Irving Park Road Doesn't Have a Chamber of Commerce Yet. Its Storefronts Stopped Waiting.
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
"It's like everything stops right before that area," Lizzie Mackenzie, co-founder of Extensions Dance on North Elston Avenue, told Block Club Chicago about the stretch of Irving Park Road that runs through her neighborhood. She wasn't describing a ghost town. She was describing a corridor with coffee shops, artist studios, and a board game cafe that still has no chamber of commerce and no Special Service Area to call its own, even as the storefronts around her keep filling up.
That gap is the real story here, more than any single new opening. Over the past several months, Irving Park Road has picked up a record store that pours coffee, a hair salon that also serves pastries, a smash burger joint built out with a projector and a lot of patience, and a national ice cream company's new production plant, all without the kind of institutional scaffolding that neighboring corridors already have. If you live along this stretch, you've probably noticed the new signage before you noticed the absence underneath it. Both are worth understanding.
Four openings from this year account for most of the foot traffic shift on the corridor:
None of these are chain rollouts. Each one is a person or a couple who decided to bet on this specific block, and the stories behind how they got open say more about the corridor than the openings themselves.
Patrick Kapp and Emiley Kiser had already lived near Irving Park Road for about four years when they signed a lease on a former prosthetics and orthotics office in October 2025. They spent nine months gutting it themselves, tearing out a drop ceiling and walled-off sections, and pulling plexiglass off the building's original stained glass windows, which had been covered for who knows how long in a structure that's more than a century old. A $75,212 Community Development Grant from the city helped cover the renovation, but the sweat equity was theirs.
A few blocks away, Ash Grant found a storefront that had operated as the same Chinese restaurant for roughly 50 years before it closed during the pandemic and sat empty. She spent months turning it into Scissor and Fork, filling it with thrifted furniture and string lights, training four stylists, and building a cafe menu on the side. She jokes that the space is haunted. She isn't joking about how much of the build-out she did herself.
Jose Garcia and Rosa Ruth Flores took the DIY approach even further at Smashburger House & Wings. Facing a roughly $2,000 quote to have someone paint a mural on their walls, Garcia instead bought a projector, traced the design himself, and spent more than 80 hours hand-painting the interior alongside the new awning outside.
"We live in this neighborhood, and we've lived here for a little over four years now," Kiser said. "We've realized that there aren't a ton of spaces like this, especially during the day, to do work, meet with friends, or just have a community space."
That sentiment shows up across all three openings. Nobody was recruited by a business improvement district or lured by a facade grant program built for this corridor. They saw a gap in their own daily life and filled it with their own money and labor.
The lack of formal support isn't new, and it isn't for lack of trying.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2018 | A local consultant tried to start a dues-funded business group for the corridor. The effort lost momentum navigating city rules and then the pandemic. |
| 2021 | The North River Commission attempted to expand its existing Special Service Area west into Irving Park. The expansion didn't go through. |
| 2025 | A coalition of Irving Park business owners asked the Pulaski Elston Business Association to file a feasibility assessment for a new SSA. The city was still reviewing it as of that year's reporting. |
A new SSA remained possible pending city approval, according to the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, but nothing in the record confirms it's been created yet. For now, Irving Park Road operates without the kind of dedicated funding stream that pays for things like litter pickup, planter boxes, or a seasonal music series.
Compare that to what's happening one boundary over. The Pulaski Elston Business Association already runs an SSA just north of Irving Park, established in 2022, that funds the Live on Lawrence music series, rotating public sculptures, community murals, and holiday decor. Katherine Duncan, who opened the Irving Park location of her chocolate shop Katherine Anne Confections in 2023, said she went looking for the kind of business resources she'd relied on in Andersonville and found nothing comparable here.
That's the tension worth sitting with. A few blocks in either direction, business owners have institutional backup. On this stretch, they don't, and they're opening anyway.
The clearest example of that gap in action is Pretty Cool Ice Cream. Founded in 2018 by Dana Cree and Michael Ciapciak, who also owns Bang Bang Pie & Biscuits, the company built its name out of a small storefront at 2353 N. California Ave. in Logan Square, eventually selling 1.5 million pops across more than 300 flavors. As the company approaches its eighth anniversary this August, it outgrew that space entirely.
The new production facility at 3929 N. Central Park Ave. in Irving Park isn't a second retail counter. It's the company's entire manufacturing operation, built specifically to triple output. That capacity is about to matter in a bigger way: Pretty Cool is launching a national shipping partnership with Lou Malnati's Taste of Chicago platform this summer, alongside collaborations with the Blackhawks and Dunning-based Eli's Cheesecake Company.
A company about to ship dry-ice-packed ice cream to customers outside Chicago chose a quiet residential block on Irving Park Road to do it, on a corridor that still doesn't have a chamber of commerce fielding calls on its behalf. That's not a coincidence born of marketing. It's a landlord, a lease, and a production need that lined up here, independent of whatever institutional support does or doesn't exist around it.
None of this new activity has replaced the signals longtime residents already track every year. Miko's Italian Ice reopened for the season on April 1, 2026, at its Kimball Avenue location in Irving Park as well as its original Sacramento Avenue spot in Logan Square, back with nine flavors including mango, coconut, strawberry, and chocolate. The GIPNA farmers market at 3945 N. Springfield Ave. kept its regular rhythm too, mixing produce and live music with summer blood drives run in partnership with Vitalant.
Those two threads, the seasonal and the entrepreneurial, are running at the same time on the same streets. One tells you it's spring. The other tells you something has genuinely shifted in who's willing to bet on this stretch of road.
Irving Park Road right now is proof that individual investment can outrun institutional infrastructure, at least for a while. A record store and a salon and a burger spot and an ice cream company's entire production line all opened here in the same year that the corridor's business owners are still waiting on a formal answer about whether they'll get an SSA of their own. Whether that pattern holds as more people follow Kiser, Kapp, Grant, Garcia, and Flores onto this stretch, or as more producers scale the way Pretty Cool has, is worth watching. For now, if you're wondering who's actually running this corridor, the honest answer is: whoever owns a storefront on it.
If you're curious about what this kind of grassroots growth means for property values, rental interest, or timing along a corridor like this, This Is IT spends a lot of time walking these blocks and talking to the people opening these doors. Reach out anytime you want to talk through what we're actually seeing on the ground, whether you've lived here for years or you're just starting to pay attention.
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