Or, We Ar Not Alone....
(In Lincoln Park, one of Chicago's wealthiest neighborhoods, about two dozen stores have gone dormant in the past year on the prime shopping strip along Armitage Avenue between Halsted Street and Racine Avenue. Among the casualties: Fresh or Faux, Moonlight Graham and Entendre Couture closed. She Boutique left to consolidate with its Highland Park location, where rent is cheaper. And the little cottage that housed Ethel's Chocolate Lounge, a Mars Inc. venture, stands empty.
The biggest eyesore sits at the west end of the street where the Armitage Collection, a 40,000-square-foot mini-mall conceived during the boom, remains vacant but for a hair salon that relocated from down the street. The project, one of Chicago-based M Development LLC's ventures, is battling a foreclosure suit. Officials at M Development didn't return calls seeking comment.
As the boutiques moved out, the resale shops moved in. A furniture consignment pop-up shop called Millionaire Rejects and a designer sample sale shop from San Francisco called Thread Lounge are the newest fixtures on the street.
The bare spaces and discount stores prompted residents, worried about their home values, to gather in September with shopkeepers, real estate executives and Ald. Vi Daley, 43rd, to discuss how to keep the Armitage neighborhood from looking like a retail ghost town.
"We need to add a little excitement and a reason for people to walk this way," said John Witte, co-owner of the Poison Cup wine and art boutique, which opened on Armitage in April after a florist moved out.
Daley said she is working with the city's cultural affairs office on a stopgap measure to turn the empty spaces into temporary art galleries.
"I've never seen vacancies like this on the street," Daley said. "Everybody's concerned about it."
Not long ago Chicago was on its way to becoming a fashion oasis.
Mayor Richard Daley appointed a fashion czar. First lady Michelle Obama propelled favorite designer boutiques Ikram and Maria Pinto into the national spotlight. And the Washington Post's Robin Givhan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic, dubbed Chicago the "Milan of the Midwest."
"It was a stage where it was certainly blossoming," said Lois Weisberg, commissioner of cultural affairs for the city of Chicago. "Designers were opening their own boutiques. Then all of the sudden they were having a hard time paying rent because of the recession. My fashion people did meet to see what we could do to help. It's very, very difficult. We can't pay the rent, they can't pay the rent."
The scene is similar on the Southport corridor. The North Side strip of boutiques and restaurants was on the cusp of becoming the next hot shopping district when the recession hit. Like Armitage, Southport is dotted with vacant storefronts and for-rent signs. And the new 20,000-square-foot retail complex called the Southport Collection remains vacant.
"Three years ago getting an apparel tenant was like falling off a log," said Joe Padorr, director of marketing and leasing at Preferred Development, the Chicago developer behind the Southport Collection. "Getting a bank was like falling off a log. They were expanding branches. Starbucks was expanding. Now there's just fewer of them doing deals, and the ones that are doing deals are the Dollar Stores."
Preferred Development bought three buildings, including the one that housed the restaurant Red Tomato, on Southport Avenue by the elevated train stop in 2007. The firm had a tentative agreement to bring in yoga gear store Lululemon and was talking to such national chains as Club Monaco and Banana Republic when the market tanked, Padorr said. Now, Preferred is leasing part of the space to a Halloween pop-up store and has an agreement to bring in Wicker Park Fitness club in early 2011 after the building is gutted and redeveloped.)