The Square Looks Finished. It Isn't.

Walk through Logan Square on a Sunday morning right now and it feels like the neighborhood finally exhaled. The farmers market spreads across a plaza that didn't exist a year ago. The Arts Fest returned in June after skipping a year entirely, with more vendor space than it has ever had. The eagle on the Centennial Monument catches light from globe fixtures restored to the way they looked in 1918. Everything reads as complete.

It isn't. Two blocks down Milwaukee Avenue, a bulldozer has been parked on a fenced lot since late July, and a fourth plaza is now under construction in the same stretch of road that just finished building three.

Three Addresses, One Finally Built to Last

For most of its life, the Logan Square Farmers Market's home was a few blocks away down Logan Boulevard for 18 years, and then it spent two years on Kedzie Boulevard while the city rebuilt the traffic circle around it. This spring it moved again, this time into the newly improved Milwaukee plaza and a portion of Logan Boulevard between Kedzie Boulevard and Milwaukee Avenue, and market producer Nilda Esparza told neighbors at a community meeting that this one is different.

"Our forever home."

The new footprint holds 103 rotating farmers and food vendors lined up inside the plaza and along Logan Boulevard, with 44 weekly farmers, plus 14 vintage vendors set up at La Placita in front of Reno, Same Day Cafe and other Kedzie businesses. Even while running out of a temporary location last year, the market season still attracted about 270,000 people. Esparza is now projecting 300,000 visitors this season, on a market that has already been named the best in the city by the Reader for seven years in a row and brings 12,000 to 15,000 people to the area weekly. That weekly number against the season total is worth sitting with: a single strong Sunday can move as many people through the plaza as some neighborhood festivals draw in a full weekend.

By the time the city held its official ribbon cutting on June 22, officials said the market had already welcomed over 80,000 visitors in its first seven weeks in the new plaza. The market runs Sundays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., May 10 through October 25, so there's still a full autumn of Sundays left to see how the new plaza handles peak produce season.

The Fest Skipped a Year, Then Came Back Loud

The Logan Square Arts Fest didn't happen in 2025. The foundation that has run it since 2009 pulled the plug for a year rather than stage it around active construction, then announced the festival was "coming home" after skipping 2025 due to major construction on the traffic circle, with a return set for June 26 to 28.

The comeback weekend leaned into the new space rather than tiptoeing around it. Headliners were spread across all three nights:

• Porches on the main stage June 26
• Bad Bad Hats topping the bill June 27
• Catie Turner closing the festival June 28

Supporting sets mixed touring names with neighborhood ones, including Avondale's Billy Joel Jr., billed as the "next Chicago band you don't know about". With the bigger plaza to work with, organizers expanded the vendor marketplace to double the amount of local makers and artists, while keeping vendor space rates flat from 2024, with rates starting at $500, so the makers who'd been priced out of past years had a real shot at a table this time.

The Free Nights Nobody Needs a Ticket For

Less visible than the festival, and running the whole season, is a series that doesn't ask for a $10 suggested donation or a vendor application. A rotating lineup of DJs runs down Logan Boulevard from June through September, free to attend, on dates of June 4, July 9, August 6 and September 10, from 6 to 9 p.m. each evening.

The first of those nights happened before the plaza's official ribbon cutting on June 22. That's a small detail, but it tells you something about how this neighborhood uses new infrastructure: people showed up and used the space before the city had finished cutting the ribbon on it. One date remains on the calendar this year, September 10, and it will fall on a plaza that by then has hosted a full market season and a full festival weekend.

Two Blocks Away, the Next Fence Is Already Up

Here's the part that doesn't show up in the photos of the ribbon cutting. The $27 million project that just wrapped didn't produce a single plaza. Block Club Chicago's report on the completed redesign counted two new plazas as part of the finished project. Streetsblog Chicago's closer walk-through counted three, folding in a landscaped promenade near the monument that runs through the convergence of Logan Boulevard, Kedzie Avenue and Milwaukee Avenue, an intersection some locals call the "Magic Eagle" column. Either count leaves out what's happening two blocks south.

A fourth public space is now under construction, and it isn't part of the traffic circle project at all. The city's own announcement of the redesign's completion noted it was also breaking ground on a separate new plaza at the southeast corner of Logan Boulevard and Milwaukee Avenue, on a vacant lot the city is turning into another gathering space. That's the site Block Club Chicago has been tracking as the Megamall Plaza, at 2550 N. Milwaukee Ave., near Andros Taverna and La Boulangerie, a project that's been in the works since at least 2024. Construction equipment showed up on site in late July, and the plan calls for outdoor seating, new lighting, trees and plantings, a performance space, and a children's play area. La Boulangerie's patio, which sat on city land, has already been removed to make room for the work. City officials expect the project could wrap by early next year, though updated timelines will come later.

So the calm feeling on the plaza right now isn't the neighborhood settling into a finished state. The main redesign wrapped June 22. Construction equipment showed up on the next lot roughly five weeks later. That's the gap.

None of this means the redesign isn't working. It means it isn't over. Even Streetsblog, generally friendly to the project, flagged real friction in the new layout, noting that it's common for pedestrians to cross without a marked crosswalk at the Milwaukee and Kedzie intersection, since the prescribed route now requires two separate walk signals. A grassroots push some residents are calling "Refine the Redesign" has formed specifically to iron out spots like that one. If you've found yourself jaywalking the intersection out of habit rather than waiting for the second light, you're not the only one.

What This Means for the Rest of Your August

None of this changes anything about the market, the DJ nights, or how to spend a Sunday. It just means the window you're standing in is narrower than it looks.

• The market runs every Sunday through October 25. Go early if you want first pick of the 44 weekly farmers before the vintage tables at La Placita get crowded.
• One DJ night is left on the calendar, September 10, 6 to 9 p.m. No tickets, no donation ask, just the boulevard.
• Watch Milwaukee and Logan Boulevard for the Megamall Plaza fencing. Whatever route you've been walking around La Boulangerie's old patio will likely need adjusting again before winter.
• If you're crossing Milwaukee and Kedzie on foot, the marked route is two lights, not one. It's slower and it's the one that's actually built for you.

The neighborhood didn't finish rebuilding itself this summer. It finished one phase of it, watched a market and a festival put that phase to immediate use, and within about five weeks had construction equipment on the next lot down. That's worth knowing before you plan your next visit around a plaza that's about to have company.

If you're renting, buying, or just trying to figure out how a stretch of construction like this actually affects day-to-day life in Logan Square, that's the kind of question This Is IT fields all the time. Contact us if you want to talk through what's changing on this block, or any other one in the city.