Walk south on Prospect Avenue past the Metra platform and you will pass a storefront that has sat empty, in one form or another, since 2019. Keep walking two doors down and you will pass the space where a full-scale ice cream shop is set to open next month. Both businesses went through the same village approval process. Only one of them is close to actually opening.
That gap says something about downtown Clarendon Hills this year that the festival calendar and the new storefront signs don't quite capture on their own. The businesses filling in fastest aren't the ones asking the village for the most help. They're the ones asking for the least.
The Corner That's Waited Seven Years
The building at 27 and 29 S. Prospect Ave has cycled through tenants for years without ever quite sticking. It was most recently home to La Pearl and I Want Candy, but it's been largely vacant since Sue's Cakery closed in 2019. Last year, a Hinsdale business owner named Chase Lofti proposed combining the two units into an American-style restaurant called Prospect Tavern, serving lunch and dinner. The ask was $265,000 from the village's downtown tax increment financing district, with $50,000 of that tied to opening within six months. The full renovation was projected at nearly $600,000, and the village estimated it could bring in roughly $110,000 a year in sales and food tax, based on a comparable restaurant Lofti had run in La Grange.
In September, a split Village Board rejected the subsidy. The sticking point wasn't the dollar figure. It was a condition that would have given the restaurant three parking spaces for outdoor dining. Lofti told Patch afterward that he was done, and that residents would keep driving to Hinsdale or Westmont for his style of restaurant.
That wasn't the end of it. In December, the board reconsidered, dropped the parking condition, and approved a revised agreement. Lofti signed in January. By April, though, village staff were recommending the board terminate the deal entirely, because the owner hadn't filed any permits or submitted construction documents. The board gave him one more chance. At that meeting, Lofti told trustees he was "100 percent committed" to the renovation. A month later, according to a memo from the village's acting manager, Prospect Tavern was still in default.
Seven years vacant, one rejected vote, one revived agreement, and two missed deadlines. That's where the corner stands as of this summer.
Two Doors Down, a Different Kind of Timeline
A few storefronts away, at 5 S. Prospect Ave, a different pattern played out. The space had been sitting empty since it stopped functioning as a real estate office, and this spring it reopened as Jacaranda Boutique & Interiors, run by Josue and Mariana Cuevas. Their ask to the village was $9,378 from the same downtown TIF district, a fraction of what Prospect Tavern requested. By the time it reached the Village Board, the couple had already put more than $20,000 of their own money into the building.
Village President Eric Tech and community development director Ed Cage both credited the business publicly, with Cage telling the board it had taken what he called a "dead corner" and made "significant improvements to the exterior and interior." The subsidy request was less than 4 percent the size of Prospect Tavern's, and the storefront was finished and open before the tavern next door had cleared its first round of permit trouble.
The Ice Cream Shop Everyone Asked For
The third piece of this is happening at 22 S. Prospect Ave, in a space that Four Sons Mercantile, a men's clothing store, vacated in March when it relocated to Glen Ellyn. Rita's Italian Ice is moving in this September, run by an operator who already has a location in Oak Lawn, with tentative hours of noon to 10 p.m.
The timing matters because of what used to be a few doors down. Clarendon Hills lost its longtime ice cream shop, the Daily Scoop, and the closure hit hard enough that residents gathered outside its old address at 9 S. Prospect Ave in July 2024 just to show they missed it. When the village ran its downtown planning survey this year, residents kept coming back to the same request: bring back an ice cream shop. From an empty storefront in March to a dated opening in September is about six months, and none of it went through the kind of subsidy fight that's kept Prospect Tavern in limbo since last summer.
Here's how the three compare side by side:
| Storefront | The ask | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|
| 27–29 S. Prospect (Prospect Tavern) | $265,000 from downtown TIF toward a roughly $600,000 renovation | In default on its village agreement as of May 2026, after a rejected vote, a revived deal, and missed permit deadlines |
| 5 S. Prospect (Jacaranda Boutique & Interiors) | $9,378 from downtown TIF, matched with more than $20,000 of the owners' own money | Open, and credited by village officials for reviving a corner they called "dead" |
| 22 S. Prospect (Rita's Italian Ice) | Not part of the public TIF subsidy record | On track to open in September 2026, about six months after the previous tenant left |
What the Village Already Knew
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The village has spent this year building a new Downtown Improvement Plan, developed with the planning firm Houseal Lavigne through workshops, an open house, and an online survey. The draft plan went to the Village Board on March 16, and the board gave further direction on it in April. The whole point of the exercise was to figure out what downtown needs to keep functioning and growing.
The survey results already pointed toward the answer that played out on Prospect Avenue this year. Residents wanted family-friendly retail. They wanted the return of an ice cream shop. They got both, in storefronts that moved through the process in months, not years. The plan's more ambitious goals, the kind that require a $600,000 build-out and a six-figure public subsidy, are still working through the same friction that's kept Prospect Tavern from opening its doors.
The Summer That Happened Anyway
None of this stalled the rest of downtown's calendar. Daisy Days, the Chamber of Commerce's signature summer festival, ran its usual mid-June weekend with carnival rides, a reptile show, a beer and wine tent, a local talent showcase, and a headliner band each night. Two days later, the Daisy Dash 5K and Kids 1K Fun Run brought runners through downtown streets on Father's Day morning, a tradition organizers describe as the way Clarendon Hills kicks off summer, with packet pickup held at Michael Abraham Architecture on Burlington the day before.
Neither event needed the corner at 27 S. Prospect to be filled. Downtown drew its usual crowd with or without that storefront lit up, which is its own kind of evidence. The neighborhood isn't waiting on one project to feel like itself. It already does, one small storefront at a time, while the anchor everyone's been watching sits exactly where it was a year ago.
None of this shows up in a listing description, but if you spend any time on Prospect Avenue, it's the kind of detail that tells you more about how a downtown actually changes than any single opening ever could. The Anne Monckton Group pays attention to these small shifts because understanding a town well enough to help someone move into or out of it means noticing more than the headlines. If you're curious about what else is changing in Clarendon Hills or the towns around it, book an appointment and we'll walk you through what we're seeing.
