Walk east from Michigan Avenue into Streeterville this month and you will pass a jewelry store inside a mansion that spent two decades sitting empty, a row of stone houses that were nine days away from a wrecking ball two years ago, and a multiplex quietly filing the paperwork to bring the neighborhood its first large-format movie screen in years. None of these are new construction. All three are things that came close to not existing at all.
That is the throughline worth noticing this fall. Streeterville's real estate reputation runs toward hospital towers and glass high-rises, the kind of density that makes people assume anything built before 1960 got cleared out long ago. But the three most talked-about additions to the neighborhood this year are all survival stories, and each one came down to a specific, documented close call.
The Deal That Almost Went to a Restaurant Group
The building at 212 East Ontario Street was built in 1885 as a Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival residence, designed by the Chicago firm Burling & Whitehouse on land that had once belonged to William B. Ogden, the city's first mayor. Portrait artist George Peter Alexander Healy, whose presidential paintings hang in the Smithsonian, lived there too. It sat vacant for roughly 20 years before jewelry brand founder Alexis Nido-Russo tried to buy it, and her first attempt didn't work. An unnamed restaurant group beat her to it, according to Block Club Chicago's reporting on the sale. When that deal fell apart, she went back a second time and closed on the 13,000-square-foot property for $3.3 million in 2024.
What followed was a 2.5-year gut renovation that turned up pieces of the building's own past mid-demolition: an original entryway mosaic, a fireplace hidden behind drywall, old newspapers tucked into the walls. Some of it was too far gone to save. What survived got folded back into the design. Local Eclectic, which had spent 13 years selling jewelry almost entirely online, opened its first physical store here on September 3, 2026, seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. The cafe on the first floor serves a custom blend from local roaster Metric Coffee alongside a laptop-free menu built around charcuterie, tinned fish, and caviar, a deliberate choice to keep the space social rather than a place to set up a spreadsheet. An original Healy painting hangs inside, paired with a new commissioned piece by Chicago artist Sébastien Johnson responding to it directly.
None of that happens if the first deal had gone through.
Ninety Days From a Different Ending
A few blocks away, at 161 East Erie Street, three limestone rowhouses have been standing since 1877, built in the years immediately after the Great Chicago Fire when Joliet limestone was one of the only fireproof materials Chicagoans trusted. Two more houses in the original row of five were demolished in 1960. The three that remain are among the oldest buildings still standing in Streeterville.
In July 2024, the nonprofit that owned the building applied for a permit to tear it down. City rules gave the Chicago Department of Planning's Historic Preservation Division a 90-day window under the Demo Delay Ordinance to intervene before the permit could be executed. That window is what gave preservation staff time to bring the building in front of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. The commission approved preliminary landmark status that October, a final recommendation followed in June 2025, and the Chicago City Council made the designation permanent in November 2025, protecting the building's exterior, including its roofline, from future demolition.
This whole sense of what this neighborhood used to be.
That's how Gail Spreen of the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents described the building's value to the block, in comments captured as the landmark case moved through the city. The designation doesn't cover everything on the lot. A rear boiler house and garage added later were left out and could still come down. But the row itself, the part that actually reads as history from the sidewalk, is now permanently protected.
Ninety days is not a long runway. If the demolition permit had cleared before the preservation review caught up, there would be nothing left to look at on that block.
The Same Instinct One Street Over
This pattern isn't confined to Streeterville. One street over on Oak Street, the city issued a full building permit this past August for an $8.1 million rebuild at 67 East Oak, on a lot with its own layered 19th-century history: a Victorian Richardsonian Romanesque residence that later became a rooming house, then a 1953 pet bird shop, then an art studio for Chicago surrealist painter Julia Thecla, before real estate developer Arthur Rubloff converted it to commercial use in 1949. Reporting on the project points to Van Cleef & Arpels as the likely tenant for the new two-story building, a move that would let the jeweler leave its current storefront next door for a space built entirely to its own specifications.
The mechanism is the same one playing out at 212 East Ontario: a piece of pre-war Near North Side real estate, sitting on land too valuable to leave alone, getting rebuilt or restored for a single retail tenant instead of being carved up or left to sit. It's not a Streeterville-only story. It's a Near North Side story, and Streeterville is where two of its most visible chapters landed this year.
Newer Landmarks Get a Turn Too
Not every reinvestment story in the neighborhood involves a building from the 1800s. AMC River East 21, at 322 East Illinois Street, filed a city building permit this September to convert one of its 21 auditoriums into an IMAX screen, according to reporting from NBC Chicago. Chicago currently has exactly two IMAX theaters, one at AMC Roosevelt Collection in the South Loop and one at Regal City North on the Bucktown-Logan Square border. Neither is downtown. The city's last large-format screen inside the Loop area, the IMAX at Navy Pier, closed permanently years ago, and downtown moviegoers have been without a comparable option since.
The timeline for River East's conversion isn't public yet, and neither AMC nor the permit filing has confirmed whether the new auditorium will include 70-millimeter film projection alongside standard digital IMAX. But the filing itself is the signal. A multiplex that opened decades ago is getting a meaningful upgrade rather than a slow fade into a smaller footprint, which tracks with everything else happening a few blocks away.
What This Adds Up to This Fall
None of these three stories is really about newness. They're about things that were already here getting a second look, and in two cases, getting saved by a matter of months. For someone who already lives in Streeterville, that's a different kind of neighborhood update than a ribbon-cutting. It means the walk between the hospital campus and Michigan Avenue now has more texture in it than it did a year ago, not because a developer added square footage, but because a handful of people made specific decisions to keep what was already standing.
If you want to see it for yourself before the season turns, a few stops are worth the detour:
- 212 East Ontario Street for coffee and a look at the restored mosaic and the Healy painting, open daily from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
- 161 East Erie Street to see the Erie Street Row rowhouses now permanently protected under the city's landmark designation, one of the last visible links to Streeterville's post-Fire rebuild.
- 322 East Illinois Street to keep an eye on permit progress at AMC River East 21, where the city's next downtown IMAX screen is quietly taking shape.
Streeterville doesn't usually get credit for holding onto its older layers. This year gave it a reason to.
Questions about what any of this means for property values or timing in the neighborhood tend to come up naturally in conversations with people who already live here. If you're one of them and curious what a building's history says about its future, Mike Larson is always glad to talk it through. Schedule a confidential consultation whenever the timing feels right.
