Walk south on Wells Street past Eugenie this month and you'll pass a dark storefront that used to glow until midnight with ninety taps of craft beer. Old Town Pour House held that spot for more than a decade, since March 2012, back when its beer list was reportedly the largest of any bar in the city. It closed in late 2024. This August it reopened, but not on Wells Street. It opened its doors on August 3 at 120 N. LaSalle in the Loop, in the former City Social space, with a menu built around weekday business lunches, after-work happy hours, and pre-theater dinners. That's a business that used to serve Old Town's residential foot traffic now serving Loop office workers and theatergoers instead.
If you've noticed Old Town feels a little different on Wells Street this summer, that's part of why. But the more interesting story isn't the empty storefront. It's where the new energy actually landed, and it isn't in the same stretch Pour House left behind.
North Wells Picked Up The New Openings, Not Central Old Town
The growth this summer is concentrated at the northern edge of the neighborhood, where Old Town, River North, and the Gold Coast meet. That's the footprint of North Union, JDL Development's $1.3 billion, 8.1-acre project that took over half of the Moody Bible Institute's former campus and is building more than 2,600 residential units across seven towers.
Two of its ground-floor tenants are already open at 920 N. Wells. DJ's Great Room is a full-service restaurant with a front bar called the Anteroom and a private dining room built for the kind of business that has become a bigger share of restaurant revenue nationally. Next door, Layla & Ringo's runs as a modern bodega and cafe, the kind of place residents grab coffee and a sandwich from on the way to work rather than plan a night around.
A few blocks up at 868 N. Wells, FARE is building out its Old Town location, tagged "Coming Summer 2026" on the company's own site. It's landing next to Layla & Ringo's, DJ's Great Room, and Petite Edith at the base of a new apartment building, in a spot one local outlet described as sitting between River North and the Gold Coast, positioned to pull both office workers and neighborhood residents in for coffee or a grab-and-go bowl.
None of these three openings sits on the traditional commercial spine of Old Town, the stretch between North Avenue and Division where the Wells Street Art Festival sets up every June. They're clustering instead at the edge where Old Town's northern border blurs into River North, feeding a population that's mostly new construction residents and office workers rather than the neighborhood's longer-standing blocks.
Oak And Rush Got Something New, Just Not New Competition
The Gold Coast's version of new this summer looks different. ARLA opened June 18 on the sixth floor of 15 E. Oak Street, in the space that used to hold Fred's at Barneys New York. It's an 8,500-square-foot Mediterranean-Japanese concept from the team behind Adalina Prime and Adalina Italian, led by chef-partner Soo Ahn, who earned a Michelin star at Band of Bohemia and appeared on Top Chef's twenty-first season. The main room seats 230, and two outdoor terraces, one over the Oak and Rush intersection and one overlooking Mariano Park, add another 60 seats with views toward Lake Michigan.
That's a genuinely splashy opening. But it's landing in the most saturated luxury dining block Gold Coast has, right alongside Gibsons, Hugo's Frog Bar & Fish House, Carmine's, Maple & Ash, and Tavern on Rush. Ahn has said he isn't approaching it as competition with those neighbors, given how tight margins already are in the industry, and that the goal was reading what the neighborhood still needed rather than trying to out-steakhouse the steakhouses next door. Even so, ARLA is adding density to an already crowded roster, not opening new territory the way North Wells is.
Here's the pattern in one place:
| Stretch | What anchored it before | What changed in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Wells St, North Ave to Division (core Old Town) | Old Town Pour House, open since 2012 | Closed in late 2024, reopened in the Loop on August 3 |
| N. Wells near the Old Town/River North/Gold Coast border | Vacant Moody Bible Institute land | DJ's Great Room and Layla & Ringo's now open, FARE building out for summer |
| Oak and Rush (Gold Coast) | Gibsons, Hugo's Frog Bar, Carmine's, Maple & Ash, Tavern on Rush | ARLA opened June 18, adding to the same luxury row |
The middle of the map, the actual heart of Old Town's business district, is the one place that lost more than it gained this year.
The Festival Still Runs On The Old Guard
That gap shows up even in Old Town's biggest annual event. The Wells Street Art Festival ran its 51st year on June 13 and 14, drawing more than 125 juried artists with Hiroshi Ariyama as this year's featured artist. The food and drink vendor list, though, reads like a roster of the neighborhood's longest-tenured names: Declan's Irish Pub, Old Town Pub, Kamehachi, Orso's, the Fireplace Inn, Glunz Tavern. None of this summer's new restaurant openings show up on that list, because none of them existed yet when the lineup was set. The festival that's supposed to be Old Town's showcase is still built on the businesses that were already there before Pour House left.
What Else Is Filling Out The Calendar
A few other threads if you're mapping out the rest of summer. Sushi by Bou's Gold Coast location ran a Live Tuna Cutting Ceremony on August 13 as part of its recurring Bou-Fin Society series, the kind of one-night event that tends to sell out fast if the format returns. The North Dearborn Association held its 66th annual Dearborn Garden Walk on July 19, opening private rear gardens between North Avenue, Division, Wells, and State, and adding a new guided tour of First St. Paul's Church, Chicago's oldest Lutheran congregation, for the first time this year. And if you want one more reason to walk the neighborhood before Labor Day, the Chicago History Museum has a Glitterati on the Gold Coast walking tour scheduled for August 29, tracing the families who gave the neighborhood its name back when it was still isolated from downtown by the lack of a bridge over the river.
None of that changes the restaurant math. But it's a reminder that Old Town and the Gold Coast have always run on two different clocks: one for the businesses that open and close on a normal commercial timeline, and one for the neighborhood traditions, garden walks, art festivals, historical tours, that keep running regardless of what's happening on Wells Street that particular year.
If you live here, the short version is this. The restaurant you'd walk past out of habit just moved downtown. The new places filling in aren't taking its spot, they're building out the edges instead, in North Union to the north and on Oak and Rush to the east. The middle of Old Town is the one part of the map still waiting for its next chapter.
If you're watching this stretch of Wells Street for other reasons, whether that's a condo near the new North Union towers or a place closer to the Gold Coast's Oak Street corridor, Telequest Realty knows this pocket of the city block by block. Contact us when you're ready to talk about what's actually happening here.
