the monument, and new traffic signals timed to slow drivers down through what used to be one of the more chaotic intersections on the North Side. The reroute converted a chunk of former roadway near the monument into new public space, and a second new plaza, La Placita, went in next to the Blue Line station.

The Logan Square Farmers Market moved into that new plaza footprint back in May, a detail that matters if you've been driving to your usual Sunday spot expecting to find the old layout. Andy Schneider, president of Logan Square Preservation, tied the redesign back to the neighborhood's 1869 boulevard system during the ceremony, noting that the cattail streetlights are original to landscape architect Jens Jensen's design and that recent decades had seen more of that public space taken over by cars before this project pulled some of it back.

That part of the story is done. It's the other part that residents haven't fully clocked yet.

The Cones Just Moved Two Blocks South

The Megamall Plaza at 2550 N. Milwaukee is a separate project from the one that got the ribbon cutting, and it's very much still underway. Construction started at the end of July, and the design calls for outdoor seating, new lighting, landscaping, a performance space, and a children's play area on what has been a mostly vacant lot near the intersection of Milwaukee and Logan Boulevard. City officials have said it could be finished by early next year, though that timeline is described as tentative.

One immediate casualty: La Boulangerie's patio at 3129 W. Logan Boulevard was removed to make room for the plaza work. If you've been meeting friends there on a Saturday morning, that outdoor seating is gone for now, and there's no firm date for when a replacement version might return.

Here's how the two projects actually stack up, since the language around "Logan Square construction" has started to blur into one long undifferentiated headache for anyone scrolling neighborhood social media:

If you're planning a fall or winter routine around this stretch of Milwaukee Avenue, budget for at least one more season of fencing near the Logan Boulevard intersection even though the bigger project down the street is done.

What Actually Opened While You Were Detouring Around It

This is the part that gets lost in every "construction wraps" headline. The same two-year window that frustrated business owners along the corridor also produced a real cluster of new restaurants, most of them within a few blocks of each other on Milwaukee and California.

• The Radicle opened its official doors on January 7 at 2523 N. Milwaukee, the original Daisies space. Chef Joe Frillman, a two-time James Beard semifinalist, is running a late night cocktail bar and restaurant built around coastal Italian drinking culture, sourcing produce partly from his brother's 30-acre farm outside St. Joseph, Michigan.
• Rasa Indian Cuisine and Bar brought curries, biryani, and North and South Indian cooking to 2763 N. Milwaukee earlier this year. One of the people behind it, Jessil, was weighing a job offer to run a restaurant in Ohio before friendship with the other founder pulled him to Chicago instead, and the spot has already built a regular lunch and dinner crowd.
• Culebra is the speakeasy underneath Lonesome Rose at 2101 N. California, a Puerto Rican and Caribbean-leaning cocktail bar that replaced the previous concept, Golden Teardrops, in the same basement space.
• Jinsei Motto, the sushi spot that used to operate inside CH Distillery, now has its own standalone storefront in the neighborhood, serving the same dry-aged nigiri and maki with some new woodfire dishes added to the menu.

Two more are worth watching without treating them as done deals yet. Mansun Pocha, a Korean street food concept from the owners of New Village Gastro Pub, has been targeting the former Roadhouse space at 2535 N. Milwaukee for a 2026 opening, though no confirmed date has landed as of this writing. And a liquor license application filed in early August under the name 2050 Dining, from NPK Hospitality (the group behind the Radius music venue), points to something coming at 2050 N. Milwaukee, right across from Concord Music Hall and a few doors from The Lincoln Lodge comedy club. No opening date yet on that one either.

Put those four confirmed openings on a map and you get something the corridor didn't have three years ago: an actual walkable run of distinct kitchens between the square and California Avenue, not just a handful of scattered spots separated by construction fencing.

The Fest That Skipped a Year

The clearest sign of how disruptive the construction actually was showed up in the neighborhood's own calendar. The Logan Square Arts Festival, which has run since 2009 and drawn more than 400,000 visitors over that span, skipped 2025 entirely because the plaza and traffic circle work made the site unusable. It came back June 26 through 28 this year, headlined by Porches, Bad Bad Hats, and Catie Turner, in the newly finished plaza around the monument. Organizers billed the return as bigger than previous years, with double the vendor footprint.

That gap year is a useful data point on its own. When a neighborhood-defining event that survived sixteen straight years has to sit one out because of infrastructure work, that's a real measure of how much the corridor was torn up, not just an inconvenience for people trying to find parking.

What This Means If You Live Here

The honest read on Logan Square right now is that the visible finish line, the ribbon cutting, the press release, the mayor's quote, isn't the whole picture. One project ended. Another one just started two blocks away and won't be done until sometime in early 2027. If you're used to treating "construction is over" as a green light for planning outdoor gatherings or expecting your usual patio seating back, hold that thought until spring.

What has genuinely changed for the better is the food. The corridor picked up four real restaurants during the exact stretch of time everyone was complaining about detours, and that's not a coincidence so much as evidence that operators were betting on the finished streetscape before it existed. If you haven't walked Milwaukee between the square and California lately, you're missing a version of the neighborhood that didn't exist when the fencing first went up.

If you're weighing what any of this means for property values or timing a move in or out of Logan Square, that's a longer conversation than a construction update can cover. Dwell Wisely Group works this corridor block by block and can walk you through how the finished streetscape and the restaurant buildout are actually showing up in buyer interest right now. Schedule a free consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.