"We're about 75 percent there."
That's how Alderman James Gardiner described the Six Corners rebuild to Nadig Newspapers back in February 2025, standing at the edge of a project that most Irving Park residents have been driving past for the better part of a decade without quite tracking how far it's come. The comment was about the fenced-off lot at 4035 N. Cicero Ave, once a Sears Auto Center, sitting empty since the store's last Chicago location closed for good. But the 75 percent framing is the part worth sitting with. It means the neighborhood isn't watching a single development go up. It's watching the last stretch of one that's already mostly finished, one most people stopped noticing was under construction at all.
The pieces that already landed
If you've lived in Old Irving Park or Portage Park for more than a few years, you've already absorbed most of this without registering it as a single story. The Sears building at 4712-4738 W. Irving Park Road, the one with the name everyone still uses to give directions, became 6 Corners Lofts, a residential conversion built by Novak Construction with retail on the ground floor. Nearby:
- The Clarendale senior living complex opened.
- An Aldi grocery store moved in.
- A Northwestern Medicine facility set up close by.
Each of those landed on its own timeline, got its own local news cycle, and then folded into the background the way finished construction always does. Nobody drives past a working Aldi and thinks "there's a piece of the Six Corners master plan." That's exactly the point Gardiner was making. The visible, unfinished 25 percent is the one still fenced off, and it's the one getting attention now because it's finally close to done.
The last big piece, and Chicago's first Pita Inn
What's coming to the former Sears Auto Center is three standalone buildings from Novak Construction: a Pita Inn, a Burlington department store, and a Wells Fargo branch with a drive-up ATM. The site was demolished in December 2024, and by this spring the specifics had firmed up enough to matter to anyone deciding where they'll actually spend money this winter.
Pita Inn is the one worth pausing on. Founded by Falah and Asma Tabahi in Skokie in 1982, the chain built a following in Wheeling, Glenview, Mundelein, and Naperville long before it considered the city itself. This will be its first Chicago location. Vice president Hazem Tabahi told Block Club Chicago the restaurant will seat more than 130 people, with an outdoor terrace and a specialty coffee bar built in alongside the shakes and desserts. According to reporting from Newcity, the Six Corners menu is also getting some dishes the suburban locations don't have, including a wagyu steak shawarma and a shrimp kabob, developed specifically for the new location rather than ported over unchanged.
That detail matters more than it sounds like it should. A 44-year-old suburban chain doesn't usually build a custom menu for one store. It's a signal that Six Corners isn't being treated as a satellite location. It's being treated as a flagship.
A timeline that keeps sliding by a season
Ask three sources when the doors actually open and you'll get three overlapping answers. Pita Inn's own social post in April 2026 said "this winter." The Six Corners Chamber of Commerce and Novak's development team have both pointed to a late 2026 completion window for all three buildings. Neither is wrong, exactly. They're describing the same stretch of months from two different vantage points, and anyone who has watched a Chicago construction project move through permitting and buildout knows the gap between "targeted" and "actual" tends to widen rather than close. The honest read for anyone planning around it: expect the grand opening somewhere between late fall and the first weeks of the new year, and don't book anything around a specific date until you see a sign go up on the building itself.
The parking question nobody's pretending isn't there
Not every reaction to the plan has been enthusiasm. The redevelopment includes more than 100 parking spaces across the site, and that number has drawn real pushback from residents who'd rather see Six Corners lean further into walkable, mixed-use density than into a layout built around cars pulling up to a drive-up ATM. It's a fair tension for a neighborhood whose commercial spine was originally shaped around streetcars and foot traffic, not surface lots. The Portage Park Chamber of Commerce has framed the project as new jobs and retail choice for a business district that spent years defined by an empty anchor store. Both things are true at once, and the disagreement over which one matters more is exactly the kind of conversation a neighborhood has when it's deciding what its next decade looks like, not when it's simply accepting whatever gets built.
The one piece still not on the drawing board
Even at 75 percent, the puzzle isn't finished. Gardiner pointed to the former Peoples Gas site at 3955 N. Kilpatrick Ave as one of the last remaining parcels, with a retail-residential development planned but not yet under construction. That's the piece to watch next, the one that will tell you whether Six Corners closes out this rebuild the way it started it, methodically and one parcel at a time, or speeds up now that the harder pieces are behind it.
What's already worth your Saturday while you wait
None of this is a reason to put your fall on hold. The neighborhood's daily rhythm doesn't depend on a Burlington opening on schedule. Eris Brewery + Cider House, tucked into a former Masonic Temple in Old Irving Park, has been pouring cider and beer in that space for years and remains one of the better reasons to end a walk somewhere other than home. Backlot Coffee keeps the same low-key, work-friendly energy a few blocks over. Filament Theatre, inside the Six Corners district itself, has spent years building a reputation as an immersive children's theater that families come back to season after season, proof that the area was never actually empty even while its biggest anchor sat behind a fence. A short walk into The Villa Historic District puts you among Prairie and Craftsman homes from the early 1900s, a pocket of the neighborhood the Irving Park Historical Society still runs walking tours through for anyone who wants the story behind the streets they've been driving past for years.
And if you want a sense of how the district itself already functions as a gathering place, not a future one, the Six Corners Vintage & Artisan Fest ran its third annual weekend this past July at 4800 W. Irving Park Road, pulling in more than 80 vendors for two days of artisans, vintage sellers, and live entertainment. That's not a preview of what Six Corners could become. It's evidence of what it already is, months before the Sears Auto Center site finishes catching up to it.
The honest version of this story isn't "a new department store is coming to your neighborhood." It's that Irving Park has been quietly rebuilding one of its commercial anchors for close to a decade, that most of the work is already finished and invisible, and that the last visible piece, the one everyone's been watching from behind a chain-link fence, is finally close enough to done that you can start planning a Saturday around it.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this does to home values once its last vacant anchor fills back in, or you're simply curious what your own place is worth as Six Corners closes out this chapter, Blume Group can walk you through a free home valuation whenever you're ready to look at the numbers.
