As children played and people lined up at food trucks during a block party on Skokie’s Main Street June 14, village of Skokie officials presented the first draft of plans for reviving the corridor’s vibrance for residents and businesses.
The village got involved after neighbors in the Main and Keystone area started staging neighborhood gatherings, called Meet Up on Main, in a bid to turn empty storefronts into thriving businesses that would help foster a social space and a sense of community.
Village officials released renderings of a future Main Street corridor, between about Crawford Avenue and Tripp Avenue, with a focus on community and economic redevelopment. While those renderings aren’t finalized proposals, they are meant to give residents a chance to look at what the village is thinking of for the corridor, according to the village’s Director of Economic Development, Johanna Nyden.
The renderings, provided by an outside consultant hired by the village in August 2023, included proposals for mixed-use buildings, commercial buildings, walkup apartments, and community spaces.
“A big priority for us is a walkable neighborhood that people can safely travel to,” Nyden said. “But also there are things we want to replace, like empty storefronts. That’s not a good outcome for us or the community.”
The village’s plan in the making is to be finalized later in the summer and would ultimately take over 20 years to materialize, largely because properties along Main Street would need to be bought and redeveloped, Nyden said.
Lissa Levy, Meet up on Main’s president, has lived in Skokie for nine years and says she has only known Main Street in its current state with empty storefronts and buildings in disrepair.
“From what I understand from people who have lived here for a very long time, Main Street used to be a wonderful hub where you could go and get all kinds of services. There used to be a bra shop — that was a destination — and there used to be a pharmacy, like a neighborhood mom-and-pop pharmacy — all kinds of things going on,” said Levy. “The infrastructure that is currently there has the memories of a once thriving economic corridor, and I have yet to see that actually be the case.”
“Now we have some developments happening on the Main Street corridor which are very exciting,” Levy told Pioneer Press. In February, the Village Board approved plans for 68 townhomes for Main Street. Soul Good Coffee, Zelda’s Catering, and a third store are looking to locate in an abandoned strip mall near Keystone Avenue.
The group’s first event of the summer was held on June 14 and hosted outdoor training activities for Boy Scouts, poetry, representatives from C.A.R.E., live music, bubble blowing, food trucks, face painting, and other activities that Meet up on Main typically offers.
In August 2023, the Skokie Village Board approved a consultant to perform a corridor study of Main Street between Crawford Avenue and Kildare Avenue for $65,000. The study aims to develop a set of land use, urban design, public realm, and policy recommendations for improvements in the area, per village records.
According to a news release from the village, the village has completed a number of right-of-way improvements to Main Street, including street resurfacing, adding a dedicated bike lane, reducing the speed limit to 25 miles per hour, and adding a landscaped median.
Levy said she hopes the village’s plan has an emphasis on maintaining Skokie’s cultural and economic diversity, which she said is unusual for the North Shore.
“If we do mixed-use buildings, making sure that residential units are affordable — not the kind of affordable that some units are luxury and some are subsidized as affordable, but places that people can actually afford to live.”
“My hope is that this proposal really takes to heart what the community wants, and what the community wants is places that they can go to. Places that are unusual, that reflect the population and then reflect the needs of the population,” Levy said.
Levy continued, “We’re gonna get a coffee shop. That’s the number one request, we’re so excited about that. But we could also use a bookstore, we could use a wine shop, we could use a boutique, we could use a co-working space, we could use a community center, we can use all kinds of different cool, unusual things that bring people to this area and make someone’s day and it could be a real gem.”
Meet up on Main will also take place on June 28, July 8 and July 15 at the intersection of Main Street and Keystone Avenue from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
