Downtown Clarendon Hills Runs on Village Board Night

Why did a coffee shop on Park Avenue pick a Wednesday in late October for its soft opening? Sparrow Coffee's deadline under its village subsidy was Halloween 2026. It announced a soft opening for Wednesday, Oct. 21, which Patch worked out to be 10 days early.

That timing explains a lot about downtown this year. The café at 100 Park Ave., the restaurant planned at 27 S. Prospect Ave., and the slip lane at Prospect and Park are each moving on a calendar set at Village Hall. Each one comes with a date you can look up, and those dates tell you more about what downtown will look like next year than any storefront sign does.

The Coffee Shop That Had a Contract Deadline

Sparrow took over the old Starbucks space at 100 Park Ave. and combined three units into one. Its hours are 7 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. every day. The café said on Instagram that it was starting with "limited hours at first," as reported by Patch.

The project started long before this fall. A July 17, 2023 Village Board agenda included a proposed $50,000 downtown TIF incentive for the State Farm office at 100 Park Ave. The money would pay the office to end its lease early and move elsewhere in the village, freeing space for Sparrow. The staff memo said Sparrow wanted more room for its design and functional needs, and it floated a larger remodel, a patio and possibly a second story.

The schedule slipped from there. Under the original subsidy agreement, the café was supposed to be ready by Halloween 2025. It got a couple of extensions, and the last one moved the deadline to this Halloween. The subsidy is $622,000 from the village's tax increment financing district. In a TIF district, growth in property tax revenue gets put back into the district, and the idea is that the added tax income pays back the subsidy over time.

Owner Chris Chacko told the Village Board in September that the wait was worth it, according to Patch:

"Great architecture meets craft coffee."

He added that the project was "well worth the wait" because "we did it correctly." Sparrow also runs a café in Naperville and a roastery in Chicago. On Sparrow's own story page, the company says Chacko's craft-roasting experience covers more than three decades and over 100,000 roasts. It describes a roasting method that mixes anaerobic roasting at critical points with traditional fire-roasting at others.

The math on this one is simple. A subsidy agreement with a deadline turned "someday" into a specific Wednesday in October.

A Block Away, the Same Kind of Deadline Has Run the Other Way

The second TIF project downtown uses the same kind of agreement and has a different outcome on the table. The planned Prospect Tavern had a $265,000 subsidy for a renovation at 27 S. Prospect Ave. In a memo released Oct. 15, village staff recommended ending that agreement, saying its terms had not been met. The Village Board was set to vote on the recommendation at its Oct. 19 meeting, Patch reported.

This was not the first time the board took it up. Village officials proposed ending the agreement in April, and the board voted unanimously to give the village time to resolve issues with the owner instead. A month later, staff again recommended ending it, but the item came off that month's agenda.

Whether 27 S. Prospect Ave. becomes a tavern now depends on that Oct. 19 board action. Two subsidy agreements started in the same downtown TIF, and right now one has a soft opening date while the other has a vote that could end it.

The Triangle Took Four Board Steps in Six Months

Sparrow's address is 100 Park Ave. The Prospect Triangle, a slip lane cutting from Prospect to Park, sits at the northwest corner of Prospect Avenue and Park Avenue, according to an April 2026 village agenda. That patch of pavement got more debate this year than anything else downtown, and it moved one vote at a time.

1. March 16. Nik Davis of planning firm Houseal Lavigne showed the Village Board three options for the slip lane: keep it, remove it for a large plaza, or remove it and add a right-turn lane plus gathering space. Trustees showed interest in using flexible bollards. Residents who spoke were split between support and concerns about safety and traffic, according to the meeting minutes. The draft also called for better landscaping at the Sloan Triangle and temporary bollards for event closures, including at Prospect Avenue by Ann Street.
2. April. Officials said the plaza was off the table. They floated removable bollards and hardscape upgrades that would let the street close for events. Patch described a first-year proposal of about $1.2 million, with construction in the fall. On April 25, the board hired Christopher B. Burke Engineering for due diligence and concept design at $57,250 plus a 10% contingency.
3. July 20. A resolution to waive bidding and approve a $3,256,060 construction contract plus a 5% contingency failed 3–3.
4. September 21. According to the village's downtown plan page, a revised scope went to the board and passed as Resolution R-26-39, Downtown Streetscape Improvements.

The plan wasn't easy to agree on, and the survey behind it shows why. The village's community survey export lists 558 answers to its first question. Patch counted 134 comments about the plaza: 112 against it and 22 in favor. The survey never asked directly about replacing the triangle, though. The village manager called the tally potentially misleading, since the survey was voluntary and meant to gauge general feelings about downtown, not serve as a vote.

Hold that $3.26 million figure from July up against the roughly $1.2 million first-year number from April, and you can see why it took a second try. The exact scope and schedule of the September version are in the R-26-39 resolution on the downtown plan page, along with the April plan, both survey releases and the July packet. Houseal Lavigne also keeps a project site for the Downtown Improvement Plan.

The Park District Runs on the Same Kind of Calendar

A few blocks away at Prospect Park, the Clarendon Hills Park District lists the courts renovation as finished. The district's page for the Field No. 2 improvements says the major work was set to start in August 2026. The park is also where Boo on the Block takes place on Thursday, Oct. 29.

The Dates That Matter Between Now and the Holidays

The board decides the big things on its own schedule, but the community calendar is fixed. These are the dates from Thursday, Oct. 29, through mid-December.

The Chamber's Holiday Walk page still says 2025 in its title, but the page itself and the village calendar both list Saturday, Dec. 5, 2026. The Chamber's downtown Halloween Walk was set for Saturday, Oct. 24, with trick-or-treating from 3 to 5 p.m. and music, shopping and dining from 5 to 6 p.m.

The Holiday Walk will be the first since Sparrow's announced opening at 100 Park Ave. Its announced hours end at 1:30 p.m., before the 4 p.m. start, so check whether it adds hours before you plan around it. By December, the September streetscape resolution will also have had more than two months to start showing up as work at Prospect and Park.

Want to know how Sparrow's opening, the Prospect Tavern vote and the streetscape plan affect the value of homes near downtown Clarendon Hills? Deidre Rudich keeps up with these Village Board decisions year-round. Schedule your complimentary market consultation, and we'll walk you through what the changes at Prospect and Park could mean for your block.