“Coming Soon” is coming closer.
The redevelopment of Church Street Plaza, downtown at the intersection of Church and Maple, near the Metra station, has filled or leased all but about 5,000 square feet of the 200,000 square foot shopping and entertainment complex, according to Mitch Goltz, principal officer at GW Properties, which purchased the site last year.
“We’re down to one or two spaces” still not filled, Goltz says. “It’s looking good.”
And yes, “Coming Soon” also includes the long-awaited AMC movie theaters, a replacement for the closed-down Cinemark movie house.
While the hope was the movies would be up and selling popcorn by now, Goltz says the opening should come “within the next few weeks.”
Among the other tenants Goltz expects to open within the next six months are restaurants BigWig, Egg Harbor Cafe, Devil Dawgs, and Crumbl Cookies.
In case you eat too many cookies, you can work off the weight at Sky Zone indoor trampoline park, or get your cavities filled at Uniform Teeth Dentistry.
In addition, the former Northwestern Medicine Urgent Care is being turned into a Northwestern Medicine sports medicine and imaging center. The urgent care recently relocated to Sherman Plaza a couple of blocks away, in the old Barnes & Noble store.
Goltz says while COVID-19 was still a major issue when he bought the plaza, “everybody we signed saw past COVID as a short-term bump in the road.”
Goltz says there definitely was “short term strain” for merchants, or potential merchants, during the height of the pandemic, but the nearly full lease-out is “validation of what we assumed,” that the long-term prognosis for the plaza was positive.
“It’s great news for Evanston,” he says.